Author: Matthew David Segall
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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“We Scientists…” by John Cleese
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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…
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“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…
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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…
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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.
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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The Universe as a Work of Art: Images of the Cosmos in Plato, Descartes, and Kepler
In his lecture series become book, Art as Experience (1934), John Dewey defines imagination, not as a specific faculty alongside others, but as “that which holds all other elements in solution” (p. 275). Imagination, according to Dewey, is a uniquely human power, rendering experience conscious through the mutually transforming fusion of old meanings with new…
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Emerson on being a scholar
“A mechanic is driven by his work all day, but it ends at night; it has an end. But the scholar’s work has none. That which he has learned is that there is much more to be learned. He feels only his incompetence. A thousand years, tenfold, a hundredfold his faculties, would not suffice: the…
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Terence McKenna on Anthropogenesis
Terence_McKenna
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Levi Bryant on the Role of Love in Philosophy
Bryant posted a great piece on textual transference and the role of love in learning. He has succeeded in making me wonder what it is exactly that gives ideas their alluring personalities. How is it that sympathy and charisma have such an effect in the world, while cold-hard facts and rationally deduced truth seem to…
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The Role of Imagination in the Science of the Stars
Is the history of science a continuous progression from less to more accurate theories of physical phenomena? Or, as Thomas Kuhn suggested, is its history characterized by a discontinuous series of paradigm shifts? In the latter case, gradual “progress” occurs only locally within established theoretical frameworks until, through the sudden imaginative leap of a genius…
Footnotes2Plato 