Author: Matthew David Segall
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Imagination is the Soul’s Temple: Reflections on Play and Ritual
Jesse Turri recently interviewed me for homebrewedchristianity.com, and had some follow up thoughts to our conversation about ritual as play.
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David Chalmers, Andy Clark, and Paul Churchland on Neuroscience, Consciousness, Physicalism, and Panpsychism
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Beyond Materialism and Idealism, a Philosophy of Organism?
Levi Bryant offered some ideas about materialism earlier this week over at Larval Subjects. I read and commented on his post while screeching through the BART transbay tube on my commute home from work. My comment, asking about “ontological constructivism,” was rushed and ill formed. Now that I’m moving more slowly, and have a keyboard large enough for all ten of…
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Theoretical Archaeology Conference Abstract
Unfortunately, the track I was to participate in was canceled due to conflicts with another conference. But I wanted to share my abstract since I hope to develop some of these themes in the future. This particular theme (teleology in archaeology) came up as I read Hodder’s great book Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationship…
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Towards an abstract for my presentation at the International Whitehead Conference, “Re-imagining Late Modernity’s Reductive Monism”
My track at this year’s International Whitehead Conference is titled “Re-imagining Late Modernity’s Reductive Monism” and is situated within the umbrella section called “Alienation from Nature: How It Arose.” Other participants in my track include Elizabeth Allison, Sean Kelly, Richard Tarnas, and Brian Swimme. I hope to have the schedule and abstracts for everyone’s contributions posted by the…
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Bruno Latour and Rowan Williams on Religion and Ecology
A very wide-ranging and far-reaching conversation. Economics, the “ownership theory” made and sold to students at the London School of Economics and many other Universities around the neoliberal globe, is put on trial by both Latour and Williams. Latour goes so far as to stick a poison label on it. About 10 minutes in, Williams’…
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Entheogens and Cosmos, the sequel [a lecture for ERIE @ CIIS this Sunday on psychedelics and the extended mind thesis]
The Entheogenic Research, Integration, and Education student group at the California Institute of Integral Studies has invited me to speak again about the philosophical, cosmological, and psychological significance of psychedelics. In case you missed it, here is my first talk for ERIE back in September called “The Psychedelic Eucharist–toward a pharmacological philosophy of religion”: I attempted to link Plato…
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Solstice Prayer from Dec. 21st, 2014
The photo is from last summer’s Burning Man festival, taken by Zipporah on Sunday morning while I sat in the Temple of Grace contemplating my life’s loves and losses. Later that night, the Temple collapsed in upon itself like a curtsying ballerina after burning for fifteen short minutes. ……. I read the following prayer at the opening of a small medicine ceremony I…
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The Religion of Reason (with Steven Pinker and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein)
Hard to disagree with too much of what Pinker and Goldstein say about Reason. Yay Reason, right?! They also make a very persuasive case for (neo)liberal capitalism. Pinker’s bit about empathy was a nice reprieve, but Goldstein shut him up fast by recounting Reason’s historical march toward the Good. In the end, I prefer Schelling’s, Hegel’s,…
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Ongoing Dialogue with Professor of Media Theory Corey Anton
Corey’s video: My response:
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Emersonian Ideas concerning Freedom
Recorded about a year ago while I was composing a chapter to be included in a forthcoming volume called The Beacon of Mind: Reason and Intuition in the Ancient and Modern World:
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2015 Whitehead Conference Poster – “Seizing an Alternative: Towards an Ecological Civilization”
More about the conference, and my track, can be found HERE and HERE.
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Evolutionary Panpsychism v. Eliminative Materialism: Towards an Anthrodecentric Philosophy of Nature
A talk I gave at my graduate program’s retreat at Esalen a few weeks ago. Part 1: Part 2: A comment by media theorist and professor of communication Corey Anton about what I say around the 3 minute mark of part 2 about the death/rebirth mystery of cosmogenesis: Corey Anton: Hi Matt, Thanks again. A…
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Dr. Rick Doblin, founder of MAPS, on Stan Grof’s Contributions to MDMA Research
A lecture given as part of a conference hosted by the Center for the Study of Psychedelic Therapy at CIIS in October to celebrate the work of Stan Grof. MAPS is the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.
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Looking ahead to IWC2015 – Religion in the Making: On the Possibility of a 2nd Axial Age
Regular readers of my blog probably already know about the 2015 International Whitehead Conference next summer in Claremont, CA. It is being called “Seizing an Alternative: Towards an Ecological Civilization.” I am organizing a track on late modernity’s reductive monism. In this track, I’ll be presenting a paper laying out what may be the most pressing problem faced by philosophers…
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Shaviro on Harman and Whitehead: Process- vs. Object-Oriented Philosophies
Harman credits Whitehead for being one of the few daring philosophers “to venture beyond the human sphere” (Guerrilla Metaphysics, 190). Both thinkers share a commitment to anthrodecentrism. They de-center the human by insisting upon a flat ontology, a theory of Being wherein every being exemplifies the same set of metaphysical categories, whether that being be God, or human,…
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Panpsychism and Speculative Realism: Reviewing Shaviro’s “The Universe of Things”
“The progress of philosophy does not primarily involve reactions of agreement or dissent. It essentially consists in the enlargement of thought, whereby contradictions and agreements are transformed into partial aspects of wider points of view.” -Alfred North Whitehead, September 10, 1941 It is in this spirit that I believe Shaviro wrote The Universe of Things.…
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Speculative Realism, Dead or Alive.
Steven Shaviro’s new book The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism arrived on my doorstep a few days ago courtesy of the University of Minnesota Press. I’m going to provide a bit of context in this post before diving into a review of the text in subsequent posts. The press release U of M included in…
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Towards an Ecological Metaphysics
Leon Niemoczynski (here) and Adam Robbert (here) have been having a productive back and forth regarding the prospect of an ecological metaphysics. Speculative Realism is not far afield of their conversation, with subslogans like “dark vitalism,” “new materialism,” and “bleak theology,” and key influences like Plato, Schelling, Nietzsche, and Deleuze, all hovering in the background. They…
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Video of my lecture: an introduction to German Idealism/Romanticism
Below is my lecture on German Idealism and Romanticism given yesterday (Sept. 30) for MA students enrolled in an Introduction to Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness course at CIIS.
Footnotes2Plato 