Footnotes2Plato

“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”
–Alfred North Whitehead

Category: Rudolf Steiner

  • Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Activity: Socrates, Jesus, and the Wisdom of Love

    I’ve been asked to think about thinking, and to write about it. I’ve gotten myself tangled up in the middle of this kind of mess before, and so I’ll admit right off the bat that I cannot be sure which comes first, the thinking or the writing. Maybe my writing is just the trace of…

  • Rudolf Steiner and the Angelic Hierarchies

    In a recently posted essay on Christian Ecosophy, I referred repeatedly to angels. Though they are as prevalent in today’s popular imagination as they ever were in the past, the secular intelligentsia tend to dismiss them as relics of our pre-scientific childhood. I think it is important that lines of communication be opened between secular…

  • Aesthethics: Loving the Beauty of Goodness

    I’m still in the planning phase of my dissertation on the ontology of Imagination, and as such am working to ferret out the most interesting aspects of my chosen site of inquiry. My research is focused on the ontology of Imagination, since my guiding thesis is that any perception of or reflection upon reality depends…

  • The Ethics and Esotericism of Eating

    Bourdain says the analogy between animal and human flesh (PETA: “you eat cow, eh? so would you eat human meat, too?”) is the last irrational wail of the animal rights activist. His response: “If I were two weeks out on the life boat, hell yeah I would!” Gill then makes an especially poignant response about…

  • The Role of Imagination in the Science of the Stars

    Is the history of science a continuous progression from less to more accurate theories of physical phenomena? Or, as Thomas Kuhn suggested, is its history characterized by a discontinuous series of paradigm shifts? In the latter case, gradual “progress” occurs only locally within established theoretical frameworks until, through the sudden imaginative leap of a genius…

  • Intuitive Thinking vs. Reflective Thought: Harman on Meillassoux

    I’ve just read Graham Harman‘s essay for continent. entitled “Meillassoux’s Virtual Future” (2011). As usual, it is primarily Harman’s style of philosophizing that really excites me. I am fascinated by the way he juggles and plays with ideas, even when I don’t finally agree with his attempts to securely mold a certain set of them into…

  • Philosophy Blogging, OOO/SR, Nihilism, and God

    It is difficult to describe the effects of the blogosphere on consciousness, especially when the information communicated via blogs pretends to be philosophical. The blog, as a medium, has not yet been swallowed as radio by TV, or the printed word by the digital hyperlink, and so gaining perspective on its effects remains difficult. We’re…

  • 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 the philosophical import of religious experience, and in light of some of the concerns brought up by Jason Hills, I wanted to further unpack the…

  • Religion and Philosophy: The God Problem

    The discussion continues over on Levi Bryant’s blog. Bryant agrees with me that Whitehead’s conception of God does not fall prey to many of the ethical and epistemological criticisms he levels against traditional theism. But he fails to understand the problem that Whitehead’s God is purported to have solved. Whitehead’s style of philosophizing has much…

  • Imagining the Cosmos: notes on my dissertation…

    In the past year or so, the blueprint of my dissertation topic has gone through multiple iterations. Last year, while applying for my PhD studies at CIIS, I wrote a goal statement that still reflects the general theme I am envisioning. Now that I’m entering the last term of course work, I wanted to take…

  • Process Ontology in Schelling and Whitehead

    In preparation for a larger speculative project, I’ve been reading a translation by Judith Norman of the 2nd draft of Schelling’s unfinished manuscript entitled Ages of the World (1813). I’ve been intrigued by Schelling’s philosophies of nature and freedom for several years, but never had the time to do a closer study. Iain Hamilton Grant‘s…

  • Rudolf Steiner on the Evolution of Consciousness and the Alphabet

    Here are the first few paragraphs of a lecture by Steiner (given in Dornach, 18th December 1921) on the relationship between alphabetic technologies and the evolution of Greek and Roman consciousness: For some time we have been occupied with gaining a more accurate knowledge of Man’s relation to the universe, and today we would like to supplement our…

  • Ethologies of Death

    Adam over at Knowledge Ecology posted some thoughts in response to my last blog on the concept of Life. I suggested that one way of distinguishing the human from other kinds of being is that we can contemplate abstractions like life-in-itself, and therefore also, death-in-itself. Adam writes the following: I think this is worth discussing…

  • Documentary on Owen Barfield

  • Religious Dialogue as Soul-Making: A Prayer to Buddha and Christ

    Why Religious Dialogue? Interreligious dialogue is not a distant possibility but a present necessity. This essay is a response to this need, but it is written also as an intrareligious dialogue. This is because the conditioned nature of my own personality, having been historically shaped into what it is by my unique imaginal participation in…

  • Harman and the Special Magic of Human Knowledge

    Among the most often tagged names on this blog are Rudolf Steiner and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, both of whose cosmologies privilege the position of human beings relative to other beings. The reasons for this elevation of human consciousness are complex, but in a word they issue from an intuition about selfhood. Both men dwell…

  • Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology

    I’ve just finished part one of Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things, Harman’s treatise on the relationship between the phenomenology of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Lingis and his object-oriented approach to philosophy. He is motivated by a desire to direct our attention to the things themselves, the independently existing objects of the world. It…

  • Uncovering the Unconscious: Towards an Integral Psychology

    This paper was presented at the Jung Society of Monterey in 2019 (video below, unfortunately with poor audio):

  • The Spirit of Philosophy

    I am passionate about philosophy not because I desire answers to arbitrary questions or explanations of abstract problems. My passion arises because life, as given–as it at first appears to my everyday consciousness–is incomplete and unaccounted for. The reason for my existence has never been self-evident, and yet discovering this reason is the prerequisite of…

  • Christopher Alexander’s Science of Imagination

    I’m six chapters into The Luminous Ground, and Christopher Alexander has already convinced me that living architecture has the potential to profoundly alter the way we relate to the universe. A building composed of what Alexander calls “living centers” literally opens a window to a deeper dimension of reality. We do not see these openings…

  • A comment to Hyper Tiling concerning anthropocentrism

    You can find Fabio’s blog here: http://hypertiling.wordpress.com/ Fabio, You’ve succeeded in getting me interested in speculative realism and object-oriented philosophy. Kantian skepticism is perhaps the main obstacle I must overcome in my dissertation, which loosely described is an argument for a more richly textured ontology, such that any full accounting of reality must include its…