"The safest general characterization of the philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." —Alfred North Whitehead
Several weeks ago, I submitted a proposal for a Templeton Foundation research fellowship called "God and the Book of Nature: Science-engaged Theology of Nature." I just heard back from the review committee that my proposal was not selected. : ( Oh well. I thought I'd share my cover letter and shelved (for now) research proposal. [...]
Here's the recent debate between Richard Dawkins and Bret Weinstein on the relationship between cultural and biological evolution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYzU-DoEV6k Here are two response videos from me arguing for the relevance of Francisco Varela and Evan Thompson et al.'s theory of autopoiesis and Alfred North Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jx06_OY6gU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DnL0_fydic Some relevant essays that [...]
https://www.schumachercollege.org.uk/courses/short-courses/physics-of-the-world-soul Schumacher College has decided to make my week on Schelling and Whitehead a stand alone course called "Physics of the World-Soul." It will take place June 18-22. More information available at the link above.
Below is the draft of a paper I'll present at next week's International Whitehead Conference in the Azores. Feedback appreciated! 2017 International Whitehead Conference Matthew T. Segall The Place of Life in the Cosmos: Feeling the Origin of Organism “A philosophic outlook is the very foundation of thought and of life. The [...]
Here is anthropologist Anne Buchanan on the post-truth era in natural science. I was reminded of my post on the federally-funded Brain Initiative a few years ago. Buchanan includes geneticist Ken Weiss' list of facts that do not fit the reductionistic paradigm of "normal science" in biology at the end of her post. Weiss and Buchanan [...]
Conference website. Friday, June 5th at 4:45pm: Whitehead's Non-Modern Philosophy: Cosmos and Polis in the Pluriverse Saturday June 6th at 2:30pm: Religion in Human and Cosmic Evolution: Whitehead's Alternative Vision I have a lot to say about some of the questions that came up during the discussion (~58 minutes into the video), especially the issues [...]
For more from Smith, see this co-authored essay "The Origin of Life": "As we see it, the early steps on the way to life are an inevitable, incremental result of the operation of the laws of chemistry and physics operating under the conditions that existed on the early Earth, a result that can be understood [...]
This was an early draft of a paper I presented at the 10th International Whitehead Conference. For video of the actual presentation, click HERE. --------------------------------- Abstract: This talk compares several approaches to the emergence of religion in human evolution. I contrast Robert Bellah's and Alfred North Whitehead's pluralistic, cosmologically oriented accounts to Daniel Dennett's reductionistic, [...]
Below is my lecture on German Idealism and Romanticism given yesterday (Sept. 30) for MA students enrolled in an Introduction to Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness course at CIIS.
In preparation for a lecture on mind and nature in German Idealism, I'm working my way through Kant's third of three critiques, the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790). Prior to this sitting, I've only ever spent time with small sections of this text. For example, sections 75 and 76 in the second part [...]
The philosopher Evan Thompson (author of Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind) recently reviewed two books on the philosophy of biology: Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini's What Darwin Got Wrong and Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly Wrong. Check it out HERE. Thompson [...]
I've been reading some of the theoretical biologist Robert Rosen's essays on the relationship between biology and physics and can't help but compare him to Friedrich Schelling. Rosen writes: [Contemporary physics embodies] a mechanistic approach to biological phenomena, whose only alternative seems to be a discredited, mystical, unscientific vitalism. [It] supposes biology to be a [...]
Something of a response to Levi Bryant/LarvalSubjects on "hylephobia." See also this post on the Astrality of Materiality.
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 [...]
I linked to Cain's essay on Darwin in my last post on his theory of the psychedelic origins of religion. I wanted to comment on what he tries to do in the Darwin essay. His claim is that, post-Darwin, the old distinction between life and matter no longer holds; therefore, we are all more like [...]
