Tag: evolution
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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’…
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Schelling’s Pantheogenic Naturphilosophie
In his bok The Origin and Goal of History, Karl Jaspers’ claims that Schelling “clung with complete conviction to the theory that the creation of the world took place six thousand years ago, whereas today no one doubts the bone finds which prove man’s life on earth to have gone on far more than a hundred…
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“From Kant to Schelling to Process Metaphysics: On the Way to Ecological Civilization” by Arran Gare
I stumbled upon this great essay on Schelling and process metaphysics recently published in the journal Cosmos and History by Prof. Arran Gare. He really makes it clear how compatible Schelling’s Naturphilosophie is with Whitehead’s cosmological scheme. “From Kant to Schelling to Process Metaphysics: On the Way to Ecological Civilization” Here is a sample: Schelling’s work…
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Thoughts on Tim Morton on the Ecological Emergency
HERE is a recent interview of Tim Morton I found over on Knowledge-Ecology. I’ve made some notes while listening: I absolutely love what he is saying. Really, I dig it. His ontology has style, and I don’t just mean he is rhetorically skilled and so persuasive to us as subjectivities, I mean he has tapped…
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Esalen and CIIS, a Conversation with Michael Murphy and Robert McDermott
President Emeritus Robert McDermott and creator of Esalen Michael Murphy in conversation on June 1st at CIIS in San Francisco.
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Reflections on Physicist Lawrence Krauss and the Consolations of Philosophy
Below is Lawrence Krauss from a recent interview in the Atlantic (Thanks to Jason/Immanent Transcendence for bringing this controversy to my attention): Krauss: …Philosophy used to be a field that had content, but then “natural philosophy” became physics, and physics has only continued to make inroads. Every time there’s a leap in physics, it encroaches on these areas that philosophers have carefully sequestered…
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Fragments of a Romantic Theory of Evolution
Darwin is supposed to have discovered something nowadays called “evolution” and to have laid to rest something nowadays called “creationism.” But if this is so, what are we to make of the theories of Schelling and Goethe in Germany, and of Coleridge in England, articulated several decades earlier than he? Their Romantic conception of the…
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Asking Terrence Deacon about Whitehead’s Reformed Platonism
A few weeks back, Jason/Immanent Transcendence asked me if I’d like to start a reading group with him this summer for Terrence Deacon‘s new book. A few days later, I found out he’d be lecturing in San Francisco… I was impressed and hope to encourage more of you to join our reading/discussion group! I’ve transcribed the…
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Lecture by Prof. Brian Swimme – “Another Step Forward: Navigating a Seamless Universe”
Cosmologist Brian Swimme will be presenting at the PCC Forum at CIIS in San Francisco, CA this Friday, April 27th at 6:30pm in room 565. The lecture is free and open to the public.
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Hermeticism and the Anthropic Principle of Evolution
In The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), Karl Popper famously (or infamously, as far as Hegelians are concerned) attacked Hegel for his bewitching apriorism and supposed distain for empirical science, going so far as to blame his Platonically inspired “mystery method” for the rise of fascism in Germany. Walter Kaufmann offered an appropriate response back…
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Robert N. Bellah: The Big History of Religion in Human Evolution.
I just returned from a lecture by the sociologist of religion Robert Bellah. He was invited to speak about his book Religion in Human Evolution (2011) by the Dominican University of California. The University has just started a program in Big History, which concerns not only the study of human culture (east, west, and indigenous),…
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Thinking with Hegel: Preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit
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Thinking with Latour and Bellah: Religion beyond Nature and Culture
I’m giving a brief presentation in a course on Christianity and Ecology with Prof. Jacob Sherman on Thursday. In what follows, I’ll try to sketch out what I’d like to say. I plan to briefly summarize the cosmotheandric potential of Robert N. Bellah’s recent tome, Religion and Human Evolution (2011). Bellah develops an account of the…
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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…
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Work and Play in Human Evolution
At the center of Robert Bellah‘s 700 page account of the axial turn in the evolution of religion (Religion in Human Evolution, 2011) is a theory of play. The relaxed field generated by playfulness, according to Bellah’s richly empirical story, is the source of all human ritual and religion, and indeed of culture more generally. Play is…
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Religion and Reality in the University: Thinking with Robert N. Bellah
A quote from Bellah’s recently published book Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. I’ve just started this massive tome, but thus far I think I’m going to really like it. “One could say that if we can no longer glimpse that sacred foundation, the actual university would collapse. For the real…
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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…
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Schelling, Darwin, and the Romantic Conception of Life
I’m not yet midway through a thick tome by Prof. Robert J. Richards at the University of Chicago entitled The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (2002). It is soaked in personal details, the trysts and tears of the friends and lovers responsible for generating a literary and philosophical movement in…
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Response to Knowledge-Ecology about Dawkins, Evolution, and Creationism
Knowledge-Ecology recently posted his lament about the scientific ignorance of GOP presidential candidate Gov. Perry, who denies both evolution and climate change. Adam also mentioned his support for Richard Dawkins’ rebuttal. I might also count Dawkins as a political ally, but not as a cosmological ally. And since I, like Adam, struggle to avoid separating…
Footnotes2Plato 