FROM THE FOOTNOTES2PLATO ARCHIVE
Category: Descartes
Explore the evolving conversation, or begin with a guide to its central questions.
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A History of Life from Plato and Descartes to Darwin and Lovelock (My Frontiers of Knowledge talk in Aspen, CO)
I was back in Aspen, CO this past weekend for the second annual Frontiers of Knowledge event at Wheeler Opera House. I presented alongside David Peña-Guzman (who you’ll hear in…
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Why Natural Science Would Be Better Off Without Physicalist Metaphysics
I enjoyed my chat with James Faulk the other day. Here’s the video: I had a mustache for like 5 minutes a few years ago. I have had to accept…
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Thinking Things with Graham Harman: Whitehead’s Way Beyond Philosophies of Human Access
Rahul Samaranayake has had me on his podcast a few times over the years, including an especially generative conversation with Peter Rollins last year. This time he invited me and Graham Harman into dialogue.…
Albert Einstein, Alfred North Whitehead, Ancient Philosophy, Aristotle, Bruno Latour, David Chalmers, Descartes, Emmanuel Levinas, Evan Thompson, Fichte, Gilles Deleuze, Graham Harman, Hegel, Heidegger, Henri Bergson, Hume, Isabelle Stengers, Kant, Modern Philosophy, Plato, Schelling, Slavoj Žižek, speculative realism, Spinoza, Steven Shaviro, Wittgenstein -
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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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:…
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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…
