FROM THE FOOTNOTES2PLATO ARCHIVE
Category: Evan Thompson
Explore the evolving conversation, or begin with a guide to its central questions.
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Platonic Space, Organic Agency, and Creative Evolution
One of the important ideas that Tim and I discussed last night was his threefold differentiation of the inquired (natural science), the speculative (metaphysics), and the prosaic (everyday experience). I…
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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 -
Ontologizing Enactivism: Worldmaking with Ezequiel Di Paolo (dialogue with Tim Jackson)
Timothy Jackson and I were back in the saddle, this time to discuss Ezequiel Di Paolo’s article seeking an enactive ontology: Di Paolo, E. A. (2023). F/acts: Ways of enactive worldmaking. Journal…
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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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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 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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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…
Alfred North Whitehead, Ancient Philosophy, Aristotle, autopoiesis, Carl Jung, Catherine Keller, Daniel Dennett, Darwin, Descartes, Emmanuel Levinas, Evan Thompson, Francisco Varela, Galileo, Gilles Deleuze, Hegel, Henri Bergson, Heraclitus, Hume, Kant, Modern Philosophy, Plato, reason, Religion, Romantic Philosophy, Schelling, Socrates -
Machinic Heterogenesis and Ecosophic Futures: Thinking With Félix Guattari
The video above records my thoughts after reading a chapter from Felix Guattari’s book Chaosmosis (1995). Turning again to the work of Guattari and his frequent collaborator Gilles Deleuze felt important as the…
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Dialogue with Evan Thompson about “The Blind Spot”
The Theōros Project hosted philosopher Evan Thompson at CIIS for a dialogue with me about his new book (with Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser) The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human…
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Good Science, Bad Philosophy: Predictive Processing as Reheated Kantianism
Below I am sharing some open-ended reflections on the turf war between enactivist cognitive science, predictive processing approaches, and Whiteheadian cosmology. … Predictive Processing (PP) approaches (including Active Inference, the…
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Whitehead’s Philosophy of Science
According to Susanne Langer, who was one of Whitehead’s students at Radcliff in the 1920s, every great philosophical scheme “must, in its original form, be regarded as a myth[1], which…
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Discussing C. S. Peirce’s “A Guess at the Riddle” with Tim Jackson
A rough transcript: Matt Segall: Hey, Tim? One sec. Just getting my earmuffs on here. Timothy Jackson: Oh, good! Matt Segall: There we go! Hey! How’s it going? Timothy Jackson: Yeah, not too bad,…
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Evolution as a Universal Learning Process
“Meaning arises out of the most fundamental dynamics of the physical world: energy and information…[I]t is precisely via the thermodynamic forces driving cosmic evolution as a whole that meaning evolves…
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Discussing “The Blind Spot” with Gregg Henriques
Here is a rough transcript of some of my comments to Gregg: I think this book speaks to both of us for obvious reasons. The work you’ve been engaged in…
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Between Phenomenology, Science, and Process Ontology (dialogue with James Schofield)
In this video, James Schofield and I have detailed discussion about process philosophy, with a focus on our respective backgrounds, interests, and scholarly work. James begins by introducing his academic journey,…
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Philosophy of/as Information in Simondon, Floridi, and Whitehead (dialogue with Tim Jackson)
We discuss Ashley Woodward’s paper on Simondon: “Philosophy of/as Information” Here’s a ChatGPT4o summary: Matt greeted Tim, sharing about the warm weather in Oakland and the ongoing Independence Day celebrations…
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Discussing “The Blind Spot” (2024) with Timothy Jackson
Tim joined me to discuss Frank, Gleiser, and Thompson’s new book. Below are some timestamps of what we covered in this long conversation: 0:10 The contemporary urban life-world 10:36 In…
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More Reflections on “The Blind Spot”: Life, Cognition, and Consciousness
These are rough notes that capture some of my ongoing reflections after re-reading the core chapters of The Blind Spot. You can read my original review here: Blind Spot Review. I…
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Review of “The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience”
Review of The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience (MIT Press, 2024) by Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson By Matthew David Segall In The Blind Spot, Frank, Gleiser, and…
Albert Einstein, Alfred North Whitehead, autopoiesis, Copernican Revolution, Daniel Dennett, Darwin, David Chalmers, Descartes, Donna Haraway, Edmund Husserl, Evan Thompson, Francisco Varela, Galileo, Goethe, Henri Bergson, Isabelle Stengers, Modern Philosophy, Ptolemy, reason, Rudolf Steiner, William James -
Fantasy, Science, and Beauty in an Evolving Universe (dialogue with Tim Jackson)
Tim and I continued our dialogue about the Free Energy Principle and Whitehead’s cosmology. I began by recounting a short video of Karl Friston saying all human perception is fantasy. From…
