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

  • Questions concerning the place of imagination in cosmology… (while reading Ed Casey and Catherine Keller)

    “In my view the creation of the world is the first unconscious act of speculative thought; and the first task of a self-conscious philosophy is to explain how it has been done.” -Whitehead Four of us met a few days back to discuss the first 75 pages of Ed Casey’s The Fate of Place: A…

  • Responding to Michael about Root Images in the Philosophy of Nature

    Several months ago, Michael (who blogs at Archive Fire and contributes to synthetic_zero) posted a comment on a post of mine about philosophical vitalism. I’m just now getting around to responding to what for me were really helpful questions as I try to further flesh out my thoughts on etheric imagination. Michael writes: I like…

  • Climate Change and Schelling’s inversion of Fichte’s “economic-teleological” principle

    Two disappointing tidbits of news from the front lines of the climate war came my way this morning. First, I learned that the US Department of State decided to contract out its recent environmental review of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline to a company called Environmental Resources Management. ERM happens to be “a dues-paying…

  • Nihilism and Groundlessness: Towards a Gaian Praxecology?

    I’ve just gotten around to reading Michael/ArchiveFire‘s post last September regarding a “post-nihilistic praxis.”  It’s got me reflecting on what the “creaturely” might mean/be after the death of God (the Creator), or what the “facticity of matter” might mean/be after its traditional opposite, the activity of spirit, has been reduced by natural science or deconstructed by…

  • Latour annunciating his religion…

    “Thou Shall Not Freeze-Frame, or How Not to Misunderstand the Science and Religion Debate” (2004) by Bruno Latour There is nothing extravagant, spiritual, or mysterious in beginning to describe religious talk in this way.We are used to other, perfectly mundane forms of speech that are evaluated not by their correspondence with any state of affairs either, but by the quality…

  • Tolkien on mythopoetics

    I just came across an apt addition to the discussion last week on myth and religion. In a letter to C. S. Lewis, Tolkien writes: “If God is mythopoeic, man must become mythopathic.” Given that all forms of literalism as regards the scientific or spiritual nature of reality are to be rejected, the only remaining…

  • Responding to Levi Bryant on the Question of Religion

    I’ve copied my response to Levi below: I’m glad you are not reducing all religion to the sort of literalism we’re both trying to critique (you from a scientific standpoint aimed at religion, me from a spiritual standpoint aimed at scientism). Regardless of what the majority of “believers” may think about the ontological status of…

  • Reflections on nihilism as a belief system

    Levi Bryant initiated a string of blog posts on nihilism with his “axioms for a dark ontology.” Attempts at Living followed HERE, and Bill Rose Thorn HERE. Both of them accept Bryant’s ontological purposelessness, but raise the important issue of developing a “post-nihilistic praxis” (see this great post by Michael/Archive Fire from last year on what…

  • Reflections on Deleuze’s Engagement with Natural Science in D&R

    In chapter V of Difference and Repetition, “The Asymmetrical Synthesis of the Sensible,” Deleuze engages with the various scientific theories of 19th and 20th century thermodynamics, not by identifying his fictions with scientific facts, but by detonating the philosophical idea of “intensive depth” in range of the qualitative extensity studied in terms of the scientific…

  • Historical Background and Overview for “Etheric Imagination in Process Philosophy”

    I realized I posted the same section twice last week, so here is the real historical and overview section of my dissertation proposal. ————————————————————————– This dissertation examines the metaphysics of imagination in the process philosophies of Schelling and Whitehead through the hermeneutical lens of a certain stream of Western esotericism. In describing the process-philosophical imagination…

  • Robert Romanyshyn’s “alchemical hermeneutics” as the foundation of a method in the participatory study of esotericism

    Romanyshyn’s alchemical hermeneutics as the foundation of a method in the participatory study of esotericism Robert Romanyshyn has developed a depth psychological method informed by hermeneutic phenomenology but ultimately rooted in alchemy. In approaching my research on the etheric imagination, I’ve turned to Romanyshyn’s method of alchemical hermeneutics because it allows for the retrieval of…

  • William Irwin Thompson on Planetary Transformation

    Adam/Knowledge-Ecology and I interviewed the integral philosopher William Irwin Thompson a while back. He recently posted a transcription of part of that encounter on his blog. Here’s a sample: So imagine in a noetic polity that a girl is born, the very fact that she is a member of that polity would empower her to…

  • Theoretical Perspectives on Etheric Imagination

    The following is the “theoretical perspectives” section of my dissertation. It introduces the ether concept I am attempting to imaginally construct with the help of Schelling, Steiner, and Whitehead. …………………………………….. This dissertation argues that philosophical thinking, to eclipse the dualistic dogmas of today’s commonsense, must ally itself with the creative power of the etheric imagination.…

  • Deleuze’s Pedagogy of Problematic Ideas as an Example of Etheric Imagination

    Below is another section of my dissertation proposal… ………………. In What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between a singular pedagogy of the concept and a universal encyclopedia of the concept.155 What does it mean to say that Deleuze’s philosophical method is pedagogical, rather than encyclopedic? It means that philosophical concepts are not catalogued in…

  • Lecture by Prof. Jacob Sherman @ CIIS this Friday on Contemplative Philosophy

    The PCC Forum will be welcoming CIIS’ own Prof. Jacob Sherman this Friday, May 3rd at 6:30pm in room 560. The lecture is free and open to the public.

  • John Sallis’ Logic of Imagination as an Example of Etheric Imagination

    Below is another section of my dissertation proposal. More to come… ……………………………………. John Sallis begins his Force of Imagination: The Sense of the Elemental (2000) by regretting the Husserlian phenomenological tradition’s tendency to subordinate imagination to pure perception in an effort to “[protect] the bodily presence of the perceived from imaginal contamination.”208 Sallis argues that…

  • Michael Marder’s Vegetal Philosophy as an Example of Etheric Imagination

    The following is excerpted from my dissertation proposal, which is tentatively titled “Etheric Imagination in Process Philosophy from Schelling to Whitehead.” I’ll be posting more selections in the coming days.  ………………………………………………….. To become rooted in the etheric forces of imagination, the process philosopher must learn to think like a plant. Michael Marder’s “vegetal metaphysics”80 provides a contemporary…

  • Iain Hamilton Grant Interview

    Leon Niemoczynski has posted a FANTASTIC interview with Iain Hamilton Grant. A small sample to wet your appetite:  As directly as possible, Idealism is that philosophy that affirms the reality of the Idea. The point is not that any account of reality must be from the standpoint of the Idea, of the Ideal, or that the conceptual…

  • Images of Earth and Eros in Walt Whitman’s Poetry

    Images of Earth and Eros in Walt Whitman’s Poetry A Presentation by Matthew D. Segall at the 2013 Cosmology of Love Conference   Come, said the Muse,  Sing me a song no poet yet has chanted,  Sing me the universal.    In this broad earth of ours, Amid the measureless grossness and the slag, Enclosed and…

  • Deleuzian Ideas

    Deleuze writes: “Ideas no more than Problems do not exist only in our heads but occur here and there in the production of an actual historical world” (Difference and Repetition, p. 190). Ideas are not simply located inside the head. Nor can Ideas be entirely captured inside the grammatical form of a logical syllogism, even…

  • Speculations on Obama’s Brain Initiative

    Francis Collins, director of the National Institute of Health and author of The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (2006), introduces President Obama as the “scientist-in-chief.” Collins’ “BioLogos” theory is a brand of theistic evolution I have to admit I am not all that familiar with. But I do think he is…