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

  • Meister Eckhart and the Core of the Soul

    For a little more than a week now, I’ve been engaging with Graham Harman‘s object-oriented approach to philosophy. I’m intrigued, but not yet convinced by his tactics. I still have questions about access, about epistemology. How do I know anything about mind-independent objects if their essence remains infinitely hidden? I’m forced to rely upon analogy, the most…

  • Metaphor and the Allure of Objects

    I’ve just finished Harman‘s chapters on Metaphor and Humor in Guerrilla Metaphysics. He explores the meaning-making capacities of language and laughter in the hopes that they might help account for how objects are capable of interaction despite their infinite concealment from one another. Through his explorations into Ortega y Gasset‘s ontology of metaphor and Bergson‘s account…

  • Harman and the Special Magic of Human Knowledge

    Among the most often tagged names on this blog are Rudolf Steiner and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, both of whose cosmologies privilege the position of human beings relative to other beings. The reasons for this elevation of human consciousness are complex, but in a word they issue from an intuition about selfhood. Both men dwell…

  • Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology

    I’ve just finished part one of Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things, Harman’s treatise on the relationship between the phenomenology of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Lingis and his object-oriented approach to philosophy. He is motivated by a desire to direct our attention to the things themselves, the independently existing objects of the world. It…

  • Graham Harman and James Hillman

    The following is an exchange between Adam Robbert and I about the parallels between the speculative realism of Graham Harman and the re-visioned archetypal psychology of James Hillman: Harman quoted by Adam (ellipses are used to increase continuity): “Amidst all the repetitious manifestoes and dry meta-descriptions of human consciousness, we also find the works of…

  • A Random Fragment on the Philosophy of Biology

    Randomness is a concept that Dawkins usually attempts to qualify and differentiate. The process of adaptation within his neo-Darwinian paradigm of selfish genes and natural selection is not random at all–it is driven by the brute physical agency of the Natural Selector. What is random are the mutations, which he apparently conceives of as happening…

  • Visual Philosophy: Life Divine

    music “Spirits” by Ty Burhoe

  • Article on Physics and Philosophy

    Article | First Things. ” As Hawking and Mlodinow occasionally seem to recognize, far from philosophy being dead, having been killed by science, the deepest arguments in this area are not scientific but philosophical. And if the philosophical reasoning runs in the direction I have suggested, it is not only philosophy but also natural theology…

  • From Means to Ends, From Work to Play, From Number to Pneuma

    When was the day that money became an idol instead of an instrument? Was it August 15, 1971, when Nixon shocked the world by erasing the Gold Standard, thereby unilaterally making the value of the US Dollar the standard of the world economy? Or was it in the waning months of 2008, when the central banks…

  • The Decline Effect and the Scientific Method: newyorker.com

    The Decline Effect and the Scientific Method: newyorker.com. This is a big blow to big science. Apparently, the scientific method, with all its supposed statistical objectivity, is not as good at proving facts as you think. Is this just some sort of confirmation bias inherent to the process of publishing research findings, or is there…

  • Uncovering the Unconscious: Towards an Integral Psychology

    This paper was presented at the Jung Society of Monterey in 2019 (video below, unfortunately with poor audio):

  • Alchemical Distillation

    Alchemy is an ancient science, so primordial that its practice assumes a unification between art, technology, and religion. Prior to the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, these spheres were understood to be concerned with one and the same pursuit: the realization of the ends of spirit in earthly time. Distillation was never merely* a physiochemical process of…

  • Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Archetypal Analysis

    The following is a short essay for a course on archetypal astrology that I took this semester with Richard Tarnas. For those unfamiliar with the general approach, this essay by Tarnas may be of service. Also see this introduction to planetary archetypes. Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Archetypal Analysis  Tonight I walked under the stars through…

  • Final Draft: Towards a Naturalistic Panentheism

    I finished the essay on the philosophy and anthropology of religion, called “Religion and the Modern World: Towards a Naturalistic Panentheism,” that I posted last week in rough draft form. Here is the conclusion: A naturalist panentheism builds its case for the existence and importance of God not upon logical or sensori-empirical proofs. Rather, the…

  • James Hillman on the folly of reducing mind to brain.

    From The Soul’s Code by James Hillman, p. 150-154: The upshot of genetic studies leads in two (!) directions: a narrow path and a broad one. The narrow road heads toward simplistic, monogenic causes. It wants to pinpoint bits of tissue and correlate them with the vast complexity of psychic meanings. The folly of reducing…

  • Religion and the Modern World: Towards a Naturalistic Panentheism

    Religion and the Modern World: Towards a Naturalistic Panentheism “Dear people, let the flower in the meadow show you how to please God and be beautiful at the same time. —The rose does not ask why. It blooms because it blooms. It pays no attention to itself nor does it wonder if anyone sees it.”…

  • Constructive v. Critical Philosophy – Responding to Isabelle Stengers at CGU

    Once it has begun to swallow the overwhelmingly wondrous fact of existence–that there is anything at all!–philosophy can perhaps catch its breath and ask the most fundamental question: what is there? From this comes the only slightly more specific questions: What is a thing? What is an idea? Isabelle Stengers and Donna Haraway spoke on Thursday night…

  • Religion: Tony Blair v. Christopher Hitchens

    my rough transcription of some of what Blair and Hitchens had to say (not necessarily in order): Tony Blair: “Fanaticism is not confined to the sphere of religious life… My belief in Jesus Christ is not about oppression and servitude, but about finding the best way to express the human spirit… Faith is not about…

  • The Whitehead Research Project to feature Isabelle Stengers

    I’m going to listen to Isabelle Stengers and Donna Haraway speak at Claremont Graduate University tomorrow! For more information, I’ve posted a link to a new collaborative blog called “The New Knowledge Ecology” that I’m contributing to: http://thenewknowledgecology.wordpress.com/2010/12/02/the-whitehead-research-project-features-isabelle-stengers-cgu/

  • Response to Kelosophy about Science and Materialism

    Kel’s blog: http://kelosophy.blogspot.com/ Hey Kel, So I’d much rather enter a dialogue with you here than on Pharyngula. It doesn’t seem to me to be the best place to critically discuss these issues. I hope that is okay with you. You wrote “What I worry about Matthew is that this [my comment that a scientific cosmology…

  • Where did the idea of “God” come from?

    My response to this comment about “God” being a childish idea from a more primitive age. Kev @ 45, Maybe. But I understand the evolution of human consciousness a bit differently. Your theory (that God was invented in our species’ infancy by childish minds who wanted an explanation for things) seems to me to inappropriately…