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 and Guattari on Discussing Philosophy (on a blog)

    From chapter 1 of What Is Philosophy?: “Discussions are fine for roundtable talks, but philosophy throws its numbered dice on another table. The best one can say about discussions is that they take things no further, since the participants never talk about the same thing. Of what concern is it to philosophy that someone has such…

  • Tolkien’s Imagination: A Talk at Esalen

    Originally posted on Becca Tarnas:   The essay “The Fantastic Imagination: Sub-Creating Tolkien’s Middle-Earth,” which is the foundation of this presentation, is available here.

  • Petals Rising

    I forgot about this short poem I penned back in August on the inside of the back cover of Ramey’s book after sitting on a bench intending to read in a rose garden in Golden Gate Park. It seems relevant to some of what I’ve covered above: I stand here watching rose petals fall. I pick up…

  • Deleuze’s Platonism and Cosmic Artisanry

    I recently picked up Joshua Ramey’s The Hermetic Deleuze again after having had to temporarily shelve it back in August due to other research obligations. Having all but completed my comprehensive exam on Whitehead, I’m turning now to focus on a paper on Deleuze for a process philosophy seminar. Having tried (admittedly not very hard)…

  • Cosmopolitical Theology: Violence, Value, and the Push for a Planetary People

    This is a talk I gave back in September for my colleagues at CIIS during our annual retreat to Esalen in Big Sur, CA.

  • David Harvey on Zero Growth Economy (w/ A. N. Whitehead)

  • The Varieties of Naturalistic Philosophy

    If a pushy philosopher were to back me into a corner and force me to choose one or the other, naturalism or supernaturalism, I would choose naturalism. But I’d find myself wanting to ask, as Socrates might, what is meant by “nature”? Physics becomes metaphysics as soon as the word–”nature”–is pronounced. The logos of language…

  • Responding to Thunderfoot’s Scientific Materialism

     

  • This Must Be Heaven : Sam Harris responds to Eben Alexander’s NDE

    This Must Be Heaven : Sam Harris responds to Eben Alexander’s near death experience. I must admit that I was deeply moved the first time I heard Alexander recount his seizure and ensuing comma. His description of his NDE–a hyperreal encounter with numinous beings from another world lying in wait beneath the phenomenal space and time of our…

  • American Philosophy and Rudolf Steiner, ed. by Robert McDermott

    A note for those interested in American philosophy: my adviser, mentor, and friend Robert McDermott is editing a text to be published later this year by Lindisfarne Books entitled American Philosophy and Rudolf Steiner. It includes essays on Emerson, Thoreau, Peirce, James, Royce, Dewey, Whitehead, and a chapter on feminism. I’m currently copy editing several of…

  • Thinking With Whitehead: Science, Sunsets, and the Bifurcation of Nature

    Thinking with Whitehead: The Scientific Revolution and the Bifurcation of Nature   The scientific revolution, beginning perhaps with Copernicus’ rediscovery of the heliocentric model of the solar system early in the 16th century, and culminating perhaps with Newton’s formulation of the laws of motion and universal gravitation towards the end of the 17th century, fundamentally…

  • Lecture at CIIS by Eric Voegelin scholar Dr. Paul Caringella this Friday

    For those who are in the San Francisco Bay Area, please join us at the PCC Forum this Friday at the California Institute of Integral Studies (1453 Mission St.) where Dr. Paul Caringella will speak about Voegelin‘s philosophy of history. Also on the menu will be Levinas, Hegel, Buber, and Plato. The lecture is free…

  • Thinking with rocks.

    These rocks, stacked by human hands along a canyon creek near Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, are not simply aggregates or piles. Neither are they simply the freely created artwork of humans. The left-hand stack of eleven rocks (if you count earth) towers toward the sky, together with its local and cosmic ecologies achieving…

  • Whitehead’s Process Atomism (response to Graham Harman)

    Graham Harman has jumped in offering his own response to my recent comment directed at Levi Bryant regarding his interpretation of Whitehead. The core issue, for Harman, is whether Whitehead’s position is ultimately reducible to some form of relationism, wherein an actual occasion is no more than the sum of its prehensions, or whether Whitehead’s…

  • Isabelle Stengers on Cosmopolitics

  • Levi Bryant Misreading Whitehead?

    Re-posting my comment to Bryant’s recent criticism of Whitehead and process-relational thought below: Levi, I’m not so sure treating an actual occasion as a “bundle of prehensions” is at all faithful to Whitehead’s scheme. Maybe you arguing that some other aspect of his thought forces him into an inconsistency on this point? If that’s not…

  • Gilles Deleuze’s and Arthur Young’s Bergsonisms: An Outline and Notes

    I’ve just finished Gilles Deleuze’s book Bergsonism (1990). Here is my outline of the text: Deleuze’s Bergsonism: Notes and Outline. Bergson suggested that the Absolute had to be approached from two sides, the scientific and the metaphysical. Science/Intellect considers the universe according to a series of states. Metaphysics/Intuition considers the universe according to the self-differentiation of…

  • Philosophical Experiments Testing the Bounds of Reality – a lecture by Sam Mickey

    Several weeks ago, I had the pleasure of introducing Sam Mickey at the PCC Forum. Sam graduated earlier this year after successfully defending his dissertation entitled: Philosophy for a Planetary Civilization: On the Verge of Integral Ecology. Along with Sean Kelly, Brian Swimme and Catherine Keller served on his committee. The dissertation weaves together a diverse…

  • Cosmic Self: a Uni-Verse

    It is with my own self-consciousness that I must begin… but I will confess, I am not yet certain of my own beginning, or even of my own uncertainty. Already I seem to have said too much: “I am”–how do I know that? Do I really exist? Can I claim self-consciousness as “my own” if…

  • The Poetry of Philosophy: Wordsworth’s Poetic Vision of Nature in Light of Whitehead’s Cosmological Scheme

    The aim of this essay is to read the nature poetry of William Wordsworth in light of the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, such that the epistemological and cosmological implications of the former are brought more fully into philosophical view. According to Victor Lowe, it is probable that no other man, save Plato, shaped the…

  • Whitehead’s Endo-Theology

    Levi Bryant/Larval Subjects has laid down a clear and clarifying plumb-line definition for a contentious word that finds itself being thrown around the OOO blogosphere from time to time:  Correlationism. It has a fascinating biography. Harman recently offered his version of its history and conceptual origin. Bryant’s was a very helpful post for me. His…