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

  • [Rough Draft] “The Re-Emergence of Schelling” – The nature of human freedom

    For a PDF of the entire essay, click The Re-Emergence of Schelling: Philosophy in a Time of Emergency. The Nature of Human Freedom The Naturphilosoph comes to understand “Nature as subject.”232 This does not imply that nature necessarily conforms to the transcendental structure of the human mind (a form of anthropomorphism), but rather that human consciousness…

  • [Rough Draft] “The Re-Emergence of Schelling” – Metaphysically (un)grounding the natural sciences

    For a PDF of the entire essay, click The Re-Emergence of Schelling: Philosophy in a Time of Emergency. Metaphysically (un)grounding the natural sciences  Schelling’s almost complete absence in Anglophone natural philosophy for more than 150 years (aside from his powerful effects on Coleridge,168 Peirce,169 and Emerson,170 and through the intermediary of Naturphilosoph Alexander von Humboldt, his…

  • [Rough Draft] “The Re-Emergence of Schelling” – The difference between Hegel’s and Schelling’s system of philosophy

    For a PDF of the entire essay, click The Re-Emergence of Schelling: Philosophy in a Time of Emergency. The difference between Hegel’s and Schelling’s system of philosophy  Early in his philosophical career while still a high school teacher in Nuremberg,116 Hegel suggested that, as a schoolmaster of philosophy, he is committed to the belief that philosophy…

  • [Rough Draft] “The Re-Emergence of Schelling” – Literature review

    Again, sorry for the lack of italics. I don’t know how to paste from Pages while keeping the formatting. For a PDF of the document (with italics in tact!), click: The Re-Emergence of Schelling: Philosophy in a Time of Emergency. Literature review This section assesses the reasons for the contemporary resurgence of scholarly interest in Schelling.…

  • “The Re-Emergence of Schelling: Philosophy in a Time of Emergency” (2014)

    Preface The philosophy of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854) cannot be adequately grasped in abstraction from the spirit that animated his individual personality. While he spent his philosophical career striving to realize the Absolute system, he did so in full recognition of the fact that the Absolute is not finally a logical system, but a…

  • Rough draft of research paper on Schelling’s Contemporary Re-Emergence

    I’ve just finished the rough draft of a comprehensive exam on the context of Schelling’s thought and the reasons for his contemporary resurgence (a list of recent scholarship). The most difficult section to write was definitely the one on the difference between he and Hegel’s approaches. I didn’t want to caricature Hegel, but nor did…

  • Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology

    I’m in the middle of writing a long essay on Schelling and the resurgence of interest in his work of late, at least in the Anglophone world. I’ll be posting the essay in installments as I finish each section. For now, here is Jerry Day, from his book on Schelling’s influence on Eric Voegelin, describing…

  • The Colorado Shooting: Why it’s Time for Critics of “The Newsroom” To Lay Down Their Guns

    Originally posted on Reel Change: NOTE: This post has been updated from its original content. Critics of HBO’s “The Newsroom” – and there have been many of them – have chided the show’s writer-creator Aaron Sorkin for being too preachy. These criticisms have come from both the right and the left. The Wall Street Journal…

  • Schelling on Nature, Humanity, and God (re-reading Iain Hamilton Grant)

    Last year, some colleagues and I at CIIS participated in a panel discussion on Speculative Realism called “Here Comes Everything.” My lecture drew primarily upon Grant’s text Philosophies of Nature After Schelling (2006). This summer, I’ve been doing research for a comprehensive exam on the recent resurgence of Schellingian philosophy (HERE is my reading list). I…

  • A Long-Expected Journey

    Originally posted on Becca Tarnas: So it begins… This is the first day of a long-awaited journey, one that is two years in planning, and will at last be embarked upon. Two people, a Ford Focus, 18 days, and 6,000 miles (at least!) This morning Matt and I depart upon our cross-country road trip from…

  • Schelling’s Pantheogenic Naturphilosophie

    In his bok The Origin and Goal of History, Karl Jaspers’ claims that Schelling “clung with complete conviction to the theory that the creation of the world took place six thousand years ago, whereas today no one doubts the bone finds which prove man’s life on earth to have gone on far more than a hundred…

  • Philosophy of the Human in Whitehead and Schelling (response to Knowledge-Ecology)

    Adam/Knowledge-Ecology just posted a fine reflection on the place of the human in nature. Below is my response. I think there is an elephant in the room here. Just before the line you quote in Modes of Thought, Whitehead says “In mankind, the dominant dependence on bodily functioning seems still there. And yet the life of…

  • “From Kant to Schelling to Process Metaphysics: On the Way to Ecological Civilization” by Arran Gare

    I stumbled upon this great essay on Schelling and process metaphysics recently published in the journal Cosmos and History by Prof. Arran Gare. He really makes it clear how compatible Schelling’s Naturphilosophie is with Whitehead’s cosmological scheme. “From Kant to Schelling to Process Metaphysics: On the Way to Ecological Civilization” Here is a sample: Schelling’s work…

  • Jonathon Keats: What the World Needs is More Curious Amateurs

    Jonathon Keats: What the World Needs is More Curious Amateurs.   Or as the poet John Keats described it, we need more people capable of “negative capability.”

  • What is Philosophy? – A walk in the woods.

    Contrapoints made this video to open up his history of philosophy series. Here is my response.

  • Thoughts on Tim Morton on the Ecological Emergency

    HERE is a recent interview of Tim Morton I found over on Knowledge-Ecology. I’ve made some notes while listening: I absolutely love what he is saying. Really, I dig it. His ontology has style, and I don’t just mean he is rhetorically skilled and so persuasive to us as subjectivities, I mean he has tapped…

  • Individuals and the Whole in Process Ontology

    This is a response to some recent posts on process philosophy in America by Jason/Immanent Transcendence. The status of individuals in a process ontology is something I’ve explored in connection with Harman’s object-oriented ontology (HERE and HERE). Harman points to process ontologists like Whitehead and says they ignore the irreducible individuality of things (as withdrawn…

  • Esalen and CIIS, a Conversation with Michael Murphy and Robert McDermott

    President Emeritus Robert McDermott and creator of Esalen Michael Murphy in conversation on June 1st at CIIS in San Francisco.  

  • The Poetics of Cosmogenesis, or Cosmopoiesis

    Jason/Immanent Transcendence has asked me to offer a Whiteheadian take on his recent posts (two examples are HERE, and, especially relevant, HERE) concerned with such ideas as purpose, process, form, time, and chance in John Dewey. Jason has also recently written about a Deweyan approach to the place of values in nature while in conversation…

  • Philosophy, society, politics and the decline of America

    Jason/Immanence Transcendence brought my attention to this critique of Graham Harman‘s Object-Oriented Ontology. The critique, written by Alexander Galloway, complains that OOO’s lack of a political dimension makes it a nonstarter as a groundwork for philosophizing in public. In today’s global context, where neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism have collided (and colluded) to bring Starbucks to Baghdad,…

  • Reflections on Physicist Lawrence Krauss and the Consolations of Philosophy

    Below is Lawrence Krauss from a recent interview in the Atlantic (Thanks to Jason/Immanent Transcendence for bringing this controversy to my attention): Krauss: …Philosophy used to be a field that had content, but then “natural philosophy” became physics, and physics has only continued to make inroads. Every time there’s a leap in physics, it encroaches on these areas that philosophers have carefully sequestered…