Category: Descartes
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A Hegelian Tour of Philosophy from Parmenides to the French Revolution
A slightly revised transcript of my introductory lecture from a course on Hegel’s Absolute Idealism. I just want to begin by noting that Hegel’s time was a time of revolution in Europe. The French Revolution, in many ways, shaped the political categories that all the modern liberal democracies have been assuming for the last couple…
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There’s no scientific evidence that consciousness exists.
Evidence, in a scientific age, is usually thought of in a very specific way. We tend to assume evidence means empirical measurement: can I record this on a camera, or on some kind of detector? Can I transform what I observe—signals, data—from something tangible in the world into a mathematical model? Can I make predictions,…
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From Substance to Creativity, Or on the Modernity That Could Have Been
Yesterday in my history of Western philosophy course, where my students are reading Richard Tarnas’ Passion of the Western Mind (1991), I lectured on a couple of seventeenth century philosophers in an attempt to catch the nature of the shift that historians call “the Enlightenment.” I then connect their innovations to a couple of nineteenth and twentieth…
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My Biophilosophy Conference Talk: Romanticizing Evolution with Schelling, Peirce, and Whitehead
Below is my talk at the “Revitalizing Biophilosophy” conference I co-hosted earlier this week. It is based on a long paper I am working on both for this conference and for “Cognizing Life,” another conference that I’ll present at next week in Tübingen, Germany (there is a free livestream option if you’d like to tune…
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The Mind is Not the Brain, and the Brain is Not a Computer (Dialogue with Victoria Trumbull)
Matt: Hi, Victoria! How are you doing this morning? Victoria: Good. Well, it’s evening for me here in England. Matt: Right. Well, really lovely to connect with you. Victoria: Yes! Matt: I wish I had had more time before our chat to finish reading your entire dissertation, but the chapter I did read is the favorite thing I’ve read in…
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The Invariance of Variation: Or Why Metaphysics Must Become Ungrounded (Dialogue with Tim Jackson)
Above, Tim Jackson and I dialogue about a number of conversations we watched, including: Matt Segall: So this is going to be laid back. We didn’t read anything, but we did listen to a whole bunch of conversations. I guess three. Okay, I threw another one in there. So, there’s the Levin and Deacon dialogue…
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Reality is a Process: Dialogue with Maitreyabandhu at the London Buddhist Centre
Slightly abridged transcript: Maitreyabandhu: So what we’re going to do this evening is have a conversation—obviously between Matt and me—about process philosophy and Buddhism. Really simply, that’s what we’re doing. To put it very simply, the central act of Buddhism—what Buddhism is really about, whether it’s here in Bethnal Green, Tibet, Burma, or wherever—is that a…
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Prehensions, Propositions, and the Cosmological Commons (dialogue with Tevin Naidu)
Tevin Naidu recently hosted me on his Mind-Body Solutions podcast. Above is the video and below is an edited and somewhat condensed transcript. Tevin: I have shaped today’s episode around your paper, “Physics Within the Bounds of Feeling Alone.” It is a wonderful piece—a beautiful read. One thing I often ask my guests to do is give a…
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An Anthropocosmic Approach to the Nature of Consciousness (My Talk at the UTOK Conference on Consciousness)
“What man most passionately wants is his living wholeness and his living unison, not his own isolate salvation of his ‘soul.’ Man wants his physical fulfillment first and foremost, since now, once and once only, he is in the flesh and potent. For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for…
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“The Phenomenon of Life” By Hans Jonas: A dialogue with Timothy Jackson about Jonas’ treatment of Darwinism
In this session, Tim Jackson and I discuss Hans Jonas’ book The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology. We focus in particular on two chapters, “Philosophical Aspects of Darwinism” and “Is God a Mathematician?” Our aim was to explore how Jonas, emerging from an existential–phenomenological and religious–philosophical context, offered both criticisms and appreciations of Darwin’s…
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Science and Religion in a Participatory Cosmos
Last night I was invited by the Center for Christogenesis at Villanova University to share some thoughts on how the science/religion dialogue may be transformed by a participatory approach to cosmology. The video will be made available in a few weeks to those who register with the Center. I began by playfully suggesting I’d be proceeding as…
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Minds All Around Us: Dialoguing with Michael Levin
You can read my reflections on this dialogue here.
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Process, Reality, and Context: Timothy E. Eastman Unties the Gordian Knot – Summaries of the Seminar Series
Below is a detailed summary of each of the nine seminar sessions that ran monthly from June 2021 through February 2022 focused on Dr. Timothy Eastman’s book, Untying the Gordian Knot: Process, Reality, and Context (2020). This event was sponsored by the Cobb Institute’s Science Advisory Committee, which I chair. You can read my review of…
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Review of Vol. 2 of ‘The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead’
Below is a draft of my review of: BRIAN G. HENNING, JOSEPH PETEK, and GEORGE LUCAS, eds. The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead (1925-1927): General Metaphysical Problems of Science. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021: lxii + 511 pages. The version that is eventually published in Process Studies will likely need to be about half this length, so I’m…
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Ingressing Minds: Causal Patterns Beyond Genetics and Environment – Reflections on Michael Levin’s Platonic Research Program for Biology
Reflections on Michael Levin’s Platonic Research Program for Biology (a dialogue with Timothy Jackson) Timothy Jackson and I discuss Michael Levin‘s new pre-print “Ingressing Minds: Causal Patterns Beyond Genetics and Environment in Natural, Synthetic, and Hybrid Embodiments” (which will eventually end up in the anthology collecting papers from the “Metaphysics and the Matter With Things: Thinking With Iain McGilchrist”…
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Minds in the Making: Bringing Formal and Final Causes Back into Evolutionary Science, with Michael Levin
Michael, host of the podcast Third Eye Drops, invited me and the developmental biologist Michael Levin into dialogue. The video should be posted in the coming weeks, and I will share it here. I’ve had several conversations with Mike before (see here). In this post, I want to riff on some of the themes we explored…
Footnotes2Plato 