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

  • 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…

  • Whiteheadian thoughts on the thingliness of ideas (responses to Archive Fire and Knowledge Ecology)

    Michael/Archive Fire and Adam/Knowledge Ecology are at it again, working to sort through the material, semiotic, and ideational strands of the cosmic mesh to figure out what is real and what isn’t. In both positions, I detect a desire for ecological realism, the sort of realism where Santa Claus, mountain pine beetles, global capitalism, black…

  • Philosophy and the City

    A few good posts on the polis recently. One by Adam Robbert. Another by Bill Thorn. … Re-thinking politics is something most Athenian citizens never had to do. They had common categories to guide them in the agora, as well as comedy and tragedy to form and re-form their feelings for them at the theater.…

  • On reading Plato…

    Everyone already knows Alfred North Whitehead’s over-cited remark about all of European philosophy being but a series of footnotes to Plato. If you’ve somehow forgotten its near exact wording, just follow Plato’s upward pointing finger to the top of this blog for a reminder. Why near exact? I left out the descriptor “European…” that comes before…

  • Margulis and the Psychedelic Eucharist

    Here is Prof. Corey Anton lecturing on the recently deceased Lynn Margulis’ bio-philosophy. Towards the end of her book (co-authored with Dorian Sagan) What Is Life?, Margulis offers an  analysis of the role of psilocybin in the evolution of mammalian consciousness. She brings up the usage of psychedelic fungi in ancient mystery cults just after sharing Socrates’…

  • Anthrodecentrism – the genesis and meaning of a word

    I’m not one to claim ownership over my language. I have not yet succeeded in working off my debt to the language with which I speak. I still owe it everything. I suspect I will always owe it everything. Words exist in an ecology of knowledge, a gossipy network of promiscuous and often comedic-tragic ties. Words…

  • “Logic of Imagination: The Expanse of the Elemental” by John Sallis

    I just finished John Sallis‘ latest book: It was my first experience of his writing, which was lucid and even rose to imaginal and inspired heights in places. I haven’t read continental phenomenology in a while, though thinkers like Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty definitely shaped my entry into academic philosophy as an undergraduate. What I…

  • Immanent Law, Transcendent Love, and Political Theology

    I’m going to attempt to clarify my own position in relation to that of Levi Bryant’s on the issue of the potential role of religion in revolutionary politics. Bryant has toned down the diatribe, offering two substantive posts over at Larval Subjects, as well as several comments to me here at Footnotes. I’ll try to lay…

  • “The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal” (2012) by Joshua Ramey

    I’ve just been made aware of this very new book on Deleuze and the Hermetic tradition. As the commenter who brought it to my attention already guessed, it couldn’t be more relevant to my current project. Hermeticism has long been an interest of mine; I’ve even described myself as a Christian Hermeticist in the past. The…

  • Another Critchley interview…

    I’m almost done with Faith of the Faithless. Critchley is really clearing up a lot of my own thinking, confirming some intuitions I’ve had and really fleshing out what had remained below the level of articulation for me. I’ll post some more in depth reflections soon, especially on the issue of whether an anarchic community…

  • Whitehead’s Divine Function (response to Knowledge Ecology)

    Adam/Knowledge Ecology has responded to my comment about the role of the divine in Whitehead’s metaphysical scheme. Let me say at the get go that Whitehead himself acknowledged that he didn’t sufficiently work out the relationship between God and the World in Process and Reality. I approach Whitehead’s scheme, then, as a hacker might go…

  • Returning to Whitehead…

    After finishing my first comprehensive exam on Schelling, its now time to dive back into Whitehead. For starters, Adam over at the new minimalist Knowledge Ecology has recently been posting brilliant snippets of what I believe is a longer tract he is writing about the ecology of ideas. Here is one titled “The Alien Light“: On…

  • Experiments in Political Theology and Dialogical Blogging

    The first clause in the title of this post is the subtitle of Simon Critchley‘s newest book, The Faith of the Faithless (2012). Critchley is a deep ethical thinker who had until a week ago managed to fly under my radar. This isn’t all that surprising, since the admittedly still diffuse research methodology of my…

  • Simon Critchley’s “Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology”

    Just ordered his newest book Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology (2012) after watching Critchley and Cornel West’s recent discussion. There are many reviews of the book around, but here is one I enjoyed from the Los Angeles Review of Books by David Winters. He writes: Critchley…[claims] that politics consists of reconfigurations of religion. In…

  • Poetics of Resistance: Radical Politics in the Waning Years of Capitalism

    Levi Bryant has had a lot to say in the past several months about the relationship between politics and ontology. HERE is his latest. Essentially, he argues that academia is too caught up in symbolic and cultural forms of resistance to capitalism, when in reality what changes history are not shifts in consciousness but transformations…

  • The Politics of Renaissance Hermeticism, and the Magic of Science

    I’ve been reading Frances Yates’ Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964). Part of her project is to dispel the myth that Bruno was burnt at the stake primarily for his heliocentrism and generally scientific and materialist attitude. This was certainly one of the Roman Inquisitions many accusations, but the real reasons the Church lit…

  • Neuroscientist Christoph Koch comes out as a panpsychist?

    Now that I’m just about finished with my comprehensive exam, let’s see what interesting things are happening around the blogosphere… WOW! According to Michael Zimmerman, Christoph Koch has come out as a panpsychist in his new book Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist. Koch generates an information-theoretic account of consciousness, which he labels Φ, suggesting that all…