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: Evolution of consciousness

  • Owen Barfield in his own words

    I was delighted to discover a recording of a lecture delivered by Owen Barfield in 1978 at the Vancouver Institute in British Columbia. You can listen to the entire lecture here.

  • Thinking with Rudolf Steiner

    It is hard to believe I’ve been thinking with Steiner for almost 15 years. He is, as the late BBC documentarian and author Jonathan Stedall put it in the title of his 2011 biopic, a “challenge.” In contemporary German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s words: Steiner created a kind of antenna anthropology that we can no longer…

  • Urphänomen Reading Group – Rudolf Steiner’s “Riddles of Philosophy”

    Urphänomen Reading Group – Rudolf Steiner’s “Riddles of Philosophy”

    Below is a playlist featuring the recordings of our Urphänomen Reading Group, which is open to anyone interested (message us on Patreon or email archetypalphenomenon@gmail.com to join). New sessions will be added to this playlist as we go. We are reading the works of Rudolf Steiner, starting with Riddles of Philosophy. Next we’ll be reading…

  • On Whitehead’s Sociological Theory in “Adventures of Ideas”

    On Whitehead’s Sociological Theory in “Adventures of Ideas”

    Whitehead’s goal is these pages to elucidate the concept of civilization. He operates under the assumption that human civilization has profound cosmological significance. The fact that civilized beings have emerged in the course of the evolution of the universe tells us something important about the nature and perhaps even the purpose of that universe. His…

  • Back to teach at Schumacher College in April 2019: “The Evolution of Consciousness and the Cosmological Imagination”

    Back to teach at Schumacher College in April 2019: “The Evolution of Consciousness and the Cosmological Imagination”

    I’ll be teaching another short course at Schumacher College in the UK the week of April 22nd-26th, 2019. Here’s a link if you’re interested in registering: https://www.schumachercollege.org.uk/courses/short-courses/re-enchanting-the-cosmos Here’s what I’ll be teaching on: “The Evolution of Consciousness and the Cosmological Imagination” This week-long course will trace the evolution of consciousness in the West from ancient…

  • 45th Annual International Jean Gebser Society Conference: Architects of the Integral World @ CIIS Oct. 16-18th, 2015

    45th Annual International Jean Gebser Society Conference: Architects of the Integral World IN CONJUNCTION WITH THE PHILOSOPHY, COSMOLOGY, AND CONSCIOUSNESS PROGRAM, PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION DEPARTMENT, CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF INTEGRAL STUDIES SAN FRANCISCO, CA ~ OCTOBER 16th–18th, 2015 CALL FOR PAPERS In the winter of 1932, from a grammatical detail in the poetry of Rilke, Jean Gebser intuited an entire shift in the…

  • CIIS tomorrow (May 1): Ursula King speaking on Cosmotheanthropic Philosophy in Teilhard de Chardin and Raimon Panikkar

    [update: video now available] The Teilhard scholar Ursula King will speak tomorrow, May 1st, at 4pm at the California Institute of Integral Studies (1453 Mission St) about the evolutionary spirituality of Teilhard de Chardin and Raimon Panikkar. It’s free and open to the public. Join us! See the flyer linked below for more information. Ursula King…

  • What is Religion? (a YouTube discussion)

    A string of videos pondering the essence of religion, beginning with suicideforcelluloid and anekantavad. Professoranton and I then exchanged a few responses (below).

  • Margulis and the Psychedelic Eucharist

    Here is Prof. Corey Anton lecturing on the recently deceased Lynn Margulis’ bio-philosophy. Towards the end of her book (co-authored with Dorian Sagan) What Is Life?, Margulis offers an  analysis of the role of psilocybin in the evolution of mammalian consciousness. She brings up the usage of psychedelic fungi in ancient mystery cults just after sharing Socrates’…

  • research papers for graduate courses on Ernst Cassirer and Jean Gebser, and Christianity and Ecology

    I’m enrolled in two courses this semester here at CIIS. The first is taught by Prof. Eric Weiss; the second by Prof. Jacob Sherman. We’re well into the second week of November already, so its time to start fleshing out my term papers. Weiss’ course is on the evolutionary schemes of the 20th century cultural…

  • 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…

  • Owen Barfield on the inscape of the world.

    “When we speak… about consciousness, about the point at which consciousness arose and so forth, we are speaking not merely about human nature, as we call it, but also about nature itself. When we study consciousness historically, contrasting perhaps what men perceive and think now with what they perceived and thought at some period in…

  • Consciousness: The Holy Grail of Neuroscience

    The following is a video response I posted on YouTube to a blog post by Steve Ramirez about consciousness and neuroscience.     He writes the following: Matthew Segall, known popularly as “0ThouArtThat0″ on youtube, is as eloquent as any up and coming philosopher – an eloquence rivaled in magnitude only by his deep misunderstanding of how science…

  • Fragile Gaia: a gift for God?

    “Truth, and beauty, and goodness, are but different faces of the same All.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson I’ve just returned from the lawn outside the postern here at Schumacher. Sean Kelly lead a discussion circle with several of us that was intended to be a space for us to reflect on how the knowledge we’d internalized…