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: play

  • Episode 6 of The Future Faces of Spirit

    Episode 6 of The Future Faces of Spirit

    Bruce Alderman of Integral Stage has been releasing a multipart video series called “The Future Faces of Spirit.” Other participants include John Vervaeke and Bonnitta Roy. Here is Alderman’s description of the series and my contribution: “What paths lie ahead for religion and spirituality in the 21st Century? How might the insights of modernity and…

  • Religion in Human and Cosmic Evolution: Whitehead’s Alternative Vision

    This was an early draft of a paper I presented at the 10th International Whitehead Conference. For video of the actual presentation, click HERE. ——————————— Abstract: This talk compares several approaches to the emergence of religion in human evolution. I contrast Robert Bellah’s and Alfred North Whitehead’s pluralistic, cosmologically oriented accounts to Daniel Dennett’s reductionistic,…

  • An interview with Jesse Turri at Home Brewed Christianity on Science, Religion, Imagination, and more…

    HERE is the interview. I haven’t listened to it yet, but I remember a wide-ranging conversation on everything from my own intellectual and spiritual development, to the relationship between science and religion, to the role of imagination and psychedelics in the philosophy of nature. HERE is Jesse Turri’s personal website.

  • Ontologies of Work (capitalism) and Play (panpsychism)

    Now that the Pluralism Wars have died down, each camp having dug itself in for the winter, maybe its time to change the subject. Let’s talk about David Graeber’s recent article in The Baffler “What’s the Point if We Can’t Have Fun?” He makes the radical (or not so radical?) move of taking play seriously, not only…

  • Cosmopolitical Reflections on Economy, Society, and Religion

      When was the day that money became an idol instead of an instrument? Was it August 15, 1971, when to pay for the Vietnam War Nixon shocked the world by erasing the Gold Standard, thereby unilaterally making the value of the US Dollar the reserve currency of the world economy? Or was it in the…

  • Remembering Creation: Towards a Christian Ecosophy

    Remembering Creation: Towards a Christian Ecosophy The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun by William Blake “The Lord was born with me [Wisdom] at the beginning of His way, before His works of old. From everlasting I was established, from the beginning, from the earliest times of the earth…Then I was…

  • 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…

  • Cosmopolitical Reflections upon leaving for Black Rock City

    Since the dominant narratives bringing forth the ongoing misadventure of industrial capitalism fail to properly situate the human soul in its actual time and place, any serious inquiry into the nature of our individual and collective situation must begin with an act of counter memory: we must ask afresh in each generation, who are we,…

  • From Means to Ends, From Work to Play, From Number to Pneuma

    When was the day that money became an idol instead of an instrument? Was it August 15, 1971, when Nixon shocked the world by erasing the Gold Standard, thereby unilaterally making the value of the US Dollar the standard of the world economy? Or was it in the waning months of 2008, when the central banks…