Author: Matthew David Segall
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Pope Francis and Integral Ecology
Check out Sam Mickey’s post on the Pope’s integral encyclical. Sam includes several excerpts for those who don’t have the time to read the entire document.
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Space and Time in an Ontology of Organism
I’m thoroughly enjoying Jimena Canales social, scientific, and philosophical history of the Einstein-Bergson debate in The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate that Changed Our Understanding of Time. There are quite a few pages on Whitehead’s alternative rendering of relativity theory. There is one place (198-99) where Canales, while commenting on George Herbert…
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Pope Francis an Integral Ecologist?
Next week, Pope Francis will release an encyclical on the role of Catholics in the ecological crisis. According to John Grimm (Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale University), “Francis will likely bring together issues of social justice and economic inequity into relationship with our growing understanding of global climate change and environmental trauma.” By…
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Philosophy in a Time of Emergency
Over the last month, half the global population of saiga antelope dropped dead in northern Kazakstan. This is what mass extinction looks like. I read about the antelope die off this morning, just after reading Adam/Knowledge-Ecology‘s and Craig Hickman/darkecologies‘ posts about Whitehead’s call for Cosmology to replace Critique. I do believe the two, Whitehead’s call and mass extinction, are related. The…
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Video of my presentations at the 10th International Whitehead Conference on Friday (6/5) and Saturday (6/6)
Conference website. Friday, June 5th at 4:45pm: Whitehead’s Non-Modern Philosophy: Cosmos and Polis in the Pluriverse Saturday June 6th at 2:30pm: Religion in Human and Cosmic Evolution: Whitehead’s Alternative Vision I have a lot to say about some of the questions that came up during the discussion (~58 minutes into the video), especially the issues…
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Pluralistic Panpsychism and Mystical Experience: a response to Kastrup (part 2 of 2)
[This is part 2 of my response to Bernardo Kastrup; part 1 is here]. Kastrup is confused by what I said in my original response to him regarding the room that ontological pluralism leaves for both the extraordinary experience of unity and the ordinary experience of plurality. Ontological pluralism seems more true to experience (both…
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Pluralistic Panpsychism v. Monistic Idealism: another response to Kastrup (part 1 of 2)
Kastrup has responded to my post a few days ago. The topic? Panpsychism. In any back and forth discussion like this, it is important to acknowledge that each of us has evidently written a great deal articulating our perspectives. Other than his brief essay on the threat of panpsychism, I have not read any of Kastrup’s…
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Schedule for our track at next week’s Whitehead/Ecological Civilization Conference
Section III: Alienation from Nature, How it Arose Track 3: Late Modernity and Its Re-Imagining (Lebus Hall, 201) Friday, June 5 2:00 PM – 2:45 PM Track Session #1a – Tam Hunt “Absent-minded science and the ‘deep science’ antidote” 2:45 PM – 3:30 PM Track Session #1b – Christian de Quincey “A Radical Science of…
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Leron Shults’ “adaptive atheism”
“A clash of doctrines is not a disaster – it is an opportunity.” -A.N. Whitehead This morning, Jesse Turri sent me a draft of LeRon Shults’ soon to be published paper “How to Survive the Anthropocene: Adaptive Atheism and the Evolution of Homo Deiparensis.” His basic thesis is that modern day religion (defined as “shared imaginative…
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Whitehead’s Non-Modern Philosophy: Cosmos and Polis in the Pluriverse (draft)
The following was an early draft of a talk I gave in my own track at the Whitehead/Ecological Civilization conference in Claremont, CA. For video of the actual talk, click HERE. This track has been given the task of re-imagining late modernity, and in particular, of re-imagining what John Cobb has called late modernity’s reductive monism. In my…
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The Threat of Panpsychism?: A response to Bernardo Kastrup
Bernardo Kastrup, a computer engineer turned metaphysician, recently posted a short essay called “The Threat of Panpsychism: A Warning.” I found the essay somewhat encouraging if only because it is another signal that contemporary philosophy (both within and outside academia) is moving beyond the tired “materialism v. anything else” debate and toward more interesting and relevant debates, like that…
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Minding Time: Chronos, Kairos, and Aion in an Archetypal Cosmos
Notes for a brief talk I gave today at CIIS. [Update (July 15, 2016): This talk was expanded into an article published in Archai: The Journal of Archetypal Cosmology] ……………………………………………………………………………….. “…what is time? Who can give that a brief or easy answer? Who can even form a conception of it to be put into words? Yet…
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45th Annual International Jean Gebser Society Conference: Architects of the Integral World @ CIIS Oct. 16-18th, 2015
45th Annual International Jean Gebser Society Conference: Architects of the Integral World IN CONJUNCTION WITH THE PHILOSOPHY, COSMOLOGY, AND CONSCIOUSNESS PROGRAM, PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION DEPARTMENT, CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF INTEGRAL STUDIES SAN FRANCISCO, CA ~ OCTOBER 16th–18th, 2015 CALL FOR PAPERS In the winter of 1932, from a grammatical detail in the poetry of Rilke, Jean Gebser intuited an entire shift in the…
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Eric Smith on the geochemical inevitability of life on earth
For more from Smith, see this co-authored essay “The Origin of Life”: “As we see it, the early steps on the way to life are an inevitable, incremental result of the operation of the laws of chemistry and physics operating under the conditions that existed on the early Earth, a result that can be understood…
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Open Letter to Oakland Mayor Libby Schaff Regarding Oakland Wildfire Plan
Originally posted on Becca Tarnas: Dear Mayor Schaaff, I am writing to you as a concerned Berkeley citizen and a life-long resident of the San Francisco Bay Area. There is much that I love about living in the East Bay, but one that I appreciate most is the easy accessibility of the beautiful forested hills…
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CIIS tomorrow (May 1): Ursula King speaking on Cosmotheanthropic Philosophy in Teilhard de Chardin and Raimon Panikkar
[update: video now available] The Teilhard scholar Ursula King will speak tomorrow, May 1st, at 4pm at the California Institute of Integral Studies (1453 Mission St) about the evolutionary spirituality of Teilhard de Chardin and Raimon Panikkar. It’s free and open to the public. Join us! See the flyer linked below for more information. Ursula King…
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“William James: Politics in the Pluriverse” by Kennan Ferguson
I’ve just finished Ferguson’s book on James’ pluralist contribution to political theory. I can’t recommend it highly enough to those interested in the political implications of ontological pluralism. Ferguson contrasts James’ prescriptive pluralism to the far less radical liberal understanding of multiculturalism. For liberalism, pluralism is a problem to be overcome, whereas for James, pluralism…
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Religion in Human and Cosmic Evolution: Whitehead’s Alternative Vision
This was an early draft of a paper I presented at the 10th International Whitehead Conference. For video of the actual presentation, click HERE. ——————————— Abstract: This talk compares several approaches to the emergence of religion in human evolution. I contrast Robert Bellah’s and Alfred North Whitehead’s pluralistic, cosmologically oriented accounts to Daniel Dennett’s reductionistic,…
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War of the Worlds: Cosmos and Polis in the Pluriverse
What is reality? Seasoned metaphysicians will be quick to point out that the phrasing of this question already assumes too much. The copula “is” implies that reality is a species of being or existence. Does this mean reality excludes nonbeing, nonexistence? That, in other words, reality includes only what is already actual and nothing of…
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ERIE Talk: The Extended Mind Thesis and the Ecologization of Consciousness
A talk I gave for ERIE at CIIS a few months ago building on (an admittedly loose interpretation of) Andy Clark’s extended mind thesis and Richard Doyle’s ideas about the role of psychedelics in human evolution:
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Morning Meditation: Souls are like Stars
Notes for a meditation session I am to lead this morning: Typically, Buddhist-inspired forms of meditation invite us to observe the emptiness of all forms, whether those forms are objects in the world around us or we ourselves as subjects, as souls. Nothing abides, all forms are passing away, or changing into other forms as the…
Footnotes2Plato 