Category: Plato
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Cosmopolitical Reflections upon leaving for Black Rock City
Since the dominant narratives bringing forth the ongoing misadventure of industrial capitalism fail to properly situate the human soul in its actual time and place, any serious inquiry into the nature of our individual and collective situation must begin with an act of counter memory: we must ask afresh in each generation, who are we,…
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The Universe as a Work of Art: Images of the Cosmos in Plato, Descartes, and Kepler
In his lecture series become book, Art as Experience (1934), John Dewey defines imagination, not as a specific faculty alongside others, but as “that which holds all other elements in solution” (p. 275). Imagination, according to Dewey, is a uniquely human power, rendering experience conscious through the mutually transforming fusion of old meanings with new…
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Plato and Astrosophy: The Wisdom of the Sky
Scholarship has been unable to determine who the true writer of Epinomis was, but it is generally assumed that the text available to us today is either what remains of an unfinished wax-tablet manuscript left behind by Plato at his death in 347 BCE, or is an extra chapter added later by a student of Plato’s,…
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The New Reformation: Whitehead on Christian Metaphysics
“…if you want to make a new start in religion, you must be content to wait a thousand years.” -Alfred North Whitehead I’ve been thinking through my recent posts on the philosophical import of religious experience, and in light of some of the concerns brought up by Jason Hills, I wanted to further unpack the…
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De Anima Mundi
Some questions have emerged about what the hell (or heaven) I might be talking about in my last essay about death and the soul. These questions provide me with an opportunity to reflect on my own writing in an attempt to more fully articulate the vision behind it. I don’t already have answers to these…
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I am Time
I am Time Time is unwinding through its eternal hour and life is heading always toward the grave. The sun is being born and dying every day as the earth rolls across the sky. Toward the Origin all creation flows, though once upon a time, the destiny of this world was written with words. History:…
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Schelling and the Transcendental Abyss of Nature
“What is essential in science is movement; deprived of this vital principle, its assertions die like fruit taken from the living tree.” –Schelling, The Ages of the World ——————————– The Copernican Revolution had the exoteric effect of throwing the Earth into motion, decentering human consciousness in the Cosmos. We, like the other planets, became a…
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Phenomenology and Reality, Philosophy and Nature
Professor Corey Anton’s video about the impossibility of speculative realism, of an account of nature that doesn’t already include consciousness: My response, ending with an excerpt from Schelling‘s “Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature” :
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Schelling’s Geocentric Realism
I’ve been reading Iain Hamilton Grant‘s Philosophies of Nature After Schelling. He laments that most commentators treat Schelling as either a biocentric vitalist or a logocentric idealist. These characterizations ignore the extent to which his naturephilosophy corrects the eliminative idealism of Fichte’s and Hegel’s systems (which made nature’s externality entirely determined by intelligence) by grounding…
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God did it, or aliens?
“NRG” posting over on Pharyngula asks me: Why impute an admittedly Unknowable Omni God to explain currently inexplainable phenomena, if it’s much more reasonable, based on what we actually know, to assume that other citizens of the universe, evolved like us but to a much greater degree, are responsible for such phenomena? To make it…
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messages about the purpose of philosophizing…
Here is a message and my response that I’ve exchanged over on YouTube as 0ThouArtThat0. From YouTube user drchaffee: Thanks for understanding that I wasn’t trying to demean you with my length-constrained message to your video. I’ve had a question rolling around in my head for a couple of days, and I just…
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The Science of Life
Daniel Dennett says biology is engineering. He argues that living organisms are machines, flattening the classical Aristotelian difference between natural and artificial. For Aristotle, natural things had their form and purpose internal to themselves, while artificial things were designed from without for a purpose other than themselves. Of course, the beauty of human art (film,…
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Timaeus, or the Universe as a Living Thing
Cosmology is an art that involves speaking about the whole: to do cosmology, I must share stories with others concerning what we all belong to. This can be done in many languages –some musical, others mathematical– and if I succeed, perhaps in English text. The universe is a body, according to Plato– a Living Thing.…
Footnotes2Plato 