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: poetry

  • Today is an endless genesis.

    A bit of cosmocinematic spellcasting inspired by Rudolf Steiner’s Interdisciplinary Astronomy Course Today was June the tenth. The year two thousand and twenty two. Today, the Earth continued weaving its way through space. Through a space twisted out of time by lunar tides and solar seasons. A space that did not pre-exist our movement through…

  • Eins und Alles _ Goethe

    Eins und Alles _ Goethe

    My German is schrecklich, but since I couldn’t find any translations I liked, I spent the afternoon struggling with Goethe’s poem “Eins und Alles” (“One and All”), with a dictionary and several other translations in tow. What follows is my best attempt to render this Englishly. I am convinced that translation is impossible, but I…

  • Philosophy is a tree.

    Philosophy is a tree.

    I don’t know whether I am a poet pretending to philosophize, or a philosopher who happens to rhyme. I am hungry for wisdom’s teaching. Feed me philosophy. These thoughts do not take place inside my head. I taste them in my mouth. They boil in my belly. My chest is resounding with their potential. The…

  • Responding to Levi Bryant on the Question of Religion

    I’ve copied my response to Levi below: I’m glad you are not reducing all religion to the sort of literalism we’re both trying to critique (you from a scientific standpoint aimed at religion, me from a spiritual standpoint aimed at scientism). Regardless of what the majority of “believers” may think about the ontological status of…

  • Fragment of a Dialogue: A Walk to Imagination’s Limits

    This is an incomplete project that I may not be able to pick up for a while. Thought I’d post the fragment. It was inspired by Schelling’s dialogue Bruno. —————————————————– A Walk to Imagination’s Limits Chroma: We have chosen a wonderful evening to set out on a walk along the riverside. Don’t you think so, my friends?…

  • Petals Rising

    I forgot about this short poem I penned back in August on the inside of the back cover of Ramey’s book after sitting on a bench intending to read in a rose garden in Golden Gate Park. It seems relevant to some of what I’ve covered above: I stand here watching rose petals fall. I pick up…

  • Cosmic Self: a Uni-Verse

    It is with my own self-consciousness that I must begin… but I will confess, I am not yet certain of my own beginning, or even of my own uncertainty. Already I seem to have said too much: “I am”–how do I know that? Do I really exist? Can I claim self-consciousness as “my own” if…

  • The Poetry of Philosophy: Wordsworth’s Poetic Vision of Nature in Light of Whitehead’s Cosmological Scheme

    The aim of this essay is to read the nature poetry of William Wordsworth in light of the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, such that the epistemological and cosmological implications of the former are brought more fully into philosophical view. According to Victor Lowe, it is probable that no other man, save Plato, shaped the…

  • The Power of Adjectives: Two Poems on Imagination by Patrick Lane and P. K. Page

    “Albino Pheasants” (1977) by Patrick Lane  At the bottom of the field where thistles throw their seeds and poplars grow from cotton into trees in a single season I stand among the weeds. Fenceposts hold each other up with sagging wire. Here no man walks except in wasted time. Men circle me with cattle, cars…

  • [final draft] Poetic Imagination in the Speculative Philosophies of Plato, Schelling, and Whitehead

    Poetic Imagination in the Speculative Philosophies of Plato, Schelling, Whitehead The Garden of Eden and Expulsion from the Garden by Thomas Cole “I am convinced that the supreme act of reason, because it embraces all ideas, is an aesthetic act; and that only in beauty are truth and goodness akin.–The philosopher must possess as much…