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: love

  • Transcendent Love and the Possibility of Revolutionary Political Change

    I’ll be joining Cadell Last on Philosophy Portal next week to discuss the relationship between politics and love. At least as I relate to the topic, this is fundamentally a question of political theology. I’ve explored this terrain frequently over the years (eg, this process theological response to Carl Schmitt).  In this post, I’ve dug up some old exchanges with Levi…

  • Digital Poiesis: Rhyme of Life and Death

    I pasted one of my recent stream of consciousness notebook entries about the role of death denial in the potentiation of trauma into Chat-GPT4 and prompted it to write a poem in the style of Novalis out of the material. Below is what it spit out. Many of its words and phrases are identical to…

  • Love and Death in the Gaianthropocene (prologue to my talk at Boom Festival)

    Sharing some thoughts I’ll expand upon during my talk at Boom Festival next week. A transcript of this video: Next week, I’ll be in Idanha-a-Nova, Portugal to attend the Boom Festival. This festival is known for its psytrance, cultural offerings, and art. I’ve often heard it described as the European version of Burning Man, though I’m…

  • War of the Worlds: Love and Strife in the Pluriverse

    Another one for the ontological pluralism file. Delivered a few months back at the Cosmology of Love conference at CIIS.

  • Love, Death, and the Sub-Creative Imagination in J.R.R. Tolkien (revised)

    Love, Death, and the Sub-Creative Imagination in J. R. R. Tolkien Written March 3, 2013, Revised September 20, 2014 by Matthew David Segall In the year 1951, as recorded by the calendar of our world, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote to a potential publisher of his Lord of the Rings trilogy to describe the origin of his…

  • The Difference Between Kant’s and Schelling’s Philosophies of Nature

    A lecture I gave earlier this week in a class at CIIS on Spirit and Nature.

  • Love, Death, and the Sub-Creative Imagination in J. R. R. Tolkien

    Yesterday I found myself reading The Silmarillion, an unfinished collection of Tolkien’s mythopoeic writings depicting the creation of Ëa and its passage through the first of the three ages of the world (The Lord of the Rings trilogy depicts events at the end of the third age). The stories, posthumously published by his son Christopher in 1977, are prefaced…

  • Immanent Law, Transcendent Love, and Political Theology

    I’m going to attempt to clarify my own position in relation to that of Levi Bryant’s on the issue of the potential role of religion in revolutionary politics. Bryant has toned down the diatribe, offering two substantive posts over at Larval Subjects, as well as several comments to me here at Footnotes. I’ll try to lay…

  • Experiments in Political Theology and Dialogical Blogging

    The first clause in the title of this post is the subtitle of Simon Critchley‘s newest book, The Faith of the Faithless (2012). Critchley is a deep ethical thinker who had until a week ago managed to fly under my radar. This isn’t all that surprising, since the admittedly still diffuse research methodology of my…

  • 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…

  • The Mysticism and Cosmology of the American Genius Howard Thurman, a lecture at CIIS

    Last night I had the privilage of attending a lecture by Brian Swimme and Bonnie and Kashka Wills on the thought of Howard Thurman. Brian is a mathematical cosmologist who teaches at CIIS here in San Francisco. Bonnie is a Restorative Justice Facilitator in Oakland. Her brother Kashka is a former literature professor turned poet.…

  • Iris Murdoch on Love and Otherness

    “Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love…is the discovery of reality.” –Iris Murdoch (“The Sublime and the Good”, in the Chicago Review, Vol. 13, 1959, p. 51)

  • Levi Bryant on the Role of Love in Philosophy

    Bryant posted a great piece on textual transference and the role of love in learning. He has succeeded in making me wonder what it is exactly that gives ideas their alluring personalities. How is it that sympathy and charisma have such an effect in the world, while cold-hard facts and rationally deduced truth seem to…

  • Gravity Is Love, And Other Astounding Metaphors : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR

    This NPR article mentions one of my professors, cosmologist Brian Swimme. Here is my comment: Dr. Swimme calls gravity love, and I think it is an apt metaphor. Anthropomorphic? Perhaps, but how else are we to really understand gravity unless we can relate it to our human experience of the universe? And it is not…

  • Physical and Spiritual Energy

    Energy. The science of thermodynamics defines it as the ability of a physical system to do work. But in the case of a human being, how does this work relate to the conscious experience of the person performing it? That is, what is the relationship between physical and spiritual energy? We might start trying to…