Tag: theology
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Roberto Unger’s Religious Revolution and Its Anthroposophical Resonances
I picked up Roberto Unger’s book The Religion of the Future (2014) for the first time yesterday. On the back cover of his book, this excerpt is printed: Everything in our existence points beyond itself. We must nevertheless die. We cannot grasp the ground of being. Our desires are insatiable. Our lives fail adequately to express our…
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C. S. Peirce’s “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God” (1908)
In his 1908 essay, “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God,” Charles Sanders Peirce offers a “humble hypothesis” meant to be accessible to the expert logician and clodhopper alike. God is identified as the ens necessarium, or the necessary being. This necessary being, according to Peirce, is the creator of all three (or at least…
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God and Nature in Schelling and Whitehead (Dialogue with Rahul Sam)
I had a great time speaking with Rahul over the weekend. He’d been reading my book on Schelling and Whitehead, so we mostly discussed the philosophy of nature and process theology. I began by discussing death and human destiny in the long term, emphasizing the existential quandary that humans face as animals aware of our…
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Next Week: Physics of the World-Soul at the Open and Relational Theology Conference
Next Saturday, Feb. 19 I’ll be hearing from four respondents who will assess my recent book on Whiteheadian cosmology Physics of the World-Soul (SacraSage, 2021). Tickets are available here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ortline-tickets-219336089147 Schedule: 9am EasternRory Randall, An Open Theist Renewal Theology: God’s Love, The Spirit’s Power, and Human Freedom– Panelists: Joshua Reichard, Steve Harper, Chris Baker, Monte…
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A review of Michael Hogue’s “American Immanence: Democracy for an Uncertain World” (2018)
MICHAEL S. HOGUE, American Immanence: Democracy for An Uncertain World. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018: 238 pages. [Reviewed by: MATTHEW D. SEGALL, Philosophy and Religion Department, California Institute of Integral Studies, 1453 Mission Street, San Francisco, California, 94103, USA. <msegall@ciis.edu>.] Michael Hogue has written a timely theopolitical intervention drawing from (and contributing to) the American…
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American Immanental Philosophies and the Future of Theopolitics: Dialoging with Michael Hogue
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Whitehead’s Final Interpretation of Reality: God and the World
Whitehead tells us at the start of the final part of Process & Reality (“Final Interpretation”) that the chief danger in philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence. For many modern, scientifically inclined philosophers, this narrowness has taken the form of an all too easy rejection of the world’s religious traditions and the religious experience which gave rise…
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The Place of Life in the Cosmos (draft of 11th International Whitehead Conference paper)
Below is the draft of a paper I’ll present at next week’s International Whitehead Conference in the Azores. Feedback appreciated! 2017 International Whitehead Conference Matthew T. Segall The Place of Life in the Cosmos: Feeling the Origin of Organism “A philosophic outlook is the very foundation of thought and of life. The…
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Schelling & Whitehead inheriting Spinoza & Leibniz: God and the Modern World
I’ve just finished Matthew Stewart’s popular book The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World (2006). I was hoping to fill out my own understanding of the historical context surrounding these two thinkers. I was not disappointed on this front. Stewart combed the archives and stitched together…
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Audio from International Whitehead Conference in Krakow
Here is the audio of my presentation at the IWC last week in the philosophy of religion section: Here is a PDF of the paper I read, titled “Worldly Religion in Whitehead and Deleuze: Steps Toward an Incarnational Philosophy” Related articles 9th Annual International Whitehead Conference in Kracow, Poland (footnotes2plato.com) Also, thanks to Leon over…
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Thinking the Holocaust with Schelling…
A few days ago, I decided to re-read Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809). It’s a reasonably short text of about 75 pages, so I’ve read it 3 or 4 times in the past year. The text’s key conceptual innovations regarding the essence of freedom (which Schelling defines as the scission…
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Discussing Bruno Latour’s Gaian Political Theology
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Cosmopolitical Theology: Violence, Value, and the Push for a Planetary People
This is a talk I gave back in September for my colleagues at CIIS during our annual retreat to Esalen in Big Sur, CA.
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Simon Critchley’s “Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology”
Just ordered his newest book Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology (2012) after watching Critchley and Cornel West’s recent discussion. There are many reviews of the book around, but here is one I enjoyed from the Los Angeles Review of Books by David Winters. He writes: Critchley…[claims] that politics consists of reconfigurations of religion. In…
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[Rough Draft] “The Re-Emergence of Schelling” – The nature of human freedom
For a PDF of the entire essay, click The Re-Emergence of Schelling: Philosophy in a Time of Emergency. The Nature of Human Freedom The Naturphilosoph comes to understand “Nature as subject.”232 This does not imply that nature necessarily conforms to the transcendental structure of the human mind (a form of anthropomorphism), but rather that human consciousness…
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[Rough Draft] “The Re-Emergence of Schelling” – Literature review
Again, sorry for the lack of italics. I don’t know how to paste from Pages while keeping the formatting. For a PDF of the document (with italics in tact!), click: The Re-Emergence of Schelling: Philosophy in a Time of Emergency. Literature review This section assesses the reasons for the contemporary resurgence of scholarly interest in Schelling.…
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“The Re-Emergence of Schelling: Philosophy in a Time of Emergency” (2014)
Preface The philosophy of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854) cannot be adequately grasped in abstraction from the spirit that animated his individual personality. While he spent his philosophical career striving to realize the Absolute system, he did so in full recognition of the fact that the Absolute is not finally a logical system, but a…
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Philosophy of the Human in Whitehead and Schelling (response to Knowledge-Ecology)
Adam/Knowledge-Ecology just posted a fine reflection on the place of the human in nature. Below is my response. I think there is an elephant in the room here. Just before the line you quote in Modes of Thought, Whitehead says “In mankind, the dominant dependence on bodily functioning seems still there. And yet the life of…
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God and the Chaosmos: Thinking with Catherine Keller
Several months ago, a discussion erupted across the SR/OOO blogosphere concerning the implications of various forms of nihilistic and theistic realism. Some of my critiques have since ended up in a Wikipedia article. In one of my responses to Graham Harman and Levi Bryant, I toyed with the idea of Whitehead’s panentheism as a kind…
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Notes on the Occupation from the Mountaintop
I walked to the top of Grand View Park here in the Sunset district of San Francisco. I wanted to clear my head by ascending to the mountaintop, where place expands into space and time transforms into history. History, as we know it, has a beginning and an end. Civilizations, and the cosmopolitical habitats they…
Footnotes2Plato 