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

Tag: Ethics

  • Principles to Guide Philosophical Community (2021) By Eli Kramer (draft review)

    Principles to Guide Philosophical Community (2021) By Eli Kramer (draft review)

    The preprint book review below is forthcoming in World Futures: The Journal of New Paradigm Research ….. ELI KRAMER, Intercultural Modes of Philosophy, Volume One: Principles to Guide Philosophical Community. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2021: 382 pages. [Reviewed by MATTHEW D. SEGALL, Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness Program, California Institute of Integral Studies, 1453 Mission Street, San…


  • The Side View podcast

    The Side View podcast

    Adam Robbert interviewed me over on The Side View Podcast. Check it out HERE. We discussed speculative philosophy, panpsychism, politics, and more.


  • Towards an Aesthetic Ontology: Beauty, Sublimity, and Infinity

    “Two things fill the mind with ever-renewing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind is drawn to think of them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” So says Kant in the conclusion to his Critique of Practical Reason. He goes on to explain that neither the…


  • Towards a “Thermopolitics” (question for Levi Bryant)

    Levi Bryant just posted on what he is calling “thermopolitics.” He wants to shift the discourse in philosophy away from its exclusive focus on linguistic analysis and the critique of ideological superstructures toward the energetics of the universe that provide the condition for their possibility. Bryant writes: This is not a metaphor.  At this very…


  • Centropy, Entropy, and Ethics in the Universe

    Levi Bryant recently posted about Entropy. He writes: Entropy is the measure of order in any system. In this regard, to take a rough and ready criterion, the more probable it is that a particular element is located anywhere in a system the more entropy that system embodies. By contrast, the more improbable the location of an element in a system, theless entropic that system is.…


  • Thinking While Naked

    Here is an intriguing article in Wired magazine by Jonah Lehrer. He reflects upon the implications of an experiment attempting to gauge the cognitive significance of nakedness. It looked at how our attribution of agency to others is effected by what they wear and how attractive they are. The results: Pictures of the faces of…


  • Notes on the Occupation from the Mountaintop

    I walked to the top of Grand View Park here in the Sunset district of San Francisco. I wanted to clear my head by ascending to the mountaintop, where place expands into space and time transforms into history. History, as we know it, has a beginning and an end. Civilizations, and the cosmopolitical habitats they…


  • 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…


  • Soul and World: Fragments written upon reading “Thinking with Whitehead” by Isabelle Stengers

    Stengers has succeeded in bringing Whitehead back to life. Whitehead’s speculative cosmology succeeds, if it does, by avoiding bifurcations between disassociated categories. Instead of placing “subjective illusion” and “objective reality” in irremediable conflict with one another; instead of separating “man” and “nature,” “mind” and “matter,” or “God” and “the World” in order to explain one…