Category: Rudolf Steiner
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Rudolf Steiner and the Dream of External Matter: Toward a Physiosophy of the Senses
Over the weekend, I gave a talk at the Mysteries of Technology Conference: “Etheric Imagination as Participatory Knowing“ Unfortunately, I had to skip a few slides due to time constraints, so I wanted to share those ideas here. Below is something of an addendum to that talk, so a lot of what follows will make…
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Rudolf Steiner’s Threefold Social Organism
An abridged transcript of my talk is below. For a more in depth look at social threefolding, you can also check out my article “The Urgency of Social Threefolding in a World Still At War With Itself” (2023). I am grateful for the invitation to share a bit about the threefold social organism, or social threefolding…
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Etheric Imagination as Participatory Knowing: A Process-Relational Reading of Rudolf Steiner’s “Light Course”
Transcript: It’s really lovely to be here this morning, though it’s quite early for me. I’ve been enjoying the last three days of the Mysteries of Technology conference very much, and I’m very grateful to have been invited. I think what MysTech is doing is important, not only for the wider world to see the ways in…
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Becoming the World-Body
You are not your brain, and you’re not just your body either, at least not if you think of your body as just what’s encased within the skin. To really understand what’s going on inside your body, you would need to understand its history, which is as old as the universe. Understanding the body means…
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Re-Thinking Economics and the Meaning of Value with Tim Adalin and O. G. Rose
It was a genuine joy to be in dialogue with Daniel and Tim yesterday. I want to reflect on some of what I shared during our discussion. The first thing I think, to frame my remarks, would be to say that over the last couple decades of my adult life, in thinking about economics and…
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Toward a Goethean Physics: Reading Steiner’s “Light Course” (GA 320) through Whitehead’s Organic Realism
Below are some excerpts and more or less stream of consciousness reflections upon reading the student notes from Rudolf Steiner’s so-called “Light Course” (GA 320; Dec 1919-Jan 1920). The number headings correspond to each of his lectures. These notes are helping me prepare for a presentation next month at MysTech’s “Mysteries of Light” conference. 1. Rudolf Steiner spent…
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Review of “The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience”
Review of The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience (MIT Press, 2024) by Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson By Matthew David Segall In The Blind Spot, Frank, Gleiser, and Thompson offer an urgent philosophical intervention into humanity’s all but doomed technoscientific civilizational project. The authors argue cogently that our contemporary scientific culture has steered…
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“Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self” by Andrea Wulf
I joined Rupert Sheldrake and David Lorimer to discuss Wulf’s brilliant book on the “Jena set” (the Schlegels, Schiller, Goethe, Caroline, Novalis, Schelling, etc.).
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Transcendent Love and the Possibility of Revolutionary Political Change
I’ll be joining Cadell Last on Philosophy Portal next week to discuss the relationship between politics and love. At least as I relate to the topic, this is fundamentally a question of political theology. I’ve explored this terrain frequently over the years (eg, this process theological response to Carl Schmitt). In this post, I’ve dug up some old exchanges with Levi…
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Artificial Intelligence, Moral Imagination, and Spiritual Evolution (dialogue with Roman Campolo)
Roman and I had another wide-ranging dialogue. Topics traversed include:
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Dying to be Born (Dialogue with Roman Campolo)
Roman and I sat down for another dialogue. Topics discussed this time include: anatman, evil, relevant novelty, death, the ontological argument for the existence of God and its discontents, and other such matters.
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Renewing Philosophy (Dialogue with Tim Adalin)
Tim Adalin hosted me on his Voicecraft podcast to discuss process philosophy and its applications. The conversation opened with an exploration of the relationship between philosophy, the elite, and democracy (particularly its susceptibility to tyranny and the importance of wise leadership over populism). I emphasized the role of education in a democratic society, proposing a culture…
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Human Freedom and the Future of Spirituality (Dialoguing with Roman Campolo)
Roman is a songwriter based out of Los Angeles with credits for K-Pop band BTS and legacy artists like Elton John and Stevie Wonder. The first 15 minutes of this didn’t record because of a technical glitch, but we felt the rest was worth sharing. We explore questions like: Where does spirituality fit into (post)modern…
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Transcendent Naturalism: Dialoguing with John Vervaeke and Gregg Henriques
Here is the first of two conversations that I’ve recently recorded with John Vervaeke and Gregg Henriques as part of the “Transcendent Naturalism” series. Part two is available here. Transcendent Naturalism and Process Philosophy: The episode begins with some of my reflections on the “transcendent naturalism” that John and Gregg have been laying out in…
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Prehension: Is Experience Fundamental?
Brendan Graham Dempsey and I connected again to continue our discussion, this time focusing on Whitehead’s concept of “prehension.” I explained that, contrary to Ken Wilber’s placement of the concept in the upper left (individual-interior) quadrant of his AQAL map, prehension does not entail just an internal or subjective experience. It’s a transformative process where…
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Debating the Place of the Human in Cosmology with Brendan Graham Dempsey
After some back and forth in his Facebook group, Brendan was gracious enough to invite me on his Metamodernism podcast to discuss several core ideas, including the nature of scientific inquiry, the role of human experience in understanding the cosmos, and the limitations of mechanistic models in science. We discussed the intersection of philosophy, science,…
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Steiner and Whitehead on the true relationship between Sun, Moon, and Earth
Below is a slide from my summary at this morning’s Urphänomen reading group. We are reading Rudolf Steiner’s “Interdisciplinary Astronomy” lecture cycle (GA 323), originally delivered in January 1921. A video of my summary of Lecture 14 is also embedded below. Here’s a link to the text of Steiner’s lecture. In this particular lecture, Steiner…
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Cosmic History in Steiner and Whitehead (dialogue with Formscapes)
This was a really fun conversation with Formscapes (check out his content on YouTube). The dialogue begins with Whitehead’s ideas on hybrid prehension and how they might relate to Steiner’s cultivation of higher organs of spiritual perception. Whitehead appears to have been open to esoteric ideas, based on some evidence that he tried contacting his…
Footnotes2Plato 