Footnotes2Plato

“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”
–Alfred North Whitehead

Category: Alfred North Whitehead

  • Thoughts on System in Kant and Whitehead

    A reading group I’ve participated in for several years now just finished Shaviro’s Without Criteria. We wrapped up the discussion thinking through, among other things, the contrasting conceptions of “system” articulated in Kant’s and Whitehead’s works. Here are some excerpts from the two philosophers that get at the contrast. “The reader must naturally have a strong…

  • CIIS Commencement Speech 5/22

    CIIS Commencement Speech 5/22

    Thank you, President Subbiondo. Thanks also to our Academic Vice President Judie Wexler, to our honorary degree recipients Angela Davis and Josef Brinckmann, and to all CIIS faculty and staff for the work you have done to make this day possible for me and for my fellow graduates. I am a philosopher, which is not to…

  • Draft of my dissertation: Cosmotheanthropic Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead

    If anyone wants a PDF of my dissertation, shoot me an email at msegall@ciis.edu and I’ll send you a draft. I’ll wait to post it here until after I’ve uploaded the final draft with technical edits included to the UMI database.

  • Pre-Defense Dissertation Draft Completed

    My dissertation defense is on Monday morning. I’ve just finished the “pre-defense” draft. I have until April 11th to finalize the published version. Below are the abstract, table of contents, and acknowledgements.        COSMOTHEANTHROPIC IMAGINATION IN THE POST-KANTIAN PROCESS PHILOSOPHY OF SCHELLING AND WHITEHEAD Abstract In this dissertation, I lure the process philosophies…

  • 1st draft of dissertation submitted

    I submitted the first draft of my dissertation to my committee a couple of weeks ago. I’m aiming to defend in March. Here’s a sneak peak of the table of contents. I still need to fill out the introduction and conclusions. Originally, I had no intention of writing so much about Kant, but he proved…

  • John Horgan’s article in “Scientific American” on Panpsychism

    John Horgan published an essay in Scientific American a few days ago criticizing Tononi’s integrated information theory of consciousness. I don’t understand Integrated Information Theory well enough to defend it, but I applaud the effort to make progress toward a scientifically operationalizable definition of consciousness. But it seems to me that part of the problem…

  • Essay republished in “Center for Ecozoic Studies Musings”

    I forgot to link to this back in July, but Herman Greene, editor of the CES Musings newsletter, republished my essay Physics of the World-Soul: The Relevance of Alfred North Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism to Contemporary Scientific Cosmology (2013) in their December 2014 issue. You can find the PDF of the issue by clicking here. Or…

  • Latour building on Whitehead’s critique of substance

    In Latour’s words, Whitehead replaced the concept of substance with that of subsistence. I appreciate Latour’s insistence on the need for the creation of institutions that encourage and sustain themselves through transformation. Question is, what would such institutions look like?

  • Critique of Pure Feeling: Whitehead on Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic

  • Cosmic Pessimism: Response to a post by S.C. Hickman

    The Visions of Eternity, by reason of narrowed perceptions, Are become weak Visions of Time & Space, fix’d into furrows of death. -William Blake Read the engaging and wide-ranging post here: The Cosmology of Nick Land: Bataille, Gnosticism, and Contemporary Physics I have noticed my own tendency to waver between a less extreme version of the cosmic pessimism Hickman describes…

  • Schelling’s Descendental Philosophy (and its Whiteheadian resonances)

    Much of the rather fragmentary thoughts to follow were spurred by my reading of Jason Wirth’s wondrous little essay in the HUGE Palgrave Companion to German Idealism (2014), “Nature of Imagination: At the Heart of Schelling’s Thinking.” Based on the subtitle of his newly published book Schelling’s Practice of the Wild: Time, Art, and Imagination…

  • The Interrupted Irruption of Time: Towards an Integral Cosmology, with Help From Bergson and Whitehead

    Above is my talk for the Jean Gebser Society conference held at the California Institute of Integral Studies the weekend of October 16th. Title: The Interrupted Irruption of Time: Towards an Integral Cosmology, with Help from Bergson and Whitehead Abstract: Gebser suggests that the world-constituting reality of time first irrupted into Western consciousness with the publication…

  • 11th International Whitehead Conference (2017 in the Azores)

    The 11th International Whitehead Conference will be hosted by the University of the Azores on Sao Miguel Island. The conference website is now up. The title of the 2017 conference is Nature in Process: Novel Approaches to Science and Metaphysics. The section headings and descriptions should be available in a few months. I’m told there…

  • response to R. Scott Bakker on transcendental phenomenology and BBT

    Anyone who posits some form of efficacy or constraint outside the natural order on the basis of some kind of interpretation of ‘experience’ has the same argumentative burden to discharge: How do you know? What justifies such an extraordinary (supernatural) posit?…What makes the question so pressing now is that their instrument, reflection, has finally found…

  • Dogen, Spinoza, and Whitehead by Seth Segall

    Check out this interesting post by my cousin, Seth Segall, over at the Existential Buddhist. The topics Seth discusses include whether consciousness is emergent from or intrinsic to the physical world, the place of values (human or otherwise) in the universe, and the variety of God concepts available to those willing to philosophize about such matters. Seth…

  • War of the Worlds: Love and Strife in the Pluriverse

    Another one for the ontological pluralism file. Delivered a few months back at the Cosmology of Love conference at CIIS.

  • Space and Time in an Ontology of Organism

    I’m thoroughly enjoying Jimena Canales social, scientific, and philosophical history of the Einstein-Bergson debate in The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate that Changed Our Understanding of Time. There are quite a few pages on Whitehead’s alternative rendering of relativity theory. There is one place (198-99) where Canales, while commenting on George Herbert…

  • Philosophy in a Time of Emergency

    Over the last month, half the global population of saiga antelope dropped dead in northern Kazakstan. This is what mass extinction looks like. I read about the antelope die off this morning, just after reading Adam/Knowledge-Ecology‘s and Craig Hickman/darkecologies‘ posts about Whitehead’s call for Cosmology to replace Critique. I do believe the two, Whitehead’s call and mass extinction, are related. The…

  • Video of my presentations at the 10th International Whitehead Conference on Friday (6/5) and Saturday (6/6)

    Conference website. Friday, June 5th at 4:45pm: Whitehead’s Non-Modern Philosophy: Cosmos and Polis in the Pluriverse Saturday June 6th at 2:30pm: Religion in Human and Cosmic Evolution: Whitehead’s Alternative Vision I have a lot to say about some of the questions that came up during the discussion (~58 minutes into the video), especially the issues…

  • Pluralistic Panpsychism v. Monistic Idealism: another response to Kastrup (part 1 of 2)

    Kastrup has responded to my post a few days ago. The topic? Panpsychism. In any back and forth discussion like this, it is important to acknowledge that each of us has evidently written a great deal articulating our perspectives. Other than his brief essay on the threat of panpsychism, I have not read any of Kastrup’s…

  • Schedule for our track at next week’s Whitehead/Ecological Civilization Conference

    Section III: Alienation from Nature, How it Arose Track 3: Late Modernity and Its Re-Imagining (Lebus Hall, 201) Friday, June 5 2:00 PM – 2:45 PM Track Session #1a – Tam Hunt “Absent-minded science and the ‘deep science’ antidote” 2:45 PM – 3:30 PM Track Session #1b – Christian de Quincey “A Radical Science of…