Author: Matthew David Segall
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Leaves of Grass (a poem for Walt Whitman)
Written at Esalen on Oct. 29 for the 5th Annual PCC Poetry Jam, MC’d by Drew Dellinger. Minor edits on 11/14/2017. How, with only twenty-six letters, do poets dare to spell the smell of even a mere tuft of grass? How, with only ten fingers, do poets come to grips with galaxies as large as…
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What is Philosophy?
Post by Matthew David Segall.
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The Difference Between Kant’s and Schelling’s Philosophies of Nature
A lecture I gave earlier this week in a class at CIIS on Spirit and Nature.
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Reflections on Bruno Latour’s “An Inquiry into Modes of Existence,” Ch. 4: Learning to Make Room
I’m participating in a reading group with about 40 other scholars focusing on Bruno Latour‘s recently published book An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns (2013). This week it is my turn to comment on Ch. 4, which is titled “Learning to Make Room.” I’m going to cross-post my comments here,…
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Answering some queries about Whitehead
A college student emailed me with some questions about the technical details of Whitehead’s metaphysical scheme as laid out in Process and Reality. I figured I’d post my response to him here since I haven’t been able to blog much lately and don’t want anyone to think I’ve given it up, and because some of…
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Thinking with Emerson, Or how German Idealism Came to America
The Beacon of Mind: Reason and Intuition in the Ancient and Modern World (forthcoming).
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Audio from International Whitehead Conference in Krakow
Here is the audio of my presentation at the IWC last week in the philosophy of religion section: Here is a PDF of the paper I read, titled “Worldly Religion in Whitehead and Deleuze: Steps Toward an Incarnational Philosophy” Related articles 9th Annual International Whitehead Conference in Kracow, Poland (footnotes2plato.com) Also, thanks to Leon over…
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Ecologies of Space-Time in Organic Ontologies
Adam over at Knowledge-Ecology threw a great post up concerning ethology, ecology, and time. Here is a sneak peek: “The organism is not an entity acting from within space and time; rather, the organism is an active generator of space-time, enfolding both into a complex ecology that flows from organisms and their behavior. The ecosystem,…
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9th International Whitehead Conference in Kracow, Poland
I’m headed halfway around the world today to present a paper at the IWC in Poland. Roland Faber, Catherine Keller, Herman Greene and others will be giving talks. I’ll do my best to record and/or live blog during their remarks. I’ll be presenting a paper in the religion section on the secularization of God in…
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Money, Ecology, and Burning Man: Inquiries into the Thermodynamics of Capitalism
I’m headed back to Black Rock City for the 3rd time in 4 years later this week. I’ll be camping with Cosmicopia at 7:15 J if you want to stop by. I’ll be giving a brief talk on the need to ecologize economics on Tuesday at 11am. The title of the talk is actually a…
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Consciousness Between Science and Philosophy (response to Steve Ramirez)
Almost three years ago, Steve Ramirez (neuroscience grad student at MIT) and I exchanged a few videos and blog posts about the scientific study of consciousness (see HERE for a run down). Ramirez began and ended our brief electronic debate convinced that I, like most other philosophers he’s encountered, have developed a profound misunderstanding of…
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Alf Hornborg on Ecology, Economy, and Technology
A few excerpts from professor of human ecology Alf Hornborg‘s book The Power of the Machine: Global Inequalities of Economy, Technology, and Environment (2001). “We seem to have difficulties understanding exactly in which sense human ideas and social relations intervene in the material realities of the biosphere. Rather than continuing to appraoch ‘knowledge’ from the Cartesian…
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Alex Honnold’s free solo of Half Dome in Yosemite – Nobody knows what a body can do.
Deleuze writes of Spinoza’s epochal realization that we do not know what a body can do: Spinoza will engender all the passions, in their details, on the basis of these two fundamental affects: joy as an increase in the power of acting, sadness as a diminution or destruction of the power of acting. This comes…
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Robert Rosen and Friedrich Schelling on Mechanism and Organism
I’ve been reading some of the theoretical biologist Robert Rosen‘s essays on the relationship between biology and physics and can’t help but compare him to Friedrich Schelling. Rosen writes: [Contemporary physics embodies] a mechanistic approach to biological phenomena, whose only alternative seems to be a discredited, mystical, unscientific vitalism. [It] supposes biology to be a…
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Thinking on a Walk in the Woods: The Ideality of Matter and the Materiality of Ideas
Something of a response to Levi Bryant/LarvalSubjects on “hylephobia.” See also this post on the Astrality of Materiality.
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“Deleuze, Guattari, and the ‘Politics of Sorcery’” by Joshua Delpech-Ramey
Find the article in SubStance HERE. “Deleuze and Guattari’s mode of immanent critique is linked to the possibility of founding identities and collectivities which, because inherently relational and constantly in a state of becoming, can not be the subject of straightforward representation, whether in ontological or political discourse. I will argue that sorcery is an important reference…
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The Cosmic Body by Alan Watts
Let’s spend some time with Alan Watts. I recommend a decent dose of sour diesel just prior to pushing play. So then, is it true? Is the modern idea of consciousness–the so-called “me,” my “I,” the “ego”–a hallucination, a sort of muscle knot inside our forehead in sorry need of a meditative massage? Is our…
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Imagining Nature with Schelling and Whitehead
Schelling and Whitehead were speculative philosophers. This appellative, like that of metaphysician or theologian, may carry with it certain baggage that those of a skeptical or positivist bent are wont to do without. But aside from those epochal moments when thinkers are suddenly inspired by speculative imagination, or by the break through of concept creation,…
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Phenomenology and Process Ontology: Evan Thompson, Merleau-Ponty, Whitehead, and the Growing Together of the Flesh of the World
I had a friendly exchange yesterday with the cognitive scientist and philosopher Evan Thompson about his debate earlier this year with another cognitive scientist Owen Flanagan. The two distinguished thinkers disagreed about whether physicalism as currently understood can provide an adequate account of consciousness. I wanted to revisit several of the themes Evan and I…
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A Time to Mourn, A Time to Weep- The Many Faces of Progress
Great piece by Trevor Malkinson on the state of the planet: A Time to Mourn, A Time to Weep- The Many Faces of Progress. Malkinson quotes the process theologian John Cobb Jr. from this recent interview: If I tried to be very philosophical, and look at things very broadly, I think that the divine experiment on…
Footnotes2Plato 