Footnotes2Plato

“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”
–Alfred North Whitehead

Author: Matthew David Segall

  • The Universe Story, and/or A Pluriverse Story?

    Sideris’ article in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion Lisa Sideris and Mary Evelyn Tucker speak at a conference about The Journey of the Universe Brian Swimme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Swimme Lisa Sideris: http://indiana.edu/~relstud/people/profiles/sideris_lisa

  • response to R. Scott Bakker on transcendental phenomenology and BBT

    Anyone who posits some form of efficacy or constraint outside the natural order on the basis of some kind of interpretation of ‘experience’ has the same argumentative burden to discharge: How do you know? What justifies such an extraordinary (supernatural) posit?…What makes the question so pressing now is that their instrument, reflection, has finally found…

  • Evan Thompson on the “Stream” of Consciousness

    R. Scott Bakker and Evan Thompson recently debated the merits of neurophenomenology here: http://philosophyofbrains.com/2015/07/29/is-consciousness-a-stream.aspx. Check out Adam/Knowledge-Ecology’s post, where another comment exchange is taking shape…

  • Far Side of the Moon

    From nasa.gov.

  • New Horizons’ Flyby Photo Shooting of Pluto

    The image of Pluto eclipsing the Sun is the most striking to me. That the human eye could see the effects of its parent star from such a perspective… New Horizons, indeed. The first photo of Pluto:

  • Dogen, Spinoza, and Whitehead by Seth Segall

    Check out this interesting post by my cousin, Seth Segall, over at the Existential Buddhist. The topics Seth discusses include whether consciousness is emergent from or intrinsic to the physical world, the place of values (human or otherwise) in the universe, and the variety of God concepts available to those willing to philosophize about such matters. Seth…

  • War of the Worlds: Love and Strife in the Pluriverse

    Another one for the ontological pluralism file. Delivered a few months back at the Cosmology of Love conference at CIIS.

  • Towards an Aesthetic Ontology: Beauty, Sublimity, and Infinity

    “Two things fill the mind with ever-renewing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind is drawn to think of them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” So says Kant in the conclusion to his Critique of Practical Reason. He goes on to explain that neither the…

  • Time Eats Itself, by Henri Bergson

    from Creative Evolution (Ch. 1, pgs. 4-6): “…as regards the psychical life unfolding beneath the symbols which conceal it, we readily perceive that time is just the stuff it is made of. There is, moreover, no stuff more resistant nor more substantial. For our duration is not merely one instant replacing another; if it were,…

  • A White Guy Talking About Race

    Figured I should start talking about this stuff. Please join me. Enlighten me. Endarken me. Whatever you feel needs to be added, corrected, etc. We just really need to start talking about it… A response to me by the YouTube user Rorschach Romanov: And my response to him:

  • Religion, Ecology, Race, and Cultural Evolution

    “Today we cannot ignore that a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach and should integrate justice in discussions on the environment to hear both the cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor.” -Pope Francis (n.49) Pope Francis released his encyclical last week. The English translation is HERE. I have only…

  • 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.

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…