Category: Plato
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Diagramming German Idealism
I’m teaching an online graduate course called Mind and Nature in German Idealism this semester. Below I am sharing several diagrams that I’ve developed to depict Kant’s transcendental method as it evolves through the first three critiques, as well as Fichte’s radicalization of the Kantian project. I hope to continue developing this diagram to elucidate Schelling, Goethe,…
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“What if we talked politics a little?” By Bruno Latour
“If we are to accomplish the impossible feat of (re)composing a group from a multiplicity or, equally impossible, making a plurality obey a common order, it is necessary above all not to start with beings with fixed opinions, firmly established interests, definitive identities and set wills. This would guarantee failure, for any work of composition…
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A Rendition of Raphael’s “School of Athens”
A doctoral student in the course I co-taught last semester (Brief History of Western Thought) created this wonderful drawing based on Raphael’s “School of Athens.” Several of the figures are renditions of the students and faculty in our class. I thought I’d share it. Any guesses which one is me?
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Mind and Nature in German Idealism: A Spring Course at CIIS
There’s still a few weeks left to enroll in my spring course at CIIS.edu as an auditor or special student. Mind and Nature in German Idealism will start on January 17th and run until May 8th. Email me if you are interested and I can share the syllabus and/or enrollment instructions (msegall@ciis.edu).
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Mind and Nature in German Idealism, a graduate course
I’m very excited to teach a 10-week online course at CIIS next semester (Spring 2017, running from Jan – Mar) called Mind and Nature in German Idealism. The course includes readings and lectures on Kant, Fichte, Goethe, Hegel, and Schelling. Note that you do not need to be enrolled in a graduate program at CIIS in…
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Physics of the World-Soul: Whitehead and Cosmology (2nd edition)
I decided to revise and republish a second edition of my 2013 monograph on the relevance of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of organism to contemporary scientific cosmology. It should be available in paperback in a few weeks. Here is a PDF if you prefer an electronic version.
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Minding Time: Chronos, Kairos, and Aion in an Archetypal Cosmos
Notes for a brief talk I gave today at CIIS. [Update (July 15, 2016): This talk was expanded into an article published in Archai: The Journal of Archetypal Cosmology] ……………………………………………………………………………….. “…what is time? Who can give that a brief or easy answer? Who can even form a conception of it to be put into words? Yet…
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Video of “The Psychedelic Eucharist: Toward a Pharmacological Philosophy of Religion”
A lecture I delivered yesterday (Sept. 29th, 2014) at CIIS for ERIE. Lecture notes
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Lecture: “The Psychedelic Eucharist: Towards a Pharmacological Philosophy of Religion” at CIIS this Monday (9/29) from 6-9pm
I’m giving another talk on Monday (9/29) on psychedelics (the last one was at Burning Man) as part of a panel discussion for the Entheogenic Research, Integration, and Education (ERIE) student group at CIIS. This one will focus on the psychedelic roots of philosophy, particularly as they relate to the Eleusinian mystery rites. I’ll paste…
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Online course this Fall: “Mind and Nature in German Idealism”
Below is the introductory lecture of a 10-week undergraduate course called “Mind and Nature in German Idealism” that I’m hoping will run this coming Fall (2014) for the University of Philosophical Research. If you’re an undergrad looking for an independent study, let me know.
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Answering some queries about Whitehead
A college student emailed me with some questions about the technical details of Whitehead’s metaphysical scheme as laid out in Process and Reality. I figured I’d post my response to him here since I haven’t been able to blog much lately and don’t want anyone to think I’ve given it up, and because some of…
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Thinking with Emerson, Or how German Idealism Came to America
The Beacon of Mind: Reason and Intuition in the Ancient and Modern World (forthcoming).
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Audio from International Whitehead Conference in Krakow
Here is the audio of my presentation at the IWC last week in the philosophy of religion section: Here is a PDF of the paper I read, titled “Worldly Religion in Whitehead and Deleuze: Steps Toward an Incarnational Philosophy” Related articles 9th Annual International Whitehead Conference in Kracow, Poland (footnotes2plato.com) Also, thanks to Leon over…
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Thinking on a Walk in the Woods: The Ideality of Matter and the Materiality of Ideas
Something of a response to Levi Bryant/LarvalSubjects on “hylephobia.” See also this post on the Astrality of Materiality.
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On the need for mediating concepts…
I posted this on FaceBook in a thread about humanities departments needing to get over Aristotle’s biology and was told to stop spamming, so I suppose I’d better just post it here instead. …………….. If contemporary biology is going to throw out “purpose” and “essence” as concepts, it needs to throw out correlate concepts like…
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The Danger of Scientism? (response to Benjamin Cain)
Go read Benjamin Cain’s fascinating and tightly argued essay posted at Three Pound Brain (the blog of author R. Scott Bakker). Below is my comment to him: That was a thoroughly enjoyable read. I agree with what may be your most important conclusion: that the real danger “we” face as auto-poetic “minds” is that…
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Questions concerning the place of imagination in cosmology… (while reading Ed Casey and Catherine Keller)
“In my view the creation of the world is the first unconscious act of speculative thought; and the first task of a self-conscious philosophy is to explain how it has been done.” -Whitehead Four of us met a few days back to discuss the first 75 pages of Ed Casey’s The Fate of Place: A…
Footnotes2Plato 