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

  • Audio from “Here Comes Everything”: A Speculative Realism Panel @ CIIS (4/8)

    Conference put on by the Interdisciplinary Dialogue Forum, a student group in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at CIIS. The History of Access: An Introduction to the Speculative Turn – Sam Mickey and Adam Robbert Ganga – River, Goddess, Thing – Elizabeth McAnally The Astonishing Depths of Things – Sam Mickey Objects in Action: Promiscuous Applications of…

  • “Here Comes Everything” Speculative Realism Panel summary (via Knowledge-Ecology)

    Adam Robbert has written a nice summary of the panel discussion last week (4/8) on Speculative Realism. I’ve pasted it below. For the audio from the event, click HERE. Here are a few reflections on last Fridays event “Here Comes Everything: An Introduction to Speculative Realism.” Video of the event will be posted later today (hopefully!). The…

  • Object as subject-superject, or why Harman is wrong about Whitehead

    Graham Harman and Alfred North Whitehead have a lot in common, but they differ in what they say about substance as a metaphysical category. I think Harman overstates this difference. Whitehead suggests “the whole universe consists of elements disclosed in the experiences of subjects” (Process and Reality, p. 166). This multiple disclosure of the One…

  • Schelling and the Transcendental Abyss of Nature

    “What is essential in science is movement; deprived of this vital principle, its assertions die like fruit taken from the living tree.” –Schelling, The Ages of the World ——————————– The Copernican Revolution had the exoteric effect of throwing the Earth into motion, decentering human consciousness in the Cosmos. We, like the other planets, became a…

  • Phenomenology and Reality, Philosophy and Nature

    Professor Corey Anton’s video about the impossibility of speculative realism, of an account of nature that doesn’t already include consciousness: My response, ending with an excerpt from Schelling‘s “Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature” :

  • Speculative Realism @ CIIS: “Here Comes Everything”

    [For a text review and audio recording of the presentations, click HERE.] Here Comes Everything:An Introduction to Speculative Realism Featuring Keynote Speaker Professor Jacob Sherman at 830pm Food and beverages will be provided! When: Friday, April 8th , 5:30-9:30pm (with a break at 7:15) Where: The California Institute of Integral Studies, Room 210 5:30pm –…

  • Böhme and Schelling’s Cosmogenetic Theology

    I’m getting to the end of Iain Hamilton Grant‘s book Philosophies of Nature After Schelling. Though Grant doesn’t mention the influence, Schelling‘s search for the “unthinged” in nature was significantly aided by the cosmogony of German mystic Jakob Böhme (1575-1624). The following is an excerpt from a presentation I gave last year on Böhme. I hope to develop…

  • Factish God(s)

    The following is my comment posted in response to a blog by Sam Mickey about the potential of an object-oriented theology. Postsecularity might also be termed “the After Age.” Perhaps the “end of history” is the beginning of an integral phase of civilization, where the transparent permeability of eternity and time, spirit and matter, reason…

  • Schelling’s Naturephilosophy and Hegel’s Exclusion of Geology

    Will commented on “Schelling’s Geocentric Realism” to defend the position of Nature in Hegel’s Logic from its realist inversion. I wanted to make Iain Hamilton Grant‘s position on the matter available (from “Schellingianism & Postmodernity: Towards a Materialist Naturphilosophie“): As a shorthand for his synthetic programme, as opposed to the Hegelian system as to mechanical…

  • Husserl and Schelling, from Phenomenology to Naturephilosophy

    A video by emblemOFbeing about Husserl‘s phenomenology as the final resolution of all antithetical schools of philosophy.   And my response questioning Husserl’s correlationism and suggesting Schelling’s geocentric realism:

  • The Psychoanalysis of Philosophy: Towards the Eroticization of Logos

    The following is an essay written for a course called “post-secular Jewish emancipatory thought,” taught by Richard Shapiro in the Social and Cultural Anthropology department at CIIS. ———————————————————————- In May of 2010, the Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities at Middlesex University, Ed Esche, informed the philosophy department that its funding had been…

  • Schelling’s Geocentric Realism

    I’ve been reading Iain Hamilton Grant‘s Philosophies of Nature After Schelling. He laments that most commentators treat Schelling as either a biocentric vitalist or a logocentric idealist. These characterizations ignore the extent to which his naturephilosophy corrects the eliminative idealism of Fichte’s and Hegel’s systems (which made nature’s externality entirely determined by intelligence) by grounding…

  • The Ears, Eyes, and Mind of the Wor(l)d

    What is language, and how did it evolve? The flurry of recent posts concerned with media ecology and the way the content of philosophical thinking depends upon the form in which it is expressed has redirected my attention to the significance of the Word. I think grammatically, which is to say that my alphabetic consciousness,…

  • Media Ecology and the Blogosphere

    Knowledge Ecology blogged earlier today about the difference between blogging and publishing books, which has become an issue of contention within “the speculative realist movement,” so called, since Ray Brassier’s disparaging comment in an interview last year. Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, and Levi Bryant all chimed in with responses. Below is my response: In light…

  • Thinking and Sensing, Space and Time

    Philosophy and science can be distinguished: the former is primarily concerned with thinking, the latter with sensing. This distinction is superficial, however, since there can be no pure science or pure philosophy; no pure concept or pure intuition. Phenomenologically, what exists is an interpenetration of cognitive action and carnal reaction, a vast network of felt…

  • Owen Barfield on the inscape of the world.

    “When we speak… about consciousness, about the point at which consciousness arose and so forth, we are speaking not merely about human nature, as we call it, but also about nature itself. When we study consciousness historically, contrasting perhaps what men perceive and think now with what they perceived and thought at some period in…

  • Bruno Latour approaching an Object-Oriented Ontology

    The following is another exchange with friend and colleague Adam Robbert in response to an essay by Bruno Latour. First, a short excerpt from the article “On Interobjectivity“: Social worlds remain flat at all points, without there being any folding that might permit a passage from the “micro” to the “macro.” For example the traffic control room…

  • The Spirit of Intrahuman Dialogue: A Meditation

    The following is a short personal reflection written for a course on inter-faith dialogue with Prof. Jacob Sherman. ————————– “Any interreligious and interhuman dialogue, any exchange among cultures,” writes Panikkar, “has to be preceded by an intrareligious and intrahuman dialogue, an internal conversation within the person” (p. 310, 1979). My personal interest in religion, broadly…

  • Teilhard de Chardin and the Christ-Cosmos Correlation

    Speculative realism has emerged out of a phenomenological tradition that originally sought to provide a transcendental defense of human existence against any scientific reduction to the merely natural. Phenomenology succeeds in this defense (on some accounts) to the extent that it is able to convincingly reduce the objects of “nature” to their human correlates. Pierre…

  • …the meaning of disaster…

    Some of my thoughts concerning the still unfolding tragedy in Japan… —————– I take up philosophy largely to defend meaning and cosmos from the nihilism and chaos at the root of much contemporary thinking. But I am reminded by this catastrophe that the earth’s order and harmony is proved by an exception: ruptures in nature’s…

  • Whitehead: Aesthetics as First Philosophy

    I’ve jumped from Meillassoux‘s After Finitude to reading Steven Shaviro‘s book on Whitehead, Kant, and Deleuze Without Criteria (2009). A few thoughts have occured to me… Whitehead’s philosophy of organism possesses an immunity to post-Kantian skepticism, since it arises out of a radically embodied characterization of sensory experience. Empiricism, for Whitehead, does not mean paying…