Footnotes2Plato

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

Tag: Chaos

  • Video of “The Psychedelic Eucharist: Toward a Pharmacological Philosophy of Religion”

    A lecture I delivered yesterday (Sept. 29th, 2014) at CIIS for ERIE. Lecture notes 

  • Notes on Intro and Ch. 1 of “Difference and Repetition” by Gilles Deleuze

    As Adam/Knowledge Ecology has mentioned, a few of us are doing a reading group on Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. Here are my notes for our first session. Notes for Introduction and Chapter 1 of Difference and Repetition by Deleuze By Matt Segall Preface: Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition is an initiatory text that, rather than putting…

  • Whitehead’s Divine Function (response to Knowledge Ecology)

    Adam/Knowledge Ecology has responded to my comment about the role of the divine in Whitehead’s metaphysical scheme. Let me say at the get go that Whitehead himself acknowledged that he didn’t sufficiently work out the relationship between God and the World in Process and Reality. I approach Whitehead’s scheme, then, as a hacker might go…

  • Returning to Whitehead…

    After finishing my first comprehensive exam on Schelling, its now time to dive back into Whitehead. For starters, Adam over at the new minimalist Knowledge Ecology has recently been posting brilliant snippets of what I believe is a longer tract he is writing about the ecology of ideas. Here is one titled “The Alien Light“: On…

  • C. S. Peirce on Chaos and Law–On the Mystery of Naming the Real

    After Nature/Leon has brought my attention to a review of a new book, Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism by Paul Forster.  “[Peirce’s] opposition to nominalism motivated him as nothing else did and, as Forster shows, is central to his philosophical program. While Peirce’s argument against nominalism was strictly philosophical, his objection to it extended…

  • Schelling and the Transcendental Abyss of Nature

    “What is essential in science is movement; deprived of this vital principle, its assertions die like fruit taken from the living tree.” –Schelling, The Ages of the World ——————————– The Copernican Revolution had the exoteric effect of throwing the Earth into motion, decentering human consciousness in the Cosmos. We, like the other planets, became a…

  • …the meaning of disaster…

    Some of my thoughts concerning the still unfolding tragedy in Japan… —————– I take up philosophy largely to defend meaning and cosmos from the nihilism and chaos at the root of much contemporary thinking. But I am reminded by this catastrophe that the earth’s order and harmony is proved by an exception: ruptures in nature’s…

  • Meillassoux and Post-Secular Philosophy

    “So long as we believe that there must be a reason why what is, is the way it is, we will continue to fuel superstition, which is to say, the belief that there is an ineffable reason underlying all things” (After Finitude, p. 82). This belief, according to Meillassoux, is logically unnecessary, since there is…

  • Owen Barfield and Quentin Meillassoux

    Meillassoux and Barfield may at first seem like strange bedfellows, but by unmasking the pervasiveness of correlationism in post-Kantian philosophy, the former steps right into an issue that works its way into nearly all of Barfield’s published works. In perhaps the most complete and cogent explanation of his position, Saving the Appearances, Barfield writes: “…the…

  • Religion and the Modern World: Towards a Naturalistic Panentheism

    Religion and the Modern World: Towards a Naturalistic Panentheism “Dear people, let the flower in the meadow show you how to please God and be beautiful at the same time. —The rose does not ask why. It blooms because it blooms. It pays no attention to itself nor does it wonder if anyone sees it.”…