Author: Matthew David Segall
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Video of “The Psychedelic Eucharist: Toward a Pharmacological Philosophy of Religion”
A lecture I delivered yesterday (Sept. 29th, 2014) at CIIS for ERIE. Lecture notes
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Lecture: “The Psychedelic Eucharist: Towards a Pharmacological Philosophy of Religion” at CIIS this Monday (9/29) from 6-9pm
I’m giving another talk on Monday (9/29) on psychedelics (the last one was at Burning Man) as part of a panel discussion for the Entheogenic Research, Integration, and Education (ERIE) student group at CIIS. This one will focus on the psychedelic roots of philosophy, particularly as they relate to the Eleusinian mystery rites. I’ll paste…
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Reflections on an experience during a recent medicine circle
I wanted to post a transcription of some reflections I shared during a medicine circle I participated in this past summer. Some of what came to me has had a big impact on my conceptualization of my dissertation thesis regarding the etheric (or plant-like) nature of Imagination. It is such a privilege to speak later in the…
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Love, Death, and the Sub-Creative Imagination in J.R.R. Tolkien (revised)
Love, Death, and the Sub-Creative Imagination in J. R. R. Tolkien Written March 3, 2013, Revised September 20, 2014 by Matthew David Segall In the year 1951, as recorded by the calendar of our world, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote to a potential publisher of his Lord of the Rings trilogy to describe the origin of his…
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“Expanding and Re-Enchanting the Psyche: The Pioneering Thought of Stanislav Grof”
If you’re a Bay Area local, do try to attend this conference celebrating the work of Stan Grof Oct. 24-25 (Friday and Saturday) at the Hotel Whitcomb. It is being sponsored by the new Center for the Study of Psychedelic Medicine at C.I.I.S. and the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. >>More information<< >>Registration<< …
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The Psychedelic Eucharist: Is there an Alchemical Solution to the Ecological Crisis?
Some notes toward a talk I’m giving at Burning Man next week. I’ll be at camp Cosmicopia (located at 3:45 and Ephesus). The talk is on Wednesday at 4pm. http://playaevents.burningman.com/playa_event/13197/ …………………… The word “psychedelic” was coined in the 1950s by the British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond in a letter exchanged with the famed author and philosopher…
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The Philosophy of Big History
Sam Mickey on Big History.
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John Cobb, Jr: Whitehead as the ecological alternative to Scientific Materialism
Scientists like to contrast themselves with others by their faithfulness to evidence. Sadly, they resist evidence that does not fit their pre-commitments. Aristotelian scientists at the papal court refused to look through the telescope because they would see what did not fit their philosophical convictions about the heavenly bodies. Modern scientists have all along ignored…
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No Newton of the Grass Blade: On the impossibility of scientific genius in Kant’s “Critique of Judgment”
In preparation for a lecture on mind and nature in German Idealism, I’m working my way through Kant’s third of three critiques, the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790). Prior to this sitting, I’ve only ever spent time with small sections of this text. For example, sections 75 and 76 in the second part…
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I’m still alive…
Just checking in to say I haven’t given up on blogging. I’ve been doing a bit of traveling lately: three weeks in Hawaii, a weekend in Willits (3 hours north of San Francisco) for an ayahuasca ceremony, and soon a 10-day excursion to Black Rock City for the Burning Man festival. I’ll be back in…
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On reading Philip K. Dick for the first time…
“…mental illness. It was like a plague. No one could discern how much was due to drugs. This time in America–1960 to 1970–and this place, the Bay Area of Northern California, was totally fucked. I’m sorry to tell you this, but that’s the truth. Fancy terms and ornate theories cannot cover this fact up (Valis,…
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The Ecology of Ideas: Enacting Worlds Worth Living In
“Every scientific man in order to preserve his reputation has to say he dislikes metaphysics. What he means is he dislikes having his metaphysics criticized.” -Alfred North Whitehead Over at Knowledge-Ecology, Adam Robbert has thrown a few fantastic posts up unpacking his vision of the ecology of ideas. Concepts are capacities skillfully enacted in ecological contexts.…
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New Hubble Telescope Deep Field of our Galactic neighborhood.
“I am convinced…that the story of the universe that has come out of three centuries of modern scientific work will be recognized as a supreme human achievement, the scientific enterprise’s central gift to humanity, a revelation having a status equal to that of the great religious revelations of the past” -Brian Swimme
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Traditions of Unknowing
Adam Robbert on the ecology of ideas…
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Nietzsche’s and Whitehead’s post-nihilist pluralistic process philosophies (part 2)
Since my post a few days ago (“The ‘innocence of becoming’: Nietzsche, Whitehead, and Nihilism as a Pathological Transitional Stage between Monism and Pluralism“), I’ve re-read chapter 4 of William Connolly’s The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism (2013). Here is his summation of that chapter, which compared Nietzsche’s and Whitehead’s process philosophies: “It…
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The “innocence of becoming”: Nietzsche, Whitehead, and Nihilism as a Pathological Transitional Stage between Monism and Pluralism
It is remarkable how similar Nietzsche’s musings on perspectivism are to Whitehead’s process-relational ontology. I was reminded of their congruence while re-reading excerpts from Nietzsche’s The Will to Power (published in Mark Taylor’s Deconstruction in Context). Of course, one might read Whitehead’s somewhat Platonic cosmological scheme (which includes reformed conceptions of teleology, god, eternal objects, and so on) as directly opposed…
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My dissertation as a Detective Novel and a work of Science Fiction
Etheric Imagination in Process Philosophy: Towards a Physics of the World-Soul/an Ontology of Organism My dissertation examines the cognitive role of imagination in modern philosophies of nature since Descartes, focusing in particular on the nature philosophies of Schelling, Steiner, and Whitehead. I argue that the cognitive organ of etheric imagination grants the nature philosopher epistemic…
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Philosophizing on YouTube with Pyrrho314
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Distilling my dissertation topic—>Etheric Imagination in an Ontology of Organism: Towards a Planetary Philosophy
First, a few orientating quotations from the thinkers I will be boiling together in the alchemical vessel of my dissertation. “…if we had the choice between empiricism and the all-oppressing necessity of thought of a rationalism which had been driven to the highest point, no free spirit would be able to object to deciding in favor of…
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Evan Thompson @ CIIS on Neuroscience, Meditation, and Self-Enaction
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Tomorrow @ CIIS: Rick Tarnas and Brian Swimme – “Radical Mythospeculation and a Second Axial Age”
Footnotes2Plato 