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: philosophy

  • 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…

  • Theism/Atheism: Imagination and Ontological Openness

    There is no need to oppose one possibility with the other. Speculative philosophy’s task is to overcome the dualistic limitations of sense-understanding (subject v. object, quality v. substance) by way of a schematic renewal of (or participatory intervention into) our habitual way of imaging the world. Speculative philosophy must hold the binary (God/no-God) together to…

  • Science, Art, Religion: The Role of Speculative Philosophy in the Adventure of Rationality

    I’ve just completed Isabelle Stengers‘ formidable but rewarding text, Thinking With Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts (2011). The final chapters concern the viability of Whitehead’s theology, specifically his articulation of the relationship between God and the World. Stengers’ asks the reader to go slowly while considering why a divine function became necessary…

  • Ethopoiesis and Eternity

    Following up on my post and Sam’s and Adam’s comments on Monday and Tuesday (6/13-15), Adam sent me a one word text message: ‘Ethopoiesis’ I have a few thoughts on this neologism I’d like to share. This word carries a complex philosophical cargo, part cultural/artistic and part natural/machinic. Ethopoiesis carries the semantic weight of both…

  • Towards a Christological Realism: Thinking the Correlation with Teilhard and Barfield

    Preface Quentin Meillassoux‘s lucid text, After Finitude (2008), comes at a time when Continental philosophy finds itself engaging more closely with what might be called  “poetico-religious” modes of thought. Rationality of the Cartesian sort has been thoroughly deconstructed, and no longer seems capable of providing what it once promised: a clear and distinct picture of…

  • The Psychoanalysis of Philosophy: Towards the Eroticization of Logos

    The following is an essay written for a course called “post-secular Jewish emancipatory thought,” taught by Richard Shapiro in the Social and Cultural Anthropology department at CIIS. ———————————————————————- In May of 2010, the Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities at Middlesex University, Ed Esche, informed the philosophy department that its funding had been…

  • Thinking and Sensing, Space and Time

    Philosophy and science can be distinguished: the former is primarily concerned with thinking, the latter with sensing. This distinction is superficial, however, since there can be no pure science or pure philosophy; no pure concept or pure intuition. Phenomenologically, what exists is an interpenetration of cognitive action and carnal reaction, a vast network of felt…

  • Bruno Latour approaching an Object-Oriented Ontology

    The following is another exchange with friend and colleague Adam Robbert in response to an essay by Bruno Latour. First, a short excerpt from the article “On Interobjectivity“: Social worlds remain flat at all points, without there being any folding that might permit a passage from the “micro” to the “macro.” For example the traffic control room…

  • Meister Eckhart, Philosophy, and Soul-Making

    The following is an essay written for a weekend course taught by philosopher Jacob Needleman on Meister Eckhart the 26th and 27th of February 2011. ————————– Meister Eckhart, Philosophy, and the Soul By Matthew Segall And there shall be for thee all soft delight That shadowy thought can win, A bright torch, and a casement…

  • Constructive v. Critical Philosophy – Responding to Isabelle Stengers at CGU

    Once it has begun to swallow the overwhelmingly wondrous fact of existence–that there is anything at all!–philosophy can perhaps catch its breath and ask the most fundamental question: what is there? From this comes the only slightly more specific questions: What is a thing? What is an idea? Isabelle Stengers and Donna Haraway spoke on Thursday night…

  • PZ Myers’ will never believe in God

    PZ Myers’ blog post: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/10/eight_reasons_you_wont_persuad.php Some excerpts from my comments (beginning around #403): The sort of god PZ has decreed impossible to believe in has little in common with Augustine’s, or Plotinus’, or Aquinas’, or with any other great theologian’s God. Natural science is epistemically closed to theological issues, not because they are unreal, but…

  • Consciousness: Problem, Paradox, or Practice?

    A quick contextualizing note for those who are just joining the tangled thread of my recent blogalogue concerning the nature of consciousness and its relationship with the nervous system and surrounding cosmos: Last month, Steve Ramirez, a PhD candidate at MIT, posted an entry on his blog (http://okaysteve.wordpress.com/) concerning neuroscience’s supposed successes explaining the “problem” of consciousness purely…

  • messages about the purpose of philosophizing…

    Here is a message and my response that I’ve exchanged over on YouTube as 0ThouArtThat0.   From YouTube user drchaffee:   Thanks for understanding that I wasn’t trying to demean you with my length-constrained message to your video. I’ve had a question rolling around in my head for a couple of days, and I just…

  • Knowing and Being: philosophy as poetry, learning through expressing

    To know the world, the mouth must first make words. I speak, therefore I am and can know the world. Being conscious is a poetic act, a participatory co-creation of life and all that is. That it is co-creationary also makes being conscious a process of discovery. The human universe is populated by countless centers…

  • Celestial and Sexual: The Antipodes of Philosophy

    First, do yourself a philosophical favor and watch the film “Agora” (2009). Now that you’ve seen it, I’m not worried about playing spoiler. Ok, even if you haven’t had a chance to watch it yet, it’s historical fiction, so just pretend I’m refreshing your memory concerning the social and spiritual upheaval in the 4th century…

  • Public Philosophy (via Hyper tiling)

    Here are some really well developed (and highly agreeable!) thoughts by a graduate student in the UK (researching the science v. religion culture war) about the place of philosophy in society and academia. I just discovered his blog and have a lot more reading to do. Give it a look. On Wednesday, I attended the…

  • The End of the Word (preliminary remarks)

    To engage in philosophy is to attempt to wake up from a dream. I had one once where I dreamt of these men’s thoughts: I believe one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life.) It says that…

  • The Limits of Language

    The Limits of Language It seems ironic, at least in light of the premise of this paper, that the thoughts of a man such as Socrates could have given birth to the last twenty-four hundred years of Western philosophical discourse. Was it not he who said “I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance”?…