Category: Ancient Philosophy
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Naturphilosophie as Process Philosophy in Schelling and Whitehead
Christopher Satoor and I discussed Schelling, his German Idealist context, and Whitehead’s inheritance of Schellingian ideas about mind and nature.
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What is at stake in cosmological inquiry?
Some reflections after my debate with David Long. Also riffing on what I wanted to speak with John Vervaeke about (our dialogue should be posted on John’s channel in a few weeks).
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Toward an Integral “God” – a dialogue with Layman Pascal
Thanks to Layman and Bruce Alderman at The Integral Stage for hosting these dialogues.
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Introduction to German Idealism
My lecture in two parts introducing German Idealism (focusing on Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Goethe, Hegel)
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Robert McDermott & Matt Segall on Rudolf Steiner’s 12 Ways of seeing the world
see also: Foreword to an upcoming anthroposophical book on twelve ways of seeing the world
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Sundays with Whitehead
Below are a couple of video sessions from my course on Whitehead’s Process & Reality.
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Physicalism and Its Discontents: A Study in Whitehead’s Panexperientialist Alternative [draft]
UPDATE: Here is a PDF of the final draft accepted for publication under the revised title “The Varieties of Physicalist Ontology: A Study in Whitehead’s Process-Relational Alternative.” I’ve just finished drafting this article, which will hopefully be featured in a special issue of the Journal of Philosophy, Theology, and the Sciences focused on panpsychism. It still…
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“Astrology: Science, Art, or Religion?”
Here’s the recording of a lecture that Becca Tarnas and I delivered last night for the Atlanta Astrological Society. Here are some relevant links if you want a more in depth discussion on some of what I mention in this lecture: The Politics of Renaissance Hermeticism, and the Magic of Science The Copernican Odyssey: From…
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Panpsychism: a brief reply to Massimo Pigliucci
The Side View recently published an essay by Massimo Pigliucci titled “The Stoic God is Untenable in Light of Modern Science.” Pigliucci is entering into a critical dialogue with a few other Side View authors, Brittany Polat and Kai Whiting, about how best to inherit from ancient Stoic philosophy. I don’t have a horse in the contemporary interpretations of…
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Whitehead’s Final Interpretation of Reality: God and the World
Whitehead tells us at the start of the final part of Process & Reality (“Final Interpretation”) that the chief danger in philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence. For many modern, scientifically inclined philosophers, this narrowness has taken the form of an all too easy rejection of the world’s religious traditions and the religious experience which gave rise…
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On the Matter of Life: Towards an Integral Economics
I’m posting a revised version of a long essay I wrote a decade ago. It draws on thinkers including Sri Aurobindo, Jean Gebser, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, William Irwin Thompson, Francisco Varela, Alfred North Whitehead, and Alf Hornborg in search of a more integral approach to economics. I had not yet encountered the social ecology…
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Time and Experience in Physics and Philosophy [draft]
Below is the introduction of paper I presented at a conference in L’aquila, Italy in April 2019. The conference aimed to revisit important philosophical issues related to the famous 1922 debate between Einstein and Bergson. HERE is the conference site (it is in Italian, so you’ll need to ask Google to translate it for you).…
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Who is Alfred North Whitehead & What is Process Philosophy?
Environmental lawyer, philosopher, and fellow Whitehead enthusiast Tam Hunt and I started an email exchange a few weeks ago after I stumbled upon his interview with the physicist Carol Rovelli. Our emails grew into a pretty extensive conversation on all things Whitehead, which I am sharing below. We discuss the importance of Whitehead’s ideas for…
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Catherine Keller: The Cosmopolitical Entanglements of Process-Relational Theology
In what follows, I offer some reflections on the feminist process theologian Catherine Keller’s book Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement (2015). Keller poetically folds her refreshingly open theological orientation into an array of important planetary topics,—including the ethical implications of quantum entanglement (chapter 4), the poststructuralist dissolution of substance (chapter 5)…
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The Schelling & Hegel Tapes
I’m sharing some clips from a live video conference session a few days ago with students in my online course this semester, “Mind and Nature in German Idealism.”
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Spring online course at CIIS.edu – Whitehead’s Adventure in Cosmology
Auditors are welcome, though space is limited. Email me at msegall@ciis.edu for more information. One of our core texts in this course will be my Physics of the World-Soul (a new third edition soon to be published).
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“From Final Knowledge to Infinite Learning, with Chaudhuri, Whitehead, and Deleuze”
Next weekend, CIIS is hosting a conference called “1968 Revisited.” I’ll be presenting on a panel on Saturday, September 29th at 10am called “Pedagogy and Experimental Philosophy” with Jacob Sherman and Joshua Ramey (moderated by Debashish Banerji). Below is a draft of my panel presentation, titled “From Final Knowledge to Infinite Learning, with Chaudhuri, Whitehead,…
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Alfred North Whitehead: An Introduction