Author: Matthew David Segall
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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 –…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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:
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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…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…
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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…
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Meillassoux and Post-Secular Philosophy
“So long as we believe that there must be a reason why what is, is the way it is, we will continue to fuel superstition, which is to say, the belief that there is an ineffable reason underlying all things” (After Finitude, p. 82). This belief, according to Meillassoux, is logically unnecessary, since there is…
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