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: Henri Bergson

  • Science and the Modern World (dialogue with Sebastjan Vörös)

    Seb and I discussed the history and contemporary status of the natural sciences and their relationship to philosophy and metaphysics.

  • Rupert Sheldrake on Whitehead

    Rupert Sheldrake on Whitehead

    I interviewed Rupert Sheldrake as part of a new series for the Cobb Institute. I’ll be speaking with a number of scientists who have been influenced by Whitehead.

  • Physicalism and Its Discontents: A Study in Whitehead’s Panexperientialist Alternative [draft]

    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…

  • On the Matter of Life: Towards an Integral Economics

    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…

  • Notes on Deleuze’s “Bergsonism”

    Notes on Deleuze’s “Bergsonism”

    Intuition as Method Stating and creating problems Realizing that we are the creators of our own problems gives us “semi-divine power”; those who accept ready-made problems of society are slaves (15) Deleuze: “the history of humanity, from the theoretical as much as from the practical point of view, is the construction of problems. It is…

  • 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).…

  • Who is Alfred North Whitehead & What is Process Philosophy?

    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…

  • “Electrons Don’t Think” by Sabine Hossenfelder

    The following is a comment I posted on the physicist and blogger Sabine Hossenfelder’s blog Backreaction to a post titled “Electrons Don’t Think.” https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/01/electrons-dont-think.html Hi Sabine. I discovered your blog last night after Googling “Carlo Rovelli and Alfred North Whitehead.” It brought me to Tam Hunt’s interview with Rovelli. I have been studying Rovelli’s popular…

  • 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). 

  • My Online Course this Fall: PARP 6133 – Whitehead’s Adventure in Cosmology

    I’m teaching another online graduate course for CIIS.edu this Fall (Aug-Dec) called Whitehead’s Adventure in Cosmology: Toward a Physics of the World-Soul (PARP 6133). Here is the proposed syllabus. Auditors and Special Students are welcome to enroll. Email me at msegall@ciis.edu for more information about how to do this.

  • New Online Masters Degree in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness

    CIIS is accepting applications for the Fall 2017 semester for a new online masters degree program in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness with concentrations in Archetypal Cosmology, Integral Ecology, and Process Philosophy. I’ll be teaching mostly in the Process Philosophy Concentration. Check out the website for more information.    

  • Physics of the World-Soul: Whitehead and Cosmology (2nd edition)

    I decided to revise and republish a second edition of my 2013 monograph on the relevance of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of organism to contemporary scientific cosmology. It should be available in paperback in a few weeks. Here is a PDF if you prefer an electronic version.  

  • Pre-Defense Dissertation Draft Completed

    My dissertation defense is on Monday morning. I’ve just finished the “pre-defense” draft. I have until April 11th to finalize the published version. Below are the abstract, table of contents, and acknowledgements.        COSMOTHEANTHROPIC IMAGINATION IN THE POST-KANTIAN PROCESS PHILOSOPHY OF SCHELLING AND WHITEHEAD Abstract In this dissertation, I lure the process philosophies…

  • The Interrupted Irruption of Time: Towards an Integral Cosmology, with Help From Bergson and Whitehead

    Above is my talk for the Jean Gebser Society conference held at the California Institute of Integral Studies the weekend of October 16th. Title: The Interrupted Irruption of Time: Towards an Integral Cosmology, with Help from Bergson and Whitehead Abstract: Gebser suggests that the world-constituting reality of time first irrupted into Western consciousness with the publication…

  • Time Eats Itself, by Henri Bergson

    from Creative Evolution (Ch. 1, pgs. 4-6): “…as regards the psychical life unfolding beneath the symbols which conceal it, we readily perceive that time is just the stuff it is made of. There is, moreover, no stuff more resistant nor more substantial. For our duration is not merely one instant replacing another; if it were,…

  • Space and Time in an Ontology of Organism

    I’m thoroughly enjoying Jimena Canales social, scientific, and philosophical history of the Einstein-Bergson debate in The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate that Changed Our Understanding of Time. There are quite a few pages on Whitehead’s alternative rendering of relativity theory. There is one place (198-99) where Canales, while commenting on George Herbert…

  • Latour’s Space-Time Experiment: Thinking with Whitehead

    Watch Olafur Eliasson and Bruno Latour re-enact the debate between Einstein and Bergson about space-time and the polarity between art and science.  Though I first heard about Latour’s re-enactment of the Einstein-Bergson debate several years ago, I only uncovered the videos of this conversation while engaging in a FaceBook thread yesterday about Einstein’s bloc universe. Einstein famously claimed that time as we experience…

  • Process, Relationality, and Individuality: Graham Harman and Alfred Norht Whitehead (response to Jonathan Cobb)

    Relevant links to the argument between me, Levi Bryant, and Graham Harman: Levi Bryant Mis-reading Whitehead? Harman’s response to me Whitehead’s Process Atomism (Response to Graham Harman) Object as subject-superject, or why Harman is wrong about Whitehead Occasionalism in Whitehead and Harman Harman’s Crucified Objects and Whitehead’s God: More on Withdrawal    

  • Towards a “Thermopolitics” (question for Levi Bryant)

    Levi Bryant just posted on what he is calling “thermopolitics.” He wants to shift the discourse in philosophy away from its exclusive focus on linguistic analysis and the critique of ideological superstructures toward the energetics of the universe that provide the condition for their possibility. Bryant writes: This is not a metaphor.  At this very…

  • Etheric Imagination in Process Philosophy from Schelling and Steiner to Whitehead

    I’ve just submitted my dissertation proposal for review. Click on the title below for the PDF. Etheric Imagination in Process Philosophy From Schelling and Steiner to Whitehead I welcome suggestions, critiques, sources, and/or extensions. Basically, I’m doing a comparative study of the philosopher Friedrich Schelling, the esotericist Rudolf Steiner, and the mathematician and cosmologist Alfred North…

  • Teleology in Science? Purpose in Nature?

    I’ve just read Grant Maxwell’s critique of a HuffPo piece by Matthew Hutson. I enjoyed his rebuttal of Hutson’s blanket rejection realism regarding teleology. I am also enjoying the discussion Grant is having with Hutson down in the comments. I do not think Hutson has read the work of organic/creative finalists like Bergson or Whitehead.…