Category: Rudolf Steiner
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From German Idealism to Anthroposophy: The Spiritual Scientist Podcast
Mick Young invited me on his Spiritual Scientist podcast to discuss the importance of German Idealism in Rudolf Steiner’s development. I introduce the concept of ‘etheric imagination’ as a form of cognition by which we can consciously participate in the formative forces responsible for generating living organisms, including our own bodies. Participating in these etheric…
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The End of “Philosophy of Freedom”
Our study of Steiner’s book isn’t merely an intellectual exercise; it represents a form of fellowship that has been palpable throughout our journey. Even though it’s saddening to conclude today, remember that we are merely finishing this book, with much more lying ahead of us. My lecture focuses on the final chapter, “The Consequences of…
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Topological Inversions in the Life, Death, and Rebirth of Human Beings (lecture by Rudolf Steiner during WW1)
Rudolf Steiner Nachlass-VerwaltungTranslated by ChatGPT4 GA 174b – Lecture Eight Stuttgart, March 15, 1916 CLICK HERE FOR A PDF OF THIS LECTURE TRANSCRIPT The last time we spoke here, during my previous presence, we examined some spiritual facts that relate to the life of the human soul after the human has passed through the gateway…
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Rudolf Steiner and Racism
As a teacher, I do my best to actively encourage deep and sustained dialogue about the racism, implicit or explicit, that shows up in the statements or actions of any figure studied with my students. Many modern European and American thinkers, including all the German idealists, Darwin, Nietzsche, Emerson, Whitehead, Jung, Teilhard, Heidegger, etc., have made…
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The Integral Stage Authors Series (interview by Layman Pascal about “Crossing the Threshold”)
I’ve pasted the transcript below with timestamps (this is autogenerated from YouTube and so has some errors, but it is readable!). 0:34 welcome back to the author series on guess what The Integral Stage. I’m Layman Pascal on behalf of myself, Bruce 0:41 Alderman, and the Unspeakable future of life on Earth. And today we’re…
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Pre-order my new book ‘Crossing the Threshold’
My new book Crossing the Threshold: Etheric Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead is now available for pre-order (thanks to Revelore Press/Integral Imprint). Orders ship on Earth Day (April 22). “Segall’s new book is a sustained blissful effort to re-infuse 21st century thought with the courage, generosity, and imagination that he himself…
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Thinking with Rudolf Steiner
It is hard to believe I’ve been thinking with Steiner for almost 15 years. He is, as the late BBC documentarian and author Jonathan Stedall put it in the title of his 2011 biopic, a “challenge.” In contemporary German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s words: Steiner created a kind of antenna anthropology that we can no longer…
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Carl Schmitt’s ‘Political Theology’: A Process Theological Intervention
“Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology: A Process Theological Intervention” By Matthew David Segall Introduction This essay critically engages with Carl Schmitt’s anti-liberal political theology, offering important interventions from the related perspectives of Alfred North Whitehead’s cosmopolitical process theology, philosophical personalism, and Bruno Latour’s Gaian political ecology. Schmitt’s criticisms of early 20th century liberalism are tested against Dan Dombrowski’s…
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In dialogue with Iain McGilchrist
See also my blog review of McGilchrist’s new book The Matter With Things.
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“The Matter With Things” by Iain McGilchrist
“Questions such as those concerning scientific truth, the nature of reality, and the place of man in the cosmos require for their study some knowledge of the constitution, quality, capacities and limitations of the human mind through which medium all such problems must be handled.” -Roger Sperry (1952) I’ve just finished reading The Matter With…
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Urphänomen Reading Group – Rudolf Steiner’s “Riddles of Philosophy”
Below is a playlist featuring the recordings of our Urphänomen Reading Group, which is open to anyone interested (message us on Patreon or email archetypalphenomenon@gmail.com to join). New sessions will be added to this playlist as we go. We are reading the works of Rudolf Steiner, starting with Riddles of Philosophy. Next we’ll be reading…
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The Urgency of Social Threefolding in a World Still at War with Itself (draft article)
The following is a rough draft of an article I had originally prepared for a special issue of the journal Eidos (CfP here). Unfortunately, the editors requested that I soften my statements about the US & NATO. While Putin is responsible for the criminal invasion of Ukraine, I am unwilling to retract my statements pointing…
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Infinite Weird Podcast: The Many Become One and Are Increased By One
Had a great time chatting with Matthew Sherling yesterday about my own journey, how I got into Whitehead’s work, and what his basic categories of concrescence and prehension mean.
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Dialogue with Bernardo Kastrup: Translating between Analytic Idealism and Process-Relationalism
My long-overdue conversation with Bernardo Kastrup is above. I am pleased with how this turned out. We mostly attempted to translate between our respective orientations, finding many overlaps despite differences of emphasis. I think important differences remain, though we’ll have to iron those out together in the future. A few thoughts about what we discussed:…
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Goethe’s Study of Metamorphosis in Light, Leaf, and Bone
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Science and the Soul of the World: Participatory Knowing in Goethe and Whitehead
I’m teaching for Schumacher College again, this time online. This course focuses on two towering exemplars of the organic approach to science, the German poet and naturalist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) and the British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947). The course will run via live video conference on Saturday mornings (PST) for…
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The brain is not a computer, and thinking is not information-processing.
Sharing an email response to a question I received about the possibility of explaining human consciousness computationally, and whether such explanations might be compatible with Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual science. I do not think the computational paradigm has much to teach us about the sort of Sophianic consciousness Steiner attempted to unveil. I summarized my thoughts…
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Robert McDermott & Matt Segall on Rudolf Steiner’s 12 Ways of seeing the world
see also: Foreword to an upcoming anthroposophical book on twelve ways of seeing the world
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Foreword to an upcoming anthroposophical book on twelve ways of seeing the world
Below is the draft of a foreword I’ve coauthored with Robert McDermott. The book, Twelve Ways of Seeing the World by Mario Betti, should be out later this year via Hawthorn Press. Betti’s book builds fruitfully upon the ideas of Rudolf Steiner. You can read Steiner’s original lectures on the topic of the 12 human worldviews…
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Whitehead’s Quantum of Explanation: Thinking with Auxier and Herstein
“Our central idea is that concrete existence explains the abstract aspects of experience and not vice-versa.” -Auxier and Herstein “So long as necessity is taken to be the guarantor of rationality, the conception of rationality advocated will be as useless to science as it is to practical life.” -Auxier and Herstein Below I offer some…
Footnotes2Plato 