Author: Matthew David Segall
-
Pope Benedict XVI Resigns – Creation Theologian Matthew Fox Responds
Matthew Fox has some important things to say here…
-
Bruno Latour’s 1st Gifford Lecture – “Once Out of Nature: Natural Religion as a Pleonasm”
Bruno Latour (the infamous sociologist of science, …or famed political ecologist and anthropologist of the moderns) is delivering the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh. Above is his first lecture, “Once Out of Nature: Natural Religion as a Pleonasm.” In these lectures, Latour is attempting to prepare us (we moderns? we humans?) to meet…
-
Vitalism in Philosophy: “The stars are the fountain veins of God.” -Böhme
Levi Bryant is pulling his hair out about vitalist philosophy (a title he gives to the work of Bergson, Whitehead, and Deleuze, among others). I read all three as materialists, though of course it is a rather strange sort of materialism replete with God-making machines, physical feelings, and alchemical metallurgy. Nonetheless, their philosophical work, especially Whitehead’s, couldn’t…
-
Continuum
Some good friends of mine will be featured in this film: Planetary Collective Presents: Continuum
-
Bruno Latour’s Gifford Lectures are underway: “Facing Gaia”
Bruno Latour is about halfway through his lecture series on natural religion. Videos of the lectures should be posted by the University of Edinburgh any day now. Here is a good review of lecture 3, titled “The puzzling face of a secular Gaia.” I especially like Latour’s neologism “geostory,” meant to replace the bifurcated notion of…
-
Root Images in Philosophies of Difference
-
Notes on Intro and Ch. 1 of “Difference and Repetition” by Gilles Deleuze
As Adam/Knowledge Ecology has mentioned, a few of us are doing a reading group on Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. Here are my notes for our first session. Notes for Introduction and Chapter 1 of Difference and Repetition by Deleuze By Matt Segall Preface: Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition is an initiatory text that, rather than putting…
-
Jacob Sherman on Joshua Ramey’s “The Hermetic Deleuze” (2012)
Read it HERE. Jake writes: I suspect that Ramey seeks to divine a new shape for philosophy in the hermetic tradition rather than, say, in Hadot’s ancient philosophical schools, because of the degree of creativity that hermeticism not only thematizes but also unleashes. Goethe’s Faust is at his most hermetic when he translates the opening…
-
Fragment of a Dialogue: A Walk to Imagination’s Limits
This is an incomplete project that I may not be able to pick up for a while. Thought I’d post the fragment. It was inspired by Schelling’s dialogue Bruno. —————————————————– A Walk to Imagination’s Limits Chroma: We have chosen a wonderful evening to set out on a walk along the riverside. Don’t you think so, my friends?…
-
No one is in control…
…because power has left the nation-state; politics has been overcome by financial flows. -Zygmunt Bauman
-
Reblogged: The Hermetic Deleuze: Anesthetizing Chaos
This from Virgilio A. Rivas The Hermetic Deleuze: Anesthetizing Chaos. My comment to Rivas: Fascinating post. I’ve given some thought to the effects of the Internet, especially blogging/vlogging, on neuro-cognitive evolution. The Global Network of Capitalized Information is fast at work relieving us of our own private subjectivity. Our very selves are being gobbled up…
-
Is the Universe Alive?
In this episode of the “Through the Wormhole” series put together by Discovery Channel, Morgan Freeman asks, “Is the Universe Alive?” He builds on the ideas of a motley crew of scientists in order to learn to see life at multiple scales, including the computer scientists Juergen Schmidhuber (machines are alive) and Seth Lloyd (atoms think),…
-
American Philosophy and Rudolf Steiner, ed. By Robert McDermott
I mentioned this text, American Philosophy and Rudolf Steiner, edited by my advisor Robert McDermott, a few months back. It has since been published.
-
The Gossip Gospel – An Informal Talk on the Role of Gossip in Community
I gave this talk on New Year’s Eve to a group of my friends.
-
Deleuze on Anamnesis
From Difference and Repetition, p. 85 (in the context of a discussion of the active and passive synthesis of time): If there is an in-itself of the past, then reminiscence is its noumenon or the thought with which it is invested. Reminiscence does not simply refer us back from a present present to former ones,…
-
Deleuzean Diagrammagic
Here’s a quick sketch of a diagram I’ll continue to refine that came to me while reading Deleuze’s discussion of the passive synthesis of imagination in D & R (71cf). An easier to read version: The past and the future are rhythmically/repeatedly synthesized via contraction into the lived present by imagination. The actual occasions of…
-
Science v. Religion (in the lead up to my dissertation) – Al Jazeera interviews Richard Dawkins, and Lawrence’s Krauss thinks he’s special
Now that I’ve completed preparatory research essays on Schelling (The Re-Emergence of Schelling: Philosophy in a Time of Emergency) and Whitehead (Physics of the World-Soul: The Relevance of A. N. Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism to Contemporary Scientific Cosmology), it’s finally time to start zeroing in on my dissertation thesis. The title I’m proposing for now is Imagination Between…
-
Live broadcasting tomorrow for 12/21/2012
Some friends and I will be spiraling around the bay in ritual celebration tomorrow, beginning at sunrise. We’ll be broadcasting some of the festivities on the UStream channel “dec21sharing.”
-
[Final Draft] Worldly Religion in Deleuze and Whitehead: On the Possibility of a Secular Divinity
Below I’ve written a paper using the ideas of Gilles Deleuze and Alfred North Whitehead to construct a secular divinity. For Deleuze, this is an especially serious act of buggery on my part. Deleuze of course approved of that method in his own projects, but I wonder if he would approve of the baby jesus…
-
Imagination in Philosophy (from NYT’s “The Stone”)
From a recent essay over at The Stone on NYT.COM by Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone about philosophy and the poetic imagination: “…what makes these interpretive efforts poetic: They do not concern the ordinary significance of form in language. When we approach language prosaically, our focus is on arbitrary conventions that link words to things…
-
Josefina Burgos – “Becoming: A Concept Where Science and Philosophy Can Meet”
A colleague at CIIS presenting on Process Philosophy in Whitehead, Bergson, and Teilhard last Friday.
Footnotes2Plato 