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

  • “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…

  • 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…

  • 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,…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Is Physicalism Enough? Can Consciousness be Naturalized? – Owen Flanagan in dialogue with Evan Thompson

    Check out the video from their exchange at Northwestern earlier this year. Below are some of my notes and reflections after watching… Owen Flanagan argues that physicalism is the only feasible view. Naturalism is the inference to the best explanation. Conscious states are brain states. At some point in evolutionary history, somehow dead matter came to…

  • Jeremy Johnson on the 2013 Integral Theory Conference and the Ecology of Ideas

    “Everything that Rises…” Or Synthetic Thought, Florilegium and the Networked Age: ITC 2013. My friend Jeremy is the official blogger for ITC 2013 here in San Francisco. I’m completely with him in his call for a move away from integral theory as an assimilation of other ideas to a more decentralized and rhizomatic network-logic where…

  • John Caputo on Speculative Realism

    Thanks to Adam/Knowledge-Ecology for pointing me to this one. I really dig what he says about physics and science… These posts are relevant to some of what Caputo has to say about correlationism, the philosophy of religion, and physical reality: https://footnotes2plato.com/2011/03/02/owen-barfield-and-quentin-meillassoux/ https://footnotes2plato.com/2011/10/04/speculative-philosophy-and-incarnationalism-in-whitehead-and-meillassoux/ https://footnotes2plato.com/2012/01/18/tilting-at-windmill-materialism-towards-an-ontology-of-organism-ooo/ https://footnotes2plato.com/2011/05/05/towards-a-christological-realism-thinking-the-correlation-with-teilhard-and-barfield/

  • On the need for mediating concepts…

    I posted this on FaceBook in a thread about humanities departments needing to get over Aristotle’s biology and was told to stop spamming, so I suppose I’d better just post it here instead. …………….. If contemporary biology is going to throw out “purpose” and “essence” as concepts, it needs to throw out correlate concepts like…

  • Tribute to Wittgenstein

    There was a period of about 3 months back in college when Wittgenstein was all I could read (this essay emerged out of that period). His genius had infected me. I was sure his solutions had dissolved all my philosophical problems (indeed, I thought he’d cured me of philosophy). Of course, back in college, I…

  • Mary Evelyn Tucker – Journey of the Universe

    Here is Mary Evelyn Tucker offering her version of a geology of morals.

  • Galen Strawson on Nietzsche’s Metaphysics

  • Panpsychism in Contemporary Philosophy

    Last week, I shared a few of Galen Strawson‘s ideas about panpsychism (as quoted from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy) on FaceBook. A very long thread began. The conversation continues at Dream the World Anew. I suggest you start there before reading further. In this post, I want to begin situating my own particular breed…

  • Panpsychism and Its Emergent Discontents

    Several of us got into a discussion on my FaceBook page regarding panpsychism and emergentism. On some accounts, if a philosopher rejects dualism and so desires to ontologically integrate what common folks normally call mental with what natural scientists understand to be material, her only option is to develop either a panpsychist or an emergentist…

  • Responding to comments about Bakker’s “blind brain theory”

    Discussion has continued beneath my last post about Bakker. Below are a few of my comments there: rsbakkar writes: I advert to common idiom when discussing theoretical incompetence, but it certainly doesn’t turn on any commitment to representationalism – even less correspondance! The fact is, people regularly get things wrong in what appear to be…

  • Unnecessary Mechanism: A Reply to R. Scott Bakker

    “The machinery of the brain does all the work–after all, what else is there? What [Cain] calls ‘thinking of science in normative terms’ is a mechanistic enterprise, something our brains do. Since metacognition is all but blind to the mechanistic nature of the brain, it cognizes cognition otherwise, in nonmechanical, acausal, magical terms. Normative judgements, intentional relations, and so…

  • Saul Bellow on Rudolf Steiner, Boredom, Sleep, and Death

    Wanted to share this before going to bed. Here are a few words about “the famous but misunderstood Dr. Rudolf Steiner” from Bellow’s Pulitzer Prize winning work of fiction Humboldt’s Gift: It wasn’t that I minded giving information to honest scholars, or even to young people on the make, but I just then was busy, fiercely, painfully busy–personally…

  • Life After Darwin (another response to Benjamin Cain)

    I linked to Cain’s essay on Darwin in my last post on his theory of the psychedelic origins of religion. I wanted to comment on what he tries to do in the Darwin essay. His claim is that, post-Darwin, the old distinction between life and matter no longer holds; therefore, we are all more like…

  • Psychedelics and Religious Experience (essay by Benjamin Cain)

    After commenting on his guest post over on Three Pound Brain, I decided to spend some time on Benjamin Cain’s blog Rants Within the Undead God. I really like the way his mind works, even if I’m a bit more philosophically skeptical of scientistic claims to total knowledge of matter (whether “dead” or “alive”). I…

  • The Danger of Scientism? (response to Benjamin Cain)

    Go read Benjamin Cain’s fascinating and tightly argued essay posted at Three Pound Brain (the blog of author R. Scott Bakker). Below is my comment to him: That was a thoroughly enjoyable read.   I agree with what may be your most important conclusion: that the real danger “we” face as auto-poetic “minds” is that…

  • Thinking the Holocaust with Schelling…

    A few days ago, I decided to re-read Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809). It’s a reasonably short text of about 75 pages, so I’ve read it 3 or 4 times in the past year. The text’s key conceptual innovations regarding the essence of freedom (which Schelling defines as the scission…