Author: Matthew David Segall
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Knowing and Being: philosophy as poetry, learning through expressing
To know the world, the mouth must first make words. I speak, therefore I am and can know the world. Being conscious is a poetic act, a participatory co-creation of life and all that is. That it is co-creationary also makes being conscious a process of discovery. The human universe is populated by countless centers…
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Soul-making
“Poetry is soul-making,” says Keats. Mere words make only sound, but poetry makes worlds, unwinding the coiled creativity of God’s voluminous loom to weave again the stories of angels and earthlings. Like lightning, ideas are made that strike the ground of our corporeal being, and from the tired dust of ages sprouts new life, awash…
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An Anonymous American in Amsterdam
For those who read my original itinerary in Europe, posted here in June, I should first explain why I ended up in Amsterdam instead of Florence and Rome. There are several reasons, one geographic, another economic, and a third intuitive. The geographic has to do with my being unable to switch my flight back to…
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Celestial and Sexual: The Antipodes of Philosophy
First, do yourself a philosophical favor and watch the film “Agora” (2009). Now that you’ve seen it, I’m not worried about playing spoiler. Ok, even if you haven’t had a chance to watch it yet, it’s historical fiction, so just pretend I’m refreshing your memory concerning the social and spiritual upheaval in the 4th century…
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Prophecy without profit
The prophet is beside himself, and breathes into history the words that will not be heard but by those with silent hearts, whose longing for a world more real reminds them daily of the night that has befallen us. Illusions are paraded as truth, and the people cheer. But does not everyone know with ever-increasing…
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The Spirit of Philosophy
I am passionate about philosophy not because I desire answers to arbitrary questions or explanations of abstract problems. My passion arises because life, as given–as it at first appears to my everyday consciousness–is incomplete and unaccounted for. The reason for my existence has never been self-evident, and yet discovering this reason is the prerequisite of…
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Basel on Fire
I arrived in Basel this morning after a very tiring (and very expensive) 2 days in London. I’ll return to the English capital on better terms in a few weeks before I head back to the States, but I couldn’t have been happier to leave it behind today. To make a long story short, Kel…
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Tapadh leat, Dublin.
One would think two days is hardly enough time to get to know a place, but Dublin is small and her people know how to show her off. I arrived on the 4th of July, my first abroad, to celebrate a different sort of independence. The small prop plane that flew me from Plymouth across…
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Leaving Schumacher
It’s raining for the first time in two weeks here at the college, but the soft patter on the old roof provides the perfect ambiance for reflecting upon my stay. We had our second bonfire last night to commemorate our time together. Each of us threw a small pine cone into the flame to signify an…
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Fragile Gaia: a gift for God?
“Truth, and beauty, and goodness, are but different faces of the same All.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson I’ve just returned from the lawn outside the postern here at Schumacher. Sean Kelly lead a discussion circle with several of us that was intended to be a space for us to reflect on how the knowledge we’d internalized…
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Gaian Consciousness
For all ancient cultures, the earth was an all encompassing reality. Hesiod writes that the heavens themselves were birthed out of Gaia, “the steadfast base of all things,” providing her with a sacred canopy spotted with stars. But the moon landings made a reality what had already been true for much of the modern period:…
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The Planetary Era
The title of the course I’m participating in at Schumacher College is “Gaia and the Evolution of Consciousness.” Biologist Stephan Harding and philosopher Sean Kelly are leading us through the scientific and cultural history relevant to these issues. Another biologist, Rupert Sheldrake, will join us for a few days next week to share his view…
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Welcome to London…
…where the wifi’s free and the weather’s not half as good as Miami. I’ve arrived! Well, sort of. I’m stuck waiting at Paddington Station for my 1pm train to Totnes. I didn’t get any sleep on the flight, but I did watch two decent movies: finally saw “2012,” which was entertaining, but I was over…
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Pushing back against Positivism
I felt like giving my two cents over at Pharyngula again. My response is copied below. I fear I repeat myself too much, but I just can’t help offering philosophical resistance whenever I come across scientism. Humanity has no future if meaning continues to be reduced to the measurable and culture to the technologically useful.…
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Christopher Alexander’s Science of Imagination
I’m six chapters into The Luminous Ground, and Christopher Alexander has already convinced me that living architecture has the potential to profoundly alter the way we relate to the universe. A building composed of what Alexander calls “living centers” literally opens a window to a deeper dimension of reality. We do not see these openings…
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A comment to Hyper Tiling concerning anthropocentrism
You can find Fabio’s blog here: http://hypertiling.wordpress.com/ Fabio, You’ve succeeded in getting me interested in speculative realism and object-oriented philosophy. Kantian skepticism is perhaps the main obstacle I must overcome in my dissertation, which loosely described is an argument for a more richly textured ontology, such that any full accounting of reality must include its…
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Public Philosophy (via Hyper tiling)
Here are some really well developed (and highly agreeable!) thoughts by a graduate student in the UK (researching the science v. religion culture war) about the place of philosophy in society and academia. I just discovered his blog and have a lot more reading to do. Give it a look. On Wednesday, I attended the…
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The short story of a sophianic moonlight friend.
There is one who kneels me, who pulls me to the Sky beneath the Earth. Around her, my heart is heavy with the gravity of love. Love, like a wound that needs forever to bleed in order to heal; a union of suffering and bliss that asks for no more than a brief kiss. In…
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My response to ‘Why Did God Create Atheists?’ @ AlterNet
Why Did God Create Atheists? | Belief | AlterNet. …and my comment posted as a response: I believe Jesus answers some of these questions when he says that “the kingdom of heaven is within you,” but that many do not yet have the ears to hear or the eyes to see what this means. Of…
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“The Luminous Ground” by Christopher Alexander
Christopher Alexander is an architect, but in order to build living structures resonant with human feeling, he had also to become a cosmologist. “A person who adheres to classical 19th- or 20th-century beliefs about matter,” writes Alexander, “will not be able, fully, to accept the revisions in building practice that I have proposed, because the…
Footnotes2Plato 