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

  • Nature in Whitehead, Hegel, and Schelling

    In order to correct what I fear may have been an unfair caricature of Hegel presented in some of my posts earlier this year (HERE and HERE) after reading Iain Hamilton Grant‘s Philosophies of Nature After Schelling, I’ve sought out perspectives from thinkers more sympathetic to Hegel’s approach. First on the list was the integral…

  • Cosmos, Anthropos, and Theos in Harman, Teilhard, and Whitehead

    Knowledge-Ecology has written a reflection upon finishing Graham Harman’s new book The Quadruple Object. Adam writes that “OOO is greatly enriching our sense of cosmos, whilst (somewhat) impoverishing our sense of anthropos.” I’ve had similar reservations about Harman’s anthrodecentrism (if I may diagnose it): Harman and the Special Magic of Human Knowledge. Harman’s is an ontology…

  • Imagining the Cosmos: notes on my dissertation…

    In the past year or so, the blueprint of my dissertation topic has gone through multiple iterations. Last year, while applying for my PhD studies at CIIS, I wrote a goal statement that still reflects the general theme I am envisioning. Now that I’m entering the last term of course work, I wanted to take…

  • Science, Art, Religion: The Role of Speculative Philosophy in the Adventure of Rationality

    I’ve just completed Isabelle Stengers‘ formidable but rewarding text, Thinking With Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts (2011). The final chapters concern the viability of Whitehead’s theology, specifically his articulation of the relationship between God and the World. Stengers’ asks the reader to go slowly while considering why a divine function became necessary…

  • Soul and World: Fragments written upon reading “Thinking with Whitehead” by Isabelle Stengers

    Stengers has succeeded in bringing Whitehead back to life. Whitehead’s speculative cosmology succeeds, if it does, by avoiding bifurcations between disassociated categories. Instead of placing “subjective illusion” and “objective reality” in irremediable conflict with one another; instead of separating “man” and “nature,” “mind” and “matter,” or “God” and “the World” in order to explain one…

  • Bifurcations between Bergson and Einstein

    Thanks to Adam for bringing this video to my attention. Bruno Latour speaks above about how contemporary philosophy should re-interpret the verdict of the 1922 exchange between the metaphysician Henri Bergson and the physicist Albert Einstein. He finds a re-interpretation of this debate important especially in light of the new ecological constraints upon 21st century…

  • Ethopoiesis and Eternity

    Following up on my post and Sam’s and Adam’s comments on Monday and Tuesday (6/13-15), Adam sent me a one word text message: ‘Ethopoiesis’ I have a few thoughts on this neologism I’d like to share. This word carries a complex philosophical cargo, part cultural/artistic and part natural/machinic. Ethopoiesis carries the semantic weight of both…

  • Thinking etho-ecology with Stengers and Whitehead

    I’ve been reading Stengers’ recently translated book Thinking with Whitehead (2011) with an eye to developing an eco-ontology, or ecological realism. Adam and I are still in the process of searching for an adequate characterization for this project, but in nuce, we want to untangle the ethical, epistemological, cosmological, and ontological knot that is the ecological…

  • Cosmotheanthropic Realism: On Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” (2011)

    Terrence Malick studied philosophy at Harvard before being awarded a Rhodes scholarship. After a short time at Oxford, he left without finishing his dissertation. His adviser there was the behaviorist Gilbert Ryle. Reportedly, he left Oxford because of a disagreement with Ryle concerning how to understand the concept of the “world” in 19th and 20th…

  • Beyond the Bifurcation of Nature

    I’ve been struggling through Isabelle Stengers‘ newly translated book Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts (2011). The first quarter of the book focuses primarily on Whitehead’s first explicitly philosophical text, The Concept of Nature (1920), in which he sets for himself the task of avoiding an account of nature based in…

  • The Myth of Eliminativism

    Tim Morton drew my attention to this post about the demise of the humanities due to neoliberal economic policies grounded in the supposed truth of neurocomputational eliminativism. I agree with Morton’s appraisal, that the eliminative materialism that seems to be gaining favor among philosophers (like Ray Brassier) offers little in the way of new theoretical…

  • The Veil of Isis and the Meaning of Withdrawal

    “A good maxim,” writes Nietzsche, is too hard for the teeth of time, and all the millennia cannot succeed in consuming it, though it always serves as nourishment…(Human, All Too Human). Pierre Hadot, in his essay on the history of the idea of nature, The Veil of Isis (2006), leads his reader through 2,500 years…

  • Process Ontology in Schelling and Whitehead

    In preparation for a larger speculative project, I’ve been reading a translation by Judith Norman of the 2nd draft of Schelling’s unfinished manuscript entitled Ages of the World (1813). I’ve been intrigued by Schelling’s philosophies of nature and freedom for several years, but never had the time to do a closer study. Iain Hamilton Grant‘s…

  • Towards an Eco-Ontology

    Adam over at Knowledge Ecology has posted about the need for a pluralistic ontology in thinking the differences between nature and culture. I’ve copied my response to him below: ——————————————— Another stimulating post, Adam. I love the thinkers you are bringing into conversation. I have not yet read Carolan’s essay, but I have a few…

  • Feelings Matter because Motion Emotes.

    ConferenceReport (or Fred in the meat-world) likes to take his visuoaudiences on a walk through metaphors of mind. In this video, he draws on the work of the cognitive scientists George Lakoff, Thomas Nagel, Antonio Damasio, Thomas Metzinger, and William James, among others. I’m most interested in what Fred has to say about the relationship between consciousness and…

  • Rudolf Steiner on the Evolution of Consciousness and the Alphabet

    Here are the first few paragraphs of a lecture by Steiner (given in Dornach, 18th December 1921) on the relationship between alphabetic technologies and the evolution of Greek and Roman consciousness: For some time we have been occupied with gaining a more accurate knowledge of Man’s relation to the universe, and today we would like to supplement our…

  • Ecology of Mind, Economy of Play, Energy of Delight

    Meaning is infinite because language is indefinitely recursive, because “world” is a word, such that “word” has no world to refer to. Words refer only to themselves, except Yours, your Name, who is the Word but mustn’t know it. “Reality” is a word referring to a set of alphanumeric-audiovisual symbols inherited from an ancient alchemical cult. Sense is infinite…

  • Stories of Life, Tails of Spirit

    A set of videos exchanged this week between Fred (ConferenceReport on YouTube) and myself about the use-value of terms like “life,” “consciousness,” and “matter” in philosophical and scientific discourse:

  • G. K. Chesterton on the Human Stranger

    “The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being; almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth. In all sobriety, he has much more of the external appearance of one bringing alien habits from another land than of a mere growth of this one. He has an unfair advantage…

  • Post-Secular Spirituality

    Michael over at Archive Fire recently linked to a published essay by a friend and former colleague at CIIS, Annick Hedlund-de Witt. Annick researches the way changing world-views in America and Europe stand to influence–whether positively, negatively, or not at all–the push for a more sustainable approach to development around the world. She focuses specifically on spiritual imaginaries (my…

  • Ethologies of Death

    Adam over at Knowledge Ecology posted some thoughts in response to my last blog on the concept of Life. I suggested that one way of distinguishing the human from other kinds of being is that we can contemplate abstractions like life-in-itself, and therefore also, death-in-itself. Adam writes the following: I think this is worth discussing…