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: Coleridge

  • Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Activity: Socrates, Jesus, and the Wisdom of Love

    I’ve been asked to think about thinking, and to write about it. I’ve gotten myself tangled up in the middle of this kind of mess before, and so I’ll admit right off the bat that I cannot be sure which comes first, the thinking or the writing. Maybe my writing is just the trace of…

  • Aesthethics: Loving the Beauty of Goodness

    I’m still in the planning phase of my dissertation on the ontology of Imagination, and as such am working to ferret out the most interesting aspects of my chosen site of inquiry. My research is focused on the ontology of Imagination, since my guiding thesis is that any perception of or reflection upon reality depends…

  • Research notes on the pragmatisms of James and Dewey

    …continuing research for my dissertation… I’ve been enjoying Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (2001). With an insightful synopsis of American history from the Civil War until about WWI as the backdrop, Menand traces the intellectual development of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey.…

  • Imagining the Cosmos: notes on my dissertation…

    In the past year or so, the blueprint of my dissertation topic has gone through multiple iterations. Last year, while applying for my PhD studies at CIIS, I wrote a goal statement that still reflects the general theme I am envisioning. Now that I’m entering the last term of course work, I wanted to take…

  • Belief in a Personal God

    The following is my response to the theologian Jason Michael McCann’s blog post about the personal nature of God in the Christian tradition. Yesterday, he posted a critical response to one of my short essays on materialism and imagination that I will also respond to soon. JMM, The distinction between truth and fact (which I understand…

  • 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.…