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

  • Speculative Philosophy and Incarnationalism in Whitehead and Meillassoux

    I’ve just finished Whitehead’s lectures on the philosophy of religion, published as Religion in the Making (1926). He intended these lectures to “show the same way of thought” displayed in his lectures a year earlier, published as Science and the Modern World, only this time directed at religion. The last several thoughts expressed by Whitehead…

  • Corporations are egregores (reflections on #Occupy protests)

    Yesterday, I had to decide whether I’d go downtown to protest, or go to class. I ended up going to class. Why? I was confused, and honestly a bit deflated, by ontological questions. Where is Chase? Where is Goldman Sachs? Where is Bank of America? These entites are not located in downtown SF, nor even on…

  • The Cosmological Powers

    This is a presentation I eventually gave during one of Brian Swimme‘s courses at CIIS. Watching it again now, I detect thinly disguised Christian apologetics in what I’ve said. That doesn’t necessarily make it bad cosmology.

  • Aesthethics: Loving the Beauty of Goodness

    I’m still in the planning phase of my dissertation on the ontology of Imagination, and as such am working to ferret out the most interesting aspects of my chosen site of inquiry. My research is focused on the ontology of Imagination, since my guiding thesis is that any perception of or reflection upon reality depends…

  • Social Imaginaries, Cosmopolitics, Initiation, and Burning Man: A Lecture at Esalen

  • On Oral and Literate Consciousness, from “Becoming Animal” by David Abram

    “While persons brought up within literate culture often speak about the natural world, indigenous, oral peoples sometimes speak directly to that world, acknowledging certain animals, plants, and even landforms as expressive subjects with whom they might find themselves in conversation. Obviously these other beings do not speak with a human tongue; they do not speak…

  • Taste the Sky, Swallow the Horizon

      I screamed so loud, I could taste the sky. The stars became buds of light on my tongue, And the clusters of galaxies Poured into the tangled sinews of my brain. I became one of billions of sons, All circling the heavens In praise of our life. And yet, I was alone; My father…

  • Evan Thompson on Autopoiesis and Enactivism

    I’ve been fascinated by the development of the enactive paradigm since I read The Embodied Mind back in college at UCF, where I studied cognitive science with Prof. Mason Cash and Prof. Shaun Gallagher. I feel fortunate that I was able to study cognitive science and the philosophy of mind in a program where the phenomenologies…

  • Integrating Panpsychism and Eliminativism in Processual Panentheism

    I’ve just watched a good chunk of Shaviro’s lecture at OOOIII. I agree with his premise concerning the fork in the philosophical road between eliminativism and panexperientialism created by speculative realism’s anti-correlationism [See Adam over at Knowledge-Ecology’s recent post for a refreshingly novel perspective concerning the supposed courageous soberness of eliminativism]. There is no middle…

  • The Ethics and Esotericism of Eating

    Bourdain says the analogy between animal and human flesh (PETA: “you eat cow, eh? so would you eat human meat, too?”) is the last irrational wail of the animal rights activist. His response: “If I were two weeks out on the life boat, hell yeah I would!” Gill then makes an especially poignant response about…

  • “We Scientists…” by John Cleese

  • Schelling, Darwin, and the Romantic Conception of Life

    I’m not yet midway through a thick tome by Prof. Robert J. Richards at the University of Chicago entitled The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (2002). It is soaked in personal details, the trysts and tears of the friends and lovers responsible for generating a literary and philosophical movement in…

  • “Coleridge and the Science of the Mind” by Chris Rudge

    I’m enthralled with this essay by doctoral student at the University of Sydney, Chris Rudge. It opens up precisely the sort of discussion I want to build on in my own dissertation. The first few paragraphs: Not a great deal of literary historical scholarship has been devoted to examining the connections between science during the eighteenth…

  • Response to Knowledge-Ecology about Dawkins, Evolution, and Creationism

    Knowledge-Ecology recently posted his lament about the scientific ignorance of GOP presidential candidate Gov. Perry, who denies both evolution and climate change. Adam also mentioned his support for Richard Dawkins’ rebuttal. I might also count Dawkins as a political ally, but not as a cosmological ally. And since I, like Adam, struggle to avoid separating…

  • 10 years later…

    An audio/visual collage, from the days of Wilson when sheep roamed the White House lawn to the days of Bush, when politics had already been fully transformed into pageantry.

  • Follow me to the desert, my soul.

    Follow me to the desert, My soul.   Sing with me Until I lose my mind; Dance with me, Until my body unwinds, And my feet no longer touch the ground, And all that’s left of time Is the sound of wind shaping sand.   Build with me a temple, My soul.   Share with…

  • The Democratization of Initiation at Burning Man

    As religious scholar Lee Gilmore argues in her book Theater in a Crowded Fire: Ritual and Spirituality at Burning Man, the annual Burning Man festival in Black Rock City, NV provides that growing sector of the population who identify as “spiritual but not religious” with an opportunity to cultivate the communal ethos and participate in…

  • Cosmopolitical Reflections upon leaving for Black Rock City

    Since the dominant narratives bringing forth the ongoing misadventure of industrial capitalism fail to properly situate the human soul in its actual time and place, any serious inquiry into the nature of our individual and collective situation must begin with an act of counter memory: we must ask afresh in each generation, who are we,…

  • Žižek on the worldlessness of global capitalism

    He nails it (from a recent column in the London Review of Books about the UK riots): “Alain Badiou has argued that we live in a social space which is increasingly experienced as ‘worldless’: in such a space, the only form protest can take is meaningless violence. Perhaps this is one of the main dangers of…

  • The Divine Function in Whitehead: Not Your Grandpa’s Occasionalism

    In my last post in response Bob Woodard/Naught Thought‘s thoughts concerning the ontological fuzziness of process philosophy, I referred to Whitehead as an “occasionalist” without explaining exactly what I meant. After reading Steven Shaviro/The Pinicchio Theory‘s insightful commentary on the function of God in Whitehead’s cosmology, as well as Levi Bryant/Larval Subject‘s dismissive opinion that Whitehead is “a…

  • In Defense of Wonder: A response to Naught Thought on Whitehead’s Philosophy of Dawn

    I cannot, without much hesitation, identify myself as either a “prickly” or a “gooey” philosopher. It depends on who my interlocutors are. If I am in a philosophical conversation with, say, a professional biochemist with a reductionistic orientation, my attempt to wipe away and retrace the horizons of their world will inevitably come off as vague, pretentious,…