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

  • 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 Harman points to process ontologists like Whitehead and says they ignore the irreducible individuality of things (as withdrawn…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…

  • Tim Morton lecturing on object-oriented poetry.

    Romanticism 20: Keats and Shelley and OOO. I’m reminded of an earlier reflection on Whitehead’s and Schelling’s process ontology of organism and the principle of non-contradiction. Keat’s Ode on a Grecian Urn.

  • Deacon’s Incomplete Nature (con’t.)

    A week and a half ago, Jason/Immanent Transcendence posted the first volley of our summer reading group on chapter zero of Terence Deacon’s Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (2012). In that chapter, Deacon introduced the key conceptual locus of the book, what he calls the absential features of living and psychic systems: “phenomena whose existence is determined…

  • Reflections on the Astrality of Materiality

    Levi Bryant/Larval Subjects has a few new post up (HERE and HERE) about the contingently constructed concept of “nature” and about his own flavor of monistic materialism. Bryant and I have argued in the past about his materialism and its lack of formal and final causality. I’ve been claiming that ideas and purposes are real,…

  • Reading “Incomplete Nature” by Terrence Deacon

    Jason/Immanent Transcendence has written the first response for our summer reading group. Chapter 0 of Terrence Deacon‘s new book Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter introduces what he calls the “absential” features of the universe. According to Deacon, the defining property of every living or psychic system is that its causes are conspicuously absent from the…

  • Heading to Pyramid Lake for Symbiosis Gathering

    I’m off tomorrow to Pyramid Lake, NV to attend the 3rd Symbiosis Gathering. I attended the last gathering in 2009 just outside Yosemite. Here are some images from that event: It’s a dazzling mix of art, music, and culture all put together by two graduates of CIIS, Karen and Kevin KoChen. This year we’ll have…

  • reading list of recent Schelling scholarship

    I’ll be working on a comprehensive examination this summer on the recent resurgence of Schelling in continental philosophy. Jason Wirth recently published a short article on this resurgence. Below is the beginnings of  a reading list for the comp. exam. My goal is to focus on contemporary scholarship (last 10-15 years), but a slightly older…

  • The Power of Adjectives: Two Poems on Imagination by Patrick Lane and P. K. Page

    “Albino Pheasants” (1977) by Patrick Lane  At the bottom of the field where thistles throw their seeds and poplars grow from cotton into trees in a single season I stand among the weeds. Fenceposts hold each other up with sagging wire. Here no man walks except in wasted time. Men circle me with cattle, cars…

  • [final draft] Poetic Imagination in the Speculative Philosophies of Plato, Schelling, and Whitehead

    Poetic Imagination in the Speculative Philosophies of Plato, Schelling, Whitehead The Garden of Eden and Expulsion from the Garden by Thomas Cole “I am convinced that the supreme act of reason, because it embraces all ideas, is an aesthetic act; and that only in beauty are truth and goodness akin.–The philosopher must possess as much…

  • Whitehead’s Experiential Universe (a response to Archive Fire)

    Michael posted another fine response to me yesterday. I have Process and Reality in hand, and will quote a bit in a minute. Alfred North Whitehead left us a cosmological scheme, not a complete system. His scheme aims for experiential coherence, not explanatory completion. “Explanation,” as modern (i.e., Cartesian) science came to understand it, is only…

  • “black bloc” anarchists strike again…

    Last fall, I expressed my frustrations with the “black bloc” tactics of some anarchists after attending the otherwise successful General Strike in Oakland (HERE and HERE). Now they are at it again, only this time in San Francisco’s Mission district. Across the country in NYC, there have been reports of white powder being sent to…

  • Fragments of a Romantic Theory of Evolution

    Darwin is supposed to have discovered something nowadays called “evolution” and to have laid to rest something nowadays called “creationism.” But if this is so, what are we to make of the theories of Schelling and Goethe in Germany, and of Coleridge in England, articulated several decades earlier than he? Their Romantic conception of the…

  • Asking Terrence Deacon about Whitehead’s Reformed Platonism

    A few weeks back, Jason/Immanent Transcendence asked me if I’d like to start a reading group with him this summer for Terrence Deacon‘s new book. A few days later, I found out he’d be lecturing in San Francisco… I was impressed and hope to encourage more of you to join our reading/discussion group! I’ve transcribed the…

  • Question for my readers…

    WordPress has offered to allow me to place ads on my page in order to bring in a little revenue for my traffic. It’s tough to say how much I’d actually make until I try it, but as a graduate student, every little bit helps. The thing is, I’m at bit uneasy about mixing marketing…

  • “Hymn to the Sacred Body of the Universe” by Drew Dellinger

    Drew Dellinger.