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

  • Leaving Schumacher

    It’s raining for the first time in two weeks here at the college, but the soft patter on the old roof provides the perfect ambiance for reflecting upon my stay. We had our second bonfire last night to commemorate our time together. Each of us threw a small pine cone into the flame to signify an…

  • Welcome to London…

    …where the wifi’s free and the weather’s not half as good as Miami. I’ve arrived! Well, sort of. I’m stuck waiting at Paddington Station for my 1pm train to Totnes. I didn’t get any sleep on the flight, but I did watch two decent movies: finally saw “2012,” which was entertaining, but I was over…

  • Christopher Alexander’s Science of Imagination

    I’m six chapters into The Luminous Ground, and Christopher Alexander has already convinced me that living architecture has the potential to profoundly alter the way we relate to the universe. A building composed of what Alexander calls “living centers” literally opens a window to a deeper dimension of reality. We do not see these openings…

  • Public Philosophy (via Hyper tiling)

    Here are some really well developed (and highly agreeable!) thoughts by a graduate student in the UK (researching the science v. religion culture war) about the place of philosophy in society and academia. I just discovered his blog and have a lot more reading to do. Give it a look. On Wednesday, I attended the…

  • Materialism and Imagination

    Art is now the last safe harbor for the expression of spiritual longing in our increasingly materialistic civilization. The supposedly self-evident discoveries of scientific investigation into the nature of the physical universe have convinced most who know of them that everything which exists is a giant machine governed by measurable, generally deterministic laws. Even our…

  • Sonnets to Orpheus (I, 26) by Rainer Maria Rilke

  • Goal Statement for my PhD Studies at CIIS

    As a result of the past two years of study toward a MA degree in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness, my mind has been so stretched—both inward into the depths of my own soul and outward into the endless expanse of the cosmos—that distilling a specific dissertation topic for my PhD research will be extremely difficult.…

  • The Role of Imagination in Speculative Philosophy

    The Role of Imagination in Speculative Philosophy “[Imagination] is but another name for absolute power And clearest insight, amplitude of mind, And Reason in her most exalted mood.” –William Wordsworth, ‘The Prelude’ Introduction It should go without saying that there is more to reality than what at first meets the eye. There is always a…

  • Correspondence on Earth and Economy

    The following is a series of emails exchanged between Mat Wilson and I over the course of the last several months (my messages will be in bold, Mr. Wilson’s not): ——————————— Mat, First, in the interest of full disclosure, I should say that just yesterday I watched a video where an objectivist read something Rand…

  • Holons Network

  • Physical and Spiritual Energy

    Energy. The science of thermodynamics defines it as the ability of a physical system to do work. But in the case of a human being, how does this work relate to the conscious experience of the person performing it? That is, what is the relationship between physical and spiritual energy? We might start trying to…

  • Transpersonal Intersubjectivity

    I’ve just been reading Christopher Bache’s book “Dark Night, Early Dawn,” and he, not unlike Christian de Quincey in his book “Radical Nature,” argues that the interpersonal and collective dimensions of spiritual experience have been paid too little attention. Taking intersubjectivity into consideration requires a return to our embodied experience as beings embedded in a…

  • CIIS: Impressions

    Crisis. Disintegration. Rebirth. What will be born? What are we experimenting for, what problems do we need to solve? Maybe we need to start asking new questions. The old questions have lead us in circles, torn the earth to shreads. How to live together? That might be a start.

  • The End of Space is the Beginning of Time

    The year is 2007, and even to say so is to deface nature. Of all Man’s stolen goods, is not time itself the tool that not even the divine dare use? History is written by men; God merely watches the show from far beyond. The ticks of Earthly time cannot be heard from eternity. To…

  • World Made by Hand

    Prophesying the coming apocalypse has become something of an American pastime, so excuse me while I endulge in a bit of wild speculation. There is talk, and not just among conspiracy theorists, that peak oil has already been reached. I’m no expert in statistics, so I have to take other people’s word for it. So…

  • Naturalizing Representation

    I wrote this essay a few years ago for a philosophy of mental representation course. I think I would rework a few ideas looking back, but I would still defend the idea that reality is not describable from 1st or 3rd person perspectives alone. Both are part of a larger ongoing whole/part. Q: Why is…

  • Masculine Minds make for Selfish Genes

    Either altruism is possible, or it isn’t, and this goes for both nature and humanity. I happen to think altruism is possible, and that the human being is just one of the most striking examples of it. Equally striking are our bodies themselves, composed of trillions of cells who somehow have chosen to participate in…

  • The Living Cosmos

    ‘ve been struggling with how to bring teleology back into scientific cosmology (by which I mean the development of the entire universe, from the birth of matter and energy, to stars and planets, to cells and animals…). It is difficult, because we are so used to seeing the world as a collection of blind atoms.…

  • What’s Going On?

    I didn’t know where else to start… But now I see I can’t! To say what is going on, I need to know how it all began. Problem is I have access only to the present. I have memories, sure; but these are not the past. And I plan, but for a future which never…

  • Biology Culture Wars

    From Wonderist: First I want to say that the closest I’ve heard to a serious shift in thinking is with epigenetics, for which there is *actually* evidence that it occurs in life.With that out of the way, I’ll boil down my point. Let’s say you have a well-known metaphor A, and a lesser-known metaphor B.…

  • Being No One

    Canteatpancakes Love your videos, Love your comments, I’m a giant Alan Watts fan my self I’ve found Thomas Metzinger to be a great addition to his ideas, have you read Being No One? The functional boundary between a supposed internal and external world seems to me nothing more then a evolutionary tool which can not…