Category: imagination
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Deleuze’s Pedagogy of Problematic Ideas as an Example of Etheric Imagination
Below is another section of my dissertation proposal… ………………. In What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between a singular pedagogy of the concept and a universal encyclopedia of the concept.155 What does it mean to say that Deleuze’s philosophical method is pedagogical, rather than encyclopedic? It means that philosophical concepts are not catalogued in…
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John Sallis’ Logic of Imagination as an Example of Etheric Imagination
Below is another section of my dissertation proposal. More to come… ……………………………………. John Sallis begins his Force of Imagination: The Sense of the Elemental (2000) by regretting the Husserlian phenomenological tradition’s tendency to subordinate imagination to pure perception in an effort to “[protect] the bodily presence of the perceived from imaginal contamination.”208 Sallis argues that…
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Michael Marder’s Vegetal Philosophy as an Example of Etheric Imagination
The following is excerpted from my dissertation proposal, which is tentatively titled “Etheric Imagination in Process Philosophy from Schelling to Whitehead.” I’ll be posting more selections in the coming days. ………………………………………………….. To become rooted in the etheric forces of imagination, the process philosopher must learn to think like a plant. Michael Marder’s “vegetal metaphysics”80 provides a contemporary…
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Images of Earth and Eros in Walt Whitman’s Poetry
Images of Earth and Eros in Walt Whitman’s Poetry A Presentation by Matthew D. Segall at the 2013 Cosmology of Love Conference Come, said the Muse, Sing me a song no poet yet has chanted, Sing me the universal. In this broad earth of ours, Amid the measureless grossness and the slag, Enclosed and…
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This Thursday’s PCC Forum- “Goethe’s Color Theory” – A lecture by Prof. Fred Amrine
For those who live in the Bay Area, the next PCC Forum (hosted by my partner Becca and I) will feature Prof. Fred Amrine, a Goethe scholar from the University of Michigan’s German department. The lecture is open to the public and will take place at the California Institue of Integral Studies (1453 Mission St., San Francisco,…
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Graham Harman’s Ontology of Style
I liked Harman’s reflections on style in philosophy so much I thought I’d paste them here. They are originally from this interview by Brian Davis conducted last year. BD: Michel Serres has said “philosophy is an anticipation of future thoughts and practices… Not only must philosophy invent, but it also invents the common ground for…
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Levi Bryant on “Bricolage”
I enjoyed Levi Bryant’s thoughts on bricolage as method. I’m trying to articulate something similar in the context of Robert Romanyshyn’s “alchemical hermeneutics” for the method section of my dissertation proposal (more on that soon).
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Love, Death, and the Sub-Creative Imagination in J. R. R. Tolkien
Yesterday I found myself reading The Silmarillion, an unfinished collection of Tolkien’s mythopoeic writings depicting the creation of Ëa and its passage through the first of the three ages of the world (The Lord of the Rings trilogy depicts events at the end of the third age). The stories, posthumously published by his son Christopher in 1977, are prefaced…
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Schellingian Reflections on Latour’s 2nd Gifford Lecture – “A Shift in Agency, With Apologies to Hume”
Latour is introduced by professor of physics Wilson Poon, who publicly confesses to being a great admirer of Latour’s work. Latour, thinly veiling how tired he is of the “Science Wars,” thanks him for the “rare confession”: “I don’t have many friends among physicists.” Poon contributes to a course at the University of Edinburgh on…
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Vitalism in Philosophy: “The stars are the fountain veins of God.” -Böhme
Levi Bryant is pulling his hair out about vitalist philosophy (a title he gives to the work of Bergson, Whitehead, and Deleuze, among others). I read all three as materialists, though of course it is a rather strange sort of materialism replete with God-making machines, physical feelings, and alchemical metallurgy. Nonetheless, their philosophical work, especially Whitehead’s, couldn’t…
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Continuum
Some good friends of mine will be featured in this film: Planetary Collective Presents: Continuum
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Root Images in Philosophies of Difference
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Fragment of a Dialogue: A Walk to Imagination’s Limits
This is an incomplete project that I may not be able to pick up for a while. Thought I’d post the fragment. It was inspired by Schelling’s dialogue Bruno. —————————————————– A Walk to Imagination’s Limits Chroma: We have chosen a wonderful evening to set out on a walk along the riverside. Don’t you think so, my friends?…
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No one is in control…
…because power has left the nation-state; politics has been overcome by financial flows. -Zygmunt Bauman
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Is the Universe Alive?
In this episode of the “Through the Wormhole” series put together by Discovery Channel, Morgan Freeman asks, “Is the Universe Alive?” He builds on the ideas of a motley crew of scientists in order to learn to see life at multiple scales, including the computer scientists Juergen Schmidhuber (machines are alive) and Seth Lloyd (atoms think),…
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American Philosophy and Rudolf Steiner, ed. By Robert McDermott
I mentioned this text, American Philosophy and Rudolf Steiner, edited by my advisor Robert McDermott, a few months back. It has since been published.
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The Gossip Gospel – An Informal Talk on the Role of Gossip in Community
I gave this talk on New Year’s Eve to a group of my friends.
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Deleuze on Anamnesis
From Difference and Repetition, p. 85 (in the context of a discussion of the active and passive synthesis of time): If there is an in-itself of the past, then reminiscence is its noumenon or the thought with which it is invested. Reminiscence does not simply refer us back from a present present to former ones,…
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Deleuzean Diagrammagic
Here’s a quick sketch of a diagram I’ll continue to refine that came to me while reading Deleuze’s discussion of the passive synthesis of imagination in D & R (71cf). An easier to read version: The past and the future are rhythmically/repeatedly synthesized via contraction into the lived present by imagination. The actual occasions of…
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Science v. Religion (in the lead up to my dissertation) – Al Jazeera interviews Richard Dawkins, and Lawrence’s Krauss thinks he’s special
Now that I’ve completed preparatory research essays on Schelling (The Re-Emergence of Schelling: Philosophy in a Time of Emergency) and Whitehead (Physics of the World-Soul: The Relevance of A. N. Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism to Contemporary Scientific Cosmology), it’s finally time to start zeroing in on my dissertation thesis. The title I’m proposing for now is Imagination Between…
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[Final Draft] Worldly Religion in Deleuze and Whitehead: On the Possibility of a Secular Divinity
Below I’ve written a paper using the ideas of Gilles Deleuze and Alfred North Whitehead to construct a secular divinity. For Deleuze, this is an especially serious act of buggery on my part. Deleuze of course approved of that method in his own projects, but I wonder if he would approve of the baby jesus…
Footnotes2Plato 