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

  • Rupert Sheldrake and Morphic Fields at Schumacher

    My time at Schumacher is drawing to a close, and the whole experience has been quite formative for me. Preparing meals, washing dishes, and weeding the garden provided unexpected opportunities to reflect upon the value of simple work with others. This morning I spent about an hour in the kitchen chopping the stems off about…

  • 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…

  • 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:…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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.…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • “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…

  • My Notes on Jonael Schickler’s “Metaphysics as Christology”

    The following are my notes on Jonael Schickler’s Metaphysics as Christology: An Odyssey of the Self from Kant and Hegel to Steiner. Introduction Steiner’s esoteric metaphysics presents a potential resolution to the opposition between Kantian transcendentalism and Hegelian dialecticism (p. xix). Hegel’s logical dimension remains ontologically underdetermined as it fails to adequately respond to Kant’s…

  • European Preview

    The sky is growing bluer as my plane races eastward to greet the rising sun. Below me is the Gulf of Mexico, its sparkling surface now marred by slicks of oil that continue to gush from ruptured pipes along the seafloor. It won’t be long now before the orange glow rimming the horizon is pierced…

  • Materialism and Imagination

    Art is now the last safe harbor for the expression of spiritual longing in our increasingly materialistic civilization. The supposedly self-evident discoveries of scientific investigation into the nature of the physical universe have convinced most who know of them that everything which exists is a giant machine governed by measurable, generally deterministic laws. Even our…

  • Sonnets to Orpheus (I, 26) by Rainer Maria Rilke

  • Goal Statement for my PhD Studies at CIIS

    As a result of the past two years of study toward a MA degree in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness, my mind has been so stretched—both inward into the depths of my own soul and outward into the endless expanse of the cosmos—that distilling a specific dissertation topic for my PhD research will be extremely difficult.…

  • Self-consciousness and Philosophy

    “You, all-powerful, are my all, at one with me before I can be at one with you.” –St. Augustine (Confessions). Self-consciousness is that with which I must begin… but I will confess, I cannot yet be certain even of my own beginning. It remains a mystery to me, sometimes even a horror. I meet the…

  • Consciousness of Science, post at PZ Myers’ blog Pharyngula

    Link to Pharyngula …To believe self-consciousness can be accounted for in purely neurochemical terms is simply a category mistake. Empirical science presupposes self-consciousness, otherwise scientific reasoning would not be possible. Science cannot explain self-consciousness mechanistically without calling into question its own privileged epistemic status. Natural science attempting to explain consciousness in terms of brain mechanisms…

  • Intimations of an Integral God: A lecture at CIIS

    Slide 1: Prior to coming to CIIS, while studying philosophy as an undergraduate, I always had the sense of being somewhat smothered. As my studies continued, and my understanding matured, I realized why. I was being trained to think in the shadow of Immanuel Kant. [Show Crit. of Pure Reason- You’ve all read this, right?]…

  • Jonael Schickler, Christology, and Rudolf Steiner

    So the book arrived today: Schickler’s dissertation, “Metaphysics as Christology: An Odyssey of the Self from Kant and Hegel to Steiner.” The author’s argument is as optimistic and uplifting as his own fate is tragic. Just days after finishing the manuscript, Schickler was killed in the Potters Bar rail accident in 2002 near Hertfordshire in…