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: cosmos

  • “Logic of Imagination: The Expanse of the Elemental” by John Sallis

    I just finished John Sallis‘ latest book: It was my first experience of his writing, which was lucid and even rose to imaginal and inspired heights in places. I haven’t read continental phenomenology in a while, though thinkers like Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty definitely shaped my entry into academic philosophy as an undergraduate. What I…

  • 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…

  • The Poetics of Cosmogenesis, or Cosmopoiesis

    Jason/Immanent Transcendence has asked me to offer a Whiteheadian take on his recent posts (two examples are HERE, and, especially relevant, HERE) concerned with such ideas as purpose, process, form, time, and chance in John Dewey. Jason has also recently written about a Deweyan approach to the place of values in nature while in conversation…

  • Deacon’s Incomplete Nature (con’t.)

    A week and a half ago, Jason/Immanent Transcendence posted the first volley of our summer reading group on chapter zero of Terence Deacon’s Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (2012). In that chapter, Deacon introduced the key conceptual locus of the book, what he calls the absential features of living and psychic systems: “phenomena whose existence is determined…

  • [final draft] Poetic Imagination in the Speculative Philosophies of Plato, Schelling, and Whitehead

    Poetic Imagination in the Speculative Philosophies of Plato, Schelling, Whitehead The Garden of Eden and Expulsion from the Garden by Thomas Cole “I am convinced that the supreme act of reason, because it embraces all ideas, is an aesthetic act; and that only in beauty are truth and goodness akin.–The philosopher must possess as much…

  • The Cosmological Powers

    This is a presentation I eventually gave during one of Brian Swimme‘s courses at CIIS. Watching it again now, I detect thinly disguised Christian apologetics in what I’ve said. That doesn’t necessarily make it bad cosmology.

  • Cosmos, Anthropos, and Theos in Harman, Teilhard, and Whitehead

    Knowledge-Ecology has written a reflection upon finishing Graham Harman’s new book The Quadruple Object. Adam writes that “OOO is greatly enriching our sense of cosmos, whilst (somewhat) impoverishing our sense of anthropos.” I’ve had similar reservations about Harman’s anthrodecentrism (if I may diagnose it): Harman and the Special Magic of Human Knowledge. Harman’s is an ontology…