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: time

  • 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…

  • A Drunk History of Time: The Einstein, Bergson, Whitehead Debates

    Is the flow of time a “stubbornly persistent illusion,” a mere psychological mirage, as Albert Einstein held? Or is it the very essence of all psychical life and material things alike, as Henri Bergson argued? Might there be an equally scientific rendering of relativity that does not force us to deny our lived experience, as…

  • Time and Experience in Physics and Philosophy [draft]

    Time and Experience in Physics and Philosophy [draft]

    Below is the introduction of paper I presented at a conference in L’aquila, Italy in April 2019. The conference aimed to revisit important philosophical issues related to the famous 1922 debate between Einstein and Bergson. HERE is the conference site (it is in Italian, so you’ll need to ask Google to translate it for you).…

  • Who is Alfred North Whitehead & What is Process Philosophy?

    Who is Alfred North Whitehead & What is Process Philosophy?

    Environmental lawyer, philosopher, and fellow Whitehead enthusiast Tam Hunt and I started an email exchange a few weeks ago after I stumbled upon his interview with the physicist Carol Rovelli. Our emails grew into a pretty extensive conversation on all things Whitehead, which I am sharing below. We discuss the importance of Whitehead’s ideas for…

  • An Evening with Alfred North Whitehead

    Here are some clips from my video call with students earlier tonight wherein I discuss Whitehead’s cosmology, including his views of God, creativity, time, immortality, and education.

  • The Interrupted Irruption of Time: Towards an Integral Cosmology, with Help From Bergson and Whitehead

    Above is my talk for the Jean Gebser Society conference held at the California Institute of Integral Studies the weekend of October 16th. Title: The Interrupted Irruption of Time: Towards an Integral Cosmology, with Help from Bergson and Whitehead Abstract: Gebser suggests that the world-constituting reality of time first irrupted into Western consciousness with the publication…

  • Time Eats Itself, by Henri Bergson

    from Creative Evolution (Ch. 1, pgs. 4-6): “…as regards the psychical life unfolding beneath the symbols which conceal it, we readily perceive that time is just the stuff it is made of. There is, moreover, no stuff more resistant nor more substantial. For our duration is not merely one instant replacing another; if it were,…

  • Space and Time in an Ontology of Organism

    I’m thoroughly enjoying Jimena Canales social, scientific, and philosophical history of the Einstein-Bergson debate in The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate that Changed Our Understanding of Time. There are quite a few pages on Whitehead’s alternative rendering of relativity theory. There is one place (198-99) where Canales, while commenting on George Herbert…

  • 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…

  • Theoretical Archaeology Conference Abstract

    Unfortunately, the track I was to participate in was canceled due to conflicts with another conference. But I wanted to share my abstract since I hope to develop some of these themes in the future. This particular theme (teleology in archaeology) came up as I read Hodder’s great book Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationship…

  • Reblogged: The Hermetic Deleuze: Anesthetizing Chaos

    This from Virgilio A. Rivas The Hermetic Deleuze: Anesthetizing Chaos. My comment to Rivas: Fascinating post. I’ve given some thought to the effects of the Internet, especially blogging/vlogging, on neuro-cognitive evolution. The Global Network of Capitalized Information is fast at work relieving us of our own private subjectivity. Our very selves are being gobbled up…

  • The Gossip Gospel – An Informal Talk on the Role of Gossip in Community

    I gave this talk on New Year’s Eve to a group of my friends.  

  • Deleuze on Anamnesis

    From Difference and Repetition, p. 85 (in the context of a discussion of the active and passive synthesis of time): If there is an in-itself of the past, then reminiscence is its noumenon or the thought with which it is invested. Reminiscence does not simply refer us back from a present present to former ones,…

  • Whitehead’s Process Atomism (response to Graham Harman)

    Graham Harman has jumped in offering his own response to my recent comment directed at Levi Bryant regarding his interpretation of Whitehead. The core issue, for Harman, is whether Whitehead’s position is ultimately reducible to some form of relationism, wherein an actual occasion is no more than the sum of its prehensions, or whether Whitehead’s…

  • Gilles Deleuze’s and Arthur Young’s Bergsonisms: An Outline and Notes

    I’ve just finished Gilles Deleuze’s book Bergsonism (1990). Here is my outline of the text: Deleuze’s Bergsonism: Notes and Outline. Bergson suggested that the Absolute had to be approached from two sides, the scientific and the metaphysical. Science/Intellect considers the universe according to a series of states. Metaphysics/Intuition considers the universe according to the self-differentiation of…

  • Reflections on Physicist Lawrence Krauss and the Consolations of Philosophy

    Below is Lawrence Krauss from a recent interview in the Atlantic (Thanks to Jason/Immanent Transcendence for bringing this controversy to my attention): Krauss: …Philosophy used to be a field that had content, but then “natural philosophy” became physics, and physics has only continued to make inroads. Every time there’s a leap in physics, it encroaches on these areas that philosophers have carefully sequestered…

  • 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,”…

  • Bifurcations between Bergson and Einstein

    Thanks to Adam for bringing this video to my attention. Bruno Latour speaks above about how contemporary philosophy should re-interpret the verdict of the 1922 exchange between the metaphysician Henri Bergson and the physicist Albert Einstein. He finds a re-interpretation of this debate important especially in light of the new ecological constraints upon 21st century…

  • Unearthing the Earth: A Phenomenological Excavation

    Unearthing the Earth: A Phenomenological Excavation of our Being-on-the-Earth By Matthew Segall “Eco-phenomenology offers a methodological bridge between the natural world and our own, or rather the rediscovery of the bridge that we are and have always been but—thanks to our collective amnesia—have forgotten, almost irretrievably. It is not enough to disguise our forgetting; there…

  • Wonder

    I wonder what it is that turns the world round, That hides the far side of the Moon from the Earth, That sees with my eyes but cannot be seen. Why is it that I have a perspective? How is it that I exist as an individual, As a piece of space wrapped up in…