Category: rudolf steiner

Foreword to an upcoming anthroposophical book on twelve ways of seeing the world

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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 [...]

Whitehead’s Quantum of Explanation: Thinking with Auxier and Herstein

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“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 [...]

Back to teach at Schumacher College in April 2019: “The Evolution of Consciousness and the Cosmological Imagination”

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I'll be teaching another short course at Schumacher College in the UK the week of April 22nd-26th, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNAO2-b1yuI Here's a link if you're interested in registering: https://www.schumachercollege.org.uk/courses/short-courses/re-enchanting-the-cosmos Here's what I'll be teaching on: “The Evolution of Consciousness and the Cosmological Imagination” This week-long course will trace the evolution of consciousness in the West from [...]

Pre-Defense Dissertation Draft Completed

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My dissertation defense is on Monday morning. I've just finished the "pre-defense" draft. I have until April 11th to finalize the published version. Below are the abstract, table of contents, and acknowledgements.  Jacob Sherman, PhD, Chair Associate Professor, Philosophy and Religion Department, California Institute of Integral Studies   Sean Kelly, PhD Professor, Philosophy and Religion Department, [...]

Etheric Imagination in Process Philosophy from Schelling and Steiner to Whitehead

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I've just submitted my dissertation proposal for review. Click on the title below for the PDF. Etheric Imagination in Process Philosophy From Schelling and Steiner to Whitehead I welcome suggestions, critiques, sources, and/or extensions. Basically, I'm doing a comparative study of the philosopher Friedrich Schelling, the esotericist Rudolf Steiner, and the mathematician and cosmologist Alfred North [...]

Saul Bellow on Rudolf Steiner, Boredom, Sleep, and Death

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Wanted to share this before going to bed. Here are a few words about "the famous but misunderstood Dr. Rudolf Steiner" from Bellow's Pulitzer Prize winning work of fiction Humboldt's Gift: It wasn't that I minded giving information to honest scholars, or even to young people on the make, but I just then was busy, fiercely, painfully busy--personally [...]

Historical Background and Overview for “Etheric Imagination in Process Philosophy”

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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 [...]

Theoretical Perspectives on Etheric Imagination

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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

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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

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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

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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 [...]