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: imagination

  • The Difference Between Kant’s and Schelling’s Philosophies of Nature

    A lecture I gave earlier this week in a class at CIIS on Spirit and Nature.

  • Reflections on Bruno Latour’s “An Inquiry into Modes of Existence,” Ch. 4: Learning to Make Room

    I’m participating in a reading group with about 40 other scholars focusing on Bruno Latour‘s recently published book An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns (2013). This week it is my turn to comment on Ch. 4, which is titled “Learning to Make Room.” I’m going to cross-post my comments here,…

  • Thinking with Emerson, Or how German Idealism Came to America

    The Beacon of Mind: Reason and Intuition in the Ancient and Modern World (forthcoming).  

  • Money, Ecology, and Burning Man: Inquiries into the Thermodynamics of Capitalism

    I’m headed back to Black Rock City for the 3rd time in 4 years later this week. I’ll be camping with Cosmicopia at 7:15 J if you want to stop by. I’ll be giving a brief talk on the need to ecologize economics on Tuesday at 11am. The title of the talk is actually a…

  • Thinking on a Walk in the Woods: The Ideality of Matter and the Materiality of Ideas

    Something of a response to Levi Bryant/LarvalSubjects on “hylephobia.” See also this post on the Astrality of Materiality.

  • Imagining Nature with Schelling and Whitehead

    Schelling and Whitehead were speculative philosophers. This appellative, like that of metaphysician or theologian, may carry with it certain baggage that those of a skeptical or positivist bent are wont to do without. But aside from those epochal moments when thinkers are suddenly inspired by speculative imagination, or by the break through of concept creation,…

  • Jeremy Johnson on the 2013 Integral Theory Conference and the Ecology of Ideas

    “Everything that Rises…” Or Synthetic Thought, Florilegium and the Networked Age: ITC 2013. My friend Jeremy is the official blogger for ITC 2013 here in San Francisco. I’m completely with him in his call for a move away from integral theory as an assimilation of other ideas to a more decentralized and rhizomatic network-logic where…

  • John Caputo on Speculative Realism

    Thanks to Adam/Knowledge-Ecology for pointing me to this one. I really dig what he says about physics and science… These posts are relevant to some of what Caputo has to say about correlationism, the philosophy of religion, and physical reality: https://footnotes2plato.com/2011/03/02/owen-barfield-and-quentin-meillassoux/ https://footnotes2plato.com/2011/10/04/speculative-philosophy-and-incarnationalism-in-whitehead-and-meillassoux/ https://footnotes2plato.com/2012/01/18/tilting-at-windmill-materialism-towards-an-ontology-of-organism-ooo/ https://footnotes2plato.com/2011/05/05/towards-a-christological-realism-thinking-the-correlation-with-teilhard-and-barfield/

  • On the need for mediating concepts…

    I posted this on FaceBook in a thread about humanities departments needing to get over Aristotle’s biology and was told to stop spamming, so I suppose I’d better just post it here instead. …………….. If contemporary biology is going to throw out “purpose” and “essence” as concepts, it needs to throw out correlate concepts like…

  • Mary Evelyn Tucker – Journey of the Universe

    Here is Mary Evelyn Tucker offering her version of a geology of morals.

  • Unnecessary Mechanism: A Reply to R. Scott Bakker

    “The machinery of the brain does all the work–after all, what else is there? What [Cain] calls ‘thinking of science in normative terms’ is a mechanistic enterprise, something our brains do. Since metacognition is all but blind to the mechanistic nature of the brain, it cognizes cognition otherwise, in nonmechanical, acausal, magical terms. Normative judgements, intentional relations, and so…

  • The Danger of Scientism? (response to Benjamin Cain)

    Go read Benjamin Cain’s fascinating and tightly argued essay posted at Three Pound Brain (the blog of author R. Scott Bakker). Below is my comment to him: That was a thoroughly enjoyable read.   I agree with what may be your most important conclusion: that the real danger “we” face as auto-poetic “minds” is that…

  • Questions concerning the place of imagination in cosmology… (while reading Ed Casey and Catherine Keller)

    “In my view the creation of the world is the first unconscious act of speculative thought; and the first task of a self-conscious philosophy is to explain how it has been done.” -Whitehead Four of us met a few days back to discuss the first 75 pages of Ed Casey’s The Fate of Place: A…

  • Responding to Michael about Root Images in the Philosophy of Nature

    Several months ago, Michael (who blogs at Archive Fire and contributes to synthetic_zero) posted a comment on a post of mine about philosophical vitalism. I’m just now getting around to responding to what for me were really helpful questions as I try to further flesh out my thoughts on etheric imagination. Michael writes: I like…

  • Nihilism and Groundlessness: Towards a Gaian Praxecology?

    I’ve just gotten around to reading Michael/ArchiveFire‘s post last September regarding a “post-nihilistic praxis.”  It’s got me reflecting on what the “creaturely” might mean/be after the death of God (the Creator), or what the “facticity of matter” might mean/be after its traditional opposite, the activity of spirit, has been reduced by natural science or deconstructed by…

  • Tolkien on mythopoetics

    I just came across an apt addition to the discussion last week on myth and religion. In a letter to C. S. Lewis, Tolkien writes: “If God is mythopoeic, man must become mythopathic.” Given that all forms of literalism as regards the scientific or spiritual nature of reality are to be rejected, the only remaining…

  • Responding to Levi Bryant on the Question of Religion

    I’ve copied my response to Levi below: I’m glad you are not reducing all religion to the sort of literalism we’re both trying to critique (you from a scientific standpoint aimed at religion, me from a spiritual standpoint aimed at scientism). Regardless of what the majority of “believers” may think about the ontological status of…

  • Reflections on nihilism as a belief system

    Levi Bryant initiated a string of blog posts on nihilism with his “axioms for a dark ontology.” Attempts at Living followed HERE, and Bill Rose Thorn HERE. Both of them accept Bryant’s ontological purposelessness, but raise the important issue of developing a “post-nihilistic praxis” (see this great post by Michael/Archive Fire from last year on what…

  • Historical Background and Overview for “Etheric Imagination in Process Philosophy”

    I realized I posted the same section twice last week, so here is the real historical and overview section of my dissertation proposal. ————————————————————————– This dissertation examines the metaphysics of imagination in the process philosophies of Schelling and Whitehead through the hermeneutical lens of a certain stream of Western esotericism. In describing the process-philosophical imagination…

  • Robert Romanyshyn’s “alchemical hermeneutics” as the foundation of a method in the participatory study of esotericism

    Romanyshyn’s alchemical hermeneutics as the foundation of a method in the participatory study of esotericism Robert Romanyshyn has developed a depth psychological method informed by hermeneutic phenomenology but ultimately rooted in alchemy. In approaching my research on the etheric imagination, I’ve turned to Romanyshyn’s method of alchemical hermeneutics because it allows for the retrieval of…

  • Theoretical Perspectives on Etheric Imagination

    The following is the “theoretical perspectives” section of my dissertation. It introduces the ether concept I am attempting to imaginally construct with the help of Schelling, Steiner, and Whitehead. …………………………………….. This dissertation argues that philosophical thinking, to eclipse the dualistic dogmas of today’s commonsense, must ally itself with the creative power of the etheric imagination.…