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

  • People, People Everywhere

    People, people everywhere, Wake up and look around. Where are we, as people, Upon this planet, Our forgotten ground? Hear the quiet whisper of Earth Falling forever with the Moon Into the depths of the Sky Toward the Sun, never reaching The light that showers down upon us; Greet each day without shame With the…

  • A New Day on Earth

    A new age is being born from the ashes of a corpse consumed in the fire fueled by demonic dreams of animals gone made. These crazed beasts foresaw the future, and in fear of death, harnessed the rhythms of the stars to grow the seeds that fed empires and sailed ships across continental seas in…

  • Unearthing the Earth: A Phenomenological Excavation of our Being-on-the-Earth

    “Eco-phenomenology offers a methodological bridge between the natural world and our own, or rather the rediscovery of the bridge that we are and have always been but—thanks to our collective amnesia—have forgotten, almost irretrievably. It is not enough to disguise our forgetting; there is also a matter of remembering—remembering the earth.” -Charles S. Brown and…

  • Perspectives on Emerging Planetization (w/ help from William Irwin Thompson)

  • Heaven Before Birth

    Heaven is not a place or a space, but a time: A time transparent, its light spread in colors by our lithurgy of lies. Each of us perceives a limited shadow— Until the eye awakens and the scene is seen as thee. Heaven is a destiny, a purpose, not a surprise. We begin there, We…

  • Physical and Spiritual Energy

    Energy. The science of thermodynamics defines it as the ability of a physical system to do work. But in the case of a human being, how does this work relate to the conscious experience of the person performing it? That is, what is the relationship between physical and spiritual energy? We might start trying to…

  • Transpersonal Intersubjectivity

    I’ve just been reading Christopher Bache’s book “Dark Night, Early Dawn,” and he, not unlike Christian de Quincey in his book “Radical Nature,” argues that the interpersonal and collective dimensions of spiritual experience have been paid too little attention. Taking intersubjectivity into consideration requires a return to our embodied experience as beings embedded in a…

  • And Night Forgives Day

    Snowflakes unique Come to rest Upon pristine mountain peaks. Melting under the weight of gravity And a fear of the sun, Through thousands of creekbeds And rapid rivers they’ll run, Many streams returning to One ocean, An ever-stretching sea Of unchosen destiny. Back on top, As clouds prepared to drop, Perfect crystals danced Divine diamond…

  • Seeing With Teilhard: Evolution and the Within of Things

    Preface “Like the meridians as they approach the poles, science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole.” –Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, p. 30 “To see and to make others see” (p. 31)—such is the mission of Teilhard’s masterwork, The Human Phenomenon. But what is it…

  • On the Nature of Spirit: Masculinity, Femininity, and Human Identity

    The philosopher Gregory Bateson has written that the “false reification of the self is basic to the planetary ecological crisis in which we find ourselves.” The rise of Western civilization, whether intentionally or not, has fostered the development of a false identity. Many have come to experience themselves as an abstraction, a disembodied ego whose…

  • CIIS: Impressions

    Crisis. Disintegration. Rebirth. What will be born? What are we experimenting for, what problems do we need to solve? Maybe we need to start asking new questions. The old questions have lead us in circles, torn the earth to shreads. How to live together? That might be a start.

  • Information and Noise: From Order Comes Chaos

    “Pollution, like a neurotic symptom, is a form of communication. To ignore the symptom, to thrust it to the side of awareness and push it back into the collective unconscious, is to perform the same action that created the pollution, the dissonance, the neurotic symptom, in the first place. The end result of ignoring the…

  • The End of Space is the Beginning of Time

    The year is 2007, and even to say so is to deface nature. Of all Man’s stolen goods, is not time itself the tool that not even the divine dare use? History is written by men; God merely watches the show from far beyond. The ticks of Earthly time cannot be heard from eternity. To…

  • Enactivism, Integral Theory, and 21st Century Spirituality

    The following is lifted from my old blog at Gaia.com, which has since shut down. Sorry of some hypertext doesn’t work! I first want to thank everyone for participating in this symposium. The intersection of integral spirituality and enactive cognitive science is, for whatever reason, one of my passions, and I couldn’t be more excited…

  • World Made by Hand

    Prophesying the coming apocalypse has become something of an American pastime, so excuse me while I endulge in a bit of wild speculation. There is talk, and not just among conspiracy theorists, that peak oil has already been reached. I’m no expert in statistics, so I have to take other people’s word for it. So…

  • Mechanism and Meaning: Making Room for Consciousness

    The following is an exchange I had on YouTube with cosmanthony21 about the nature of “awareness.” —————————————————–cosmanthony21’s original message: Ok, lemme give it a shot. This is an interesting topic for discussion, so if you’ll humor me, Id like to write some thoughts coming to mind on the topic of awareness you had brought up.…

  • Naturalizing Representation

    I wrote this essay a few years ago for a philosophy of mental representation course. I think I would rework a few ideas looking back, but I would still defend the idea that reality is not describable from 1st or 3rd person perspectives alone. Both are part of a larger ongoing whole/part. Q: Why is…

  • She Cries Wolf

    t is not enough to merely believe in love.For it to be real, it must be born. Love as an idea is an empty promise.Love embodied is what moves minds and changes the world. Hate can change the world as well, but typically acting on one’s hatred is far easier than acting on love. The…

  • Dennett’s Dangerous Idea

    I am a little more than half way through Daniel Dennett’s book about how evolutionary biology provides you with the only meaning your life needs (or at least the only meaning it can have, regardless of what you may think otherwise). Thoughts are, after all (after Dennett waves his material wand), just the side effects…

  • Evol

    It is a disease, a poison, a curse and a burden. That is unless it comes true… unless the expectation dies to itself and is set free. Love is the one remaining cosmic mystery. Understanding its secret is the rarest gift on earth, one everyone is after. But chasing it is not being in it.…

  • Twins

    Tickling my tummy makes it rumble because butterflies are set loose inside. The surface conceals the circus, the tent blocks the light from chasing the jitters away. A beautiful face with two eyes, one a smile and the other in pain. My prescriptions are mangled because I lack medical understanding. How to diagnose the situation?…