Crossing the Threshold - by Matthew David Segall (Paperback)

About the Book

This book articulates a descendental aesthetic ontology showing the way across the epistemological chasm that Kant's critiques hewed between knowledge and reality.

Book Synopsis

This book is a philosophical experiment in thinking, feeling, and willing beyond the transcendental threshold of Immanuel Kant's critical philosophy. It draws inspiration from the organic process philosophies of F. W. J. Schelling and A. N. Whitehead to articulate a descendental aesthetic ontology showing the way across the epistemological chasm that Kant's critiques hewed between knowledge and reality. This descendental inversion of Kantian transcendentalism aims to bridge the chasm-not by resolving the structure of reality into clear and distinct concepts-but by replanting cognition in the aesthetic processes that power it. The key to this reconnection is found in a new etheric power of imagination, which if consciously cultivated can grant the process philosopher direct experience of the cosmic creativity expressing itself in both the depths of the soul and throughout the physical world. With human knowing no longer conceived of as a transcendental onlooker but rather rooted again in cosmogenesis, the ancient hermetic maxim that we are microcosmic participants in the Life of the Whole is reaffirmed.

Review Quotes

"Matt Segall is one of the most interesting philosophers to emerge in recent years in the study of Whitehead, and, perhaps even more excitingly, of Schelling. Segall's integrative study of these two philosophers makes yet another contribution to the burgeoning project of revitalizing an alternative organic approach to natural science and theology. While in no sense sacrificing intellectual rigour, he moves beyond the limitations of a purely analytical approach to demonstrate the importance of embodied experience and imagination in the effort to understand the nature of the world and of ourselves." Ian McGilChrist