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: Timaeus

  • Minding Time: Chronos, Kairos, and Aion in an Archetypal Cosmos

    Notes for a brief talk I gave today at CIIS. [Update (July 15, 2016): This talk was expanded into an article published in Archai: The Journal of Archetypal Cosmology] ………………………………………………………………………………..  “…what is time? Who can give that a brief or easy answer? Who can even form a conception of it to be put into words? Yet…

  • Questions concerning the place of imagination in cosmology… (while reading Ed Casey and Catherine Keller)

    “In my view the creation of the world is the first unconscious act of speculative thought; and the first task of a self-conscious philosophy is to explain how it has been done.” -Whitehead Four of us met a few days back to discuss the first 75 pages of Ed Casey’s The Fate of Place: A…

  • [Conclusion] The Relevance of Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism to Contemporary Scientific Cosmology

    Conclusion: Towards a Physics of the World-Soul “In my view the creation of the world is the first unconscious act of speculative thought; and the first task of a self-conscious philosophy is to explain how it has been done.” -Whitehead239  “The religious insight is the grasp of this truth: That the order of the world,…

  • The Creative Potency of Toroidal Time

    Levi Bryant (Larval Subjects) recently unpacked his position that object’s are “spacetime worms” (HERE). It got me thinking about the arguments that thinkers like Bergson and Whitehead had with Einstein regarding the philosophical implications of his equations. Bruno Latour spoke about this issue HERE. For Bergson, “time is invention or it is nothing at all,”…

  • De Anima Mundi

    Some questions have emerged about what the hell (or heaven) I might be talking about in my last essay about death and the soul. These questions provide me with an opportunity to reflect on my own writing in an attempt to more fully articulate the vision behind it. I don’t already have answers to these…

  • Schelling’s Geocentric Realism

    I’ve been reading Iain Hamilton Grant‘s Philosophies of Nature After Schelling. He laments that most commentators treat Schelling as either a biocentric vitalist or a logocentric idealist. These characterizations ignore the extent to which his naturephilosophy corrects the eliminative idealism of Fichte’s and Hegel’s systems (which made nature’s externality entirely determined by intelligence) by grounding…

  • God did it, or aliens?

    “NRG” posting over on Pharyngula asks me: Why impute an admittedly Unknowable Omni God to explain currently inexplainable phenomena, if it’s much more reasonable, based on what we actually know, to assume that other citizens of the universe, evolved like us but to a much greater degree, are responsible for such phenomena? To make it…