FROM THE FOOTNOTES2PLATO ARCHIVE
Category: Plato
Explore the evolving conversation, or begin with a guide to its central questions.
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The Beginning and the End of Positive Philosophy
In the Theaeteus, Plato has Socrates say that “wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.” In his Metaphysics, Aristotle echoes this by writing that “it was…
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The Creative Potency of Toroidal Time
Levi Bryant (Larval Subjects) recently unpacked his position that object’s are “spacetime worms” (HERE). It got me thinking about the arguments that thinkers like Bergson and Whitehead had with Einstein…
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Withdrawal: Ancient and Modern Accounts
Adam over at Knowledge-Ecology has been in discussion with Michael at Archive Fire regarding the varieties of withdrawal in object-oriented philosophy. Below I’ve pasted my comment in response to Adam’s post: I’ve…
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Thinking While Naked
Here is an intriguing article in Wired magazine by Jonah Lehrer. He reflects upon the implications of an experiment attempting to gauge the cognitive significance of nakedness. It looked at…
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Work and Play in Human Evolution
At the center of Robert Bellah‘s 700 page account of the axial turn in the evolution of religion (Religion in Human Evolution, 2011) is a theory of play. The relaxed field generated…
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Notes on imagination, Poetry as Soul-making
Poetry as soul-making Strictly speaking, what I want to talk about today does not exist, or at least if it does, remains for the most part unconscious to the rational,…
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The Copernican Odyssey: From Kantian Skepticism to Tarnasian Participation, or from the Dawn of Modern Science to the Wisdom of the Midnight Sun
The following is a rough draft of a presentation I will be giving next week as part of a panel discussion on the philosopher Richard Tarnas’ Archetypal Cosmology. Tarnas’ essay…
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The Supersensible in Platonic Philosophy
this was a video I recorded more than two years ago in response to an articulate atheist and scientific materialist on YouTube. It is primarily about Plato and how he…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
