“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”
–Alfred North Whitehead
I’m about halfway through The Half has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (2014) by Edward Baptist. Baptist’s book embeds an economic history of post-revolutionary America in the personal stories of slaves. He brings into question the still dominant version of American history, “the half that has ever been told,” which argues that slavery Read more
This post is largely in response to this interview with the ecological Marxist John Bellamy Foster. Foster spends most of his time responding to criticisms of his work by Jason W. Moore. I haven’t read Moore’s work, so I’m not sure whether the misunderstanding of Latour arose with him or with Foster’s characterization of the latters “constructionism” Read more
I’m headed back to the Symbiosis Gathering later this year. I’ll be offering a talk on the role of psychedelics–or “ecodelics” as author Richard Doyle refers to them–and the philosophical insights they engender that may be of service to steering through our planetary crisis. When ingested in carefully crafted ceremonial containers, ecodelics reveal the deeper connections and interpenetration of Read more
Here’s a PDF of the version I submitted to the UMI database. I plan to substantially revise this before publishing it as a book sometime in the next year. But for now, I welcome feedback on the current draft. Cosmotheanthropic Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead Read more
Click here to view this essay at the publisher’s website, FunctionLab. The Function of Reason and the Recovery of an Earthly Architecture By Matthew David Segall, PhD June 2016 “[The] relatedness between us and the world…which begins to exist wherever there is living structure is as important in the sphere of building as it is Read more
“In one sense philosophy does nothing. It merely satisfies the entirely impractical craving to probe and adjust ideas which have been found adequate each in its special sphere of use. In the same way the ocean tides do nothing. Twice daily they beat upon the cliffs of continents and then retire. But have patience and look deeper; and you find that in the end whole continents of thought have been submerged by philosophic tides, and have been rebuilt in the depths awaiting emergence. The fate of humanity depends upon the ultimate continental faith by which it shapes its action, and this faith is in the end shaped by philosophy.”
—Alfred North Whitehead
© 2006-2024 Matthew David Segall