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: Modern Philosophy

  • Climate Change and Schelling’s inversion of Fichte’s “economic-teleological” principle

    Two disappointing tidbits of news from the front lines of the climate war came my way this morning. First, I learned that the US Department of State decided to contract out its recent environmental review of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline to a company called Environmental Resources Management. ERM happens to be “a dues-paying…

  • 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 Deleuze’s Engagement with Natural Science in D&R

    In chapter V of Difference and Repetition, “The Asymmetrical Synthesis of the Sensible,” Deleuze engages with the various scientific theories of 19th and 20th century thermodynamics, not by identifying his fictions with scientific facts, but by detonating the philosophical idea of “intensive depth” in range of the qualitative extensity studied in terms of the scientific…

  • 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.…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Iain Hamilton Grant Interview

    Leon Niemoczynski has posted a FANTASTIC interview with Iain Hamilton Grant. A small sample to wet your appetite:  As directly as possible, Idealism is that philosophy that affirms the reality of the Idea. The point is not that any account of reality must be from the standpoint of the Idea, of the Ideal, or that the conceptual…

  • Reflections on “The Function of Reason” (1929) by Alfred North Whitehead

    “The function of Reason,” says Whitehead, “is to promote the art of life” (4). Reason thereby becomes primarily an aesthetic concern, a matter of appetition, and of the appetition of appetition with “emphasis upon novelty” (20). Reason is not simply the art of surviving, but of living well, and living better. If some degree of…

  • Reflections on Thomas Nagel’s mentions of Schelling and Whitehead in “Mind and Cosmos”

    The aim of this book is to argue that the mind-body problem is not just a local problem, having to do with the relation between mind, brain, and behavior in living animal organisms, but that it invades our understanding ofthe entire cosmos and its history. The physical sciences and evolutionary biology cannot be kept insulated…

  • 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.…

  • 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,…

  • More on Latour and Tarnas – Networks, Technology, and the Transformation of Western Culture

    Grant Maxwell has responded to my reflections on Richard Tarnas, Bruno Latour, and the Re-Enchantment Project. Grant wonders what I meant by referring to Tarnas’ archetypal cosmology as a “middle up” approach to transforming culture, and to Latour’s anthropology of the moderns as a “top down” approach to the same. I appreciate Grant’s use of Latour’s own network…

  • Discussing Bruno Latour’s Gaian Political Theology

  • Reflections on Latour, Tarnas, and the Misenchantment of the World

    Before you read this post, go watch Bruno Latour’s recent Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, titled “Facing Gaia: A New Enquiry into Natural Religion” (or read the PDF version). I’ve written a few short commentaries on these lectures that may help bring you up to speed if you don’t have the 7 or 8 hours to…

  • Latour’s 4th Gifford – “The Anthropocene and the Destruction of the Image of the Globe”

    My summary: By 2016, the world’s geologists will officially decide whether or not Earth has entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. From Latour’s non-modern perspective, neither “nature” nor “society” can enter this new epoch unscathed. The theater of Modern history has been destroyed and must be re-constructed from scratch. Gone is the passive stage,…

  • Reflections on Bruno Latour’s 3rd Gifford Lecture – “The Puzzling Face of a Secular Gaia”

    Latour marvels at the reverse symmetry of the discoveries of Galileo and Lovelock. Both transformed humanity’s perspective of the Earth (and itself) by pointing cheap instruments to the sky. In the 17th century, Galileo dissolved the lunar membrane that had separated heaven and earth. He expanded the laws of nature into the distant reaches of space, dislodging Earth…

  • Bruno Latour’s 1st Gifford Lecture – “Once Out of Nature: Natural Religion as a Pleonasm”

    Bruno Latour (the infamous sociologist of science, …or famed political ecologist and anthropologist of the moderns) is delivering the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh. Above is his first lecture, “Once Out of Nature: Natural Religion as a Pleonasm.” In these lectures, Latour is attempting to prepare us (we moderns? we humans?) to meet…

  • 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…