Author: Matthew David Segall
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In Defense of Eternal Objects and God: On What Abides in Whitehead’s Process Philosophy
Was there ever a time before metaphysics? Will there be a time after it? Pre and post, a priori and a posteriori, the here and now and the infinite Beyond: always and everywhere the opposites are meeting and making one another! We can strive to grow out of puerile metaphysics, but the claim to have transcended metaphysics entirely is not…
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Transcending the Culture War by Recovering Participatory Theism (Dialogue with Nathan Hawkins)
Nathan Hawkins and I just finished a podcast recording (above) that I hope will contribute to amplifying the deeper notes that are still just barely audible beneath the surface noise of the culture war. We both agree that dialogue must replace partisan shouting, and that philosophy has an important public role to play in helping to…
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How does it feel to be on your own?: Society and the Modern World – A Whiteheadian Reading of Hartmut Rosa and Charles Taylor
We finished our Hartmut Rosa reading group this morning (recordings are available here). I am grateful for Tripp Fuller’s invitation to study this text. It was my first time reading Rosa, and I found his sociological intervention convergent with many of my own ways of thinking. As I’ll relate below, Tripp and I had no trouble finding…
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Sacred Swimmer
I came to this cityat the edge of the continentas so many dreamers before mefollowing the westward winds of timelike the gold-glinting eyesof greedy men who mistook the ocean’s endless horizonfor a promise made only to them.I was destined by a different orenot yet hardened but still molten to the core,something older than the veinstorn open…
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The Logical Animal – Earth to Humanity: Put Down Your Maps
The frogs are croaking on my left down in the Eel River, and on my right is the low roar of semis on the 101. This is nearly my last night in Humboldt County. I came out to the hot tub one last time to take in the night sky. It happened to be clear…
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Thinking Things with Graham Harman: Whitehead’s Way Beyond Philosophies of Human Access
Rahul Samaranayake has had me on his podcast a few times over the years, including an especially generative conversation with Peter Rollins last year. This time he invited me and Graham Harman into dialogue. Below is the transcript. RAHULIt’s funny. I was reading some of your articles, Graham. You mention Whitehead quite a lot. So obviously my head went…
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Poetics of Life and Death: Dialoguing with Andreas Weber
Matt: Hi, Andreas. Good morning. Andreas: Good morning. Sorry to keep you waiting. Matt: That’s quite all right. Andreas: I was late anyway, and then Zoom decided it needed to do a new install, like in the old Windows times. Matt: Of course. Always another update. Andreas: Exactly. It’s not the first time it’s happened,…
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Ontologizing Enactivism: Worldmaking with Ezequiel Di Paolo (dialogue with Tim Jackson)
Timothy Jackson and I were back in the saddle, this time to discuss Ezequiel Di Paolo’s article seeking an enactive ontology: Di Paolo, E. A. (2023). F/acts: Ways of enactive worldmaking. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 30 (11–12): 159-89. doi: 10.53765/20512201.30.11.159. Ezequiel will be joining us to present in the biophilosophy track at this summer’s International Whitehead Conference in…
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A Hegelian Tour of Philosophy from Parmenides to the French Revolution
A slightly revised transcript of my introductory lecture from a course on Hegel’s Absolute Idealism. I just want to begin by noting that Hegel’s time was a time of revolution in Europe. The French Revolution, in many ways, shaped the political categories that all the modern liberal democracies have been assuming for the last couple…
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Truth in the Making: On the Possibility of Metaphysics in a World-in-Process
“…‘becoming’ is the transformation of incoherence into coherence.” -Whitehead (PR 25) “There is not one completed set of things which are actual occasions. For the fundamental inescapable fact is the creativity in virtue of which there can be no ‘many things’ which are not subordinated in a concrete unity. Thus a set of all actual occasions…
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“Time and World” By Hartmut Rosa: Reading Group Invitation
I want to invite you to join a new online reading group I’m co-hosting with my friend Tripp Fuller. We’re going to be working through Hartmut Rosa’s Time and World. The group will happen over Zoom in a seminar style with plenty of time for dialogue. If you’re a paid subscriber to either my Substack or Tripp’s, you’ll have access…
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Thinking With David Krakauer
Listening to David Krakauer on Jim Rutt’s “Worldview” podcast while making dinner made a few things snap into place for me. You can listen to it here: https://www.jimruttshow.com/david-krakauer-3/ I appreciate how rigorously he avoids collapsing the epistemic into the ontological. Krakauer is very lucid about wanting to prevent effective theories from hardening into a metaphysics. His…
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Philosophies of Ontogenesis: Evolution by Artistic Selection
First, have a listen to Timothy Jackson’s recent Lepht Hand podcast about the ontogenetic stance: Then have a read of his essay on Darwin, Simondon, and Battaile and the importance of a “variation first” approach that replaces classical effective theory ontology with an account of ontogenesis. One consequence of such an approach is that we can only…
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There’s no scientific evidence that consciousness exists.
Evidence, in a scientific age, is usually thought of in a very specific way. We tend to assume evidence means empirical measurement: can I record this on a camera, or on some kind of detector? Can I transform what I observe—signals, data—from something tangible in the world into a mathematical model? Can I make predictions,…
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Islam and the West: Dialoging with Jared Morningstar
In my recent conversation with Jacob Kishere as part of his “Christianity beyond itself” series, we attempted to navigate the ways the “Christ impulse” can so easily get hijacked by culture-war crusader energy. Spiritual renewal thereby risks being conflated with civilizational chauvinism. Midway through our dialogue, Islam came up. I felt how ill-equipped I am for that…
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Flights and Perchings: A 2025 retrospective and a look ahead as I turn 40
As the new year begins, I decided to take a look back at my speaking engagements in 2025. I turn 40 later this month, so this has been an occasion not only to recollect the recent course of my intellectual development, but to imagine how to shape what I hope will be at least another…
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Christ and Caesar: Christian Nationalism in the News
I wish I didn’t care that Nick Fuentes’ star continues to rise. I wish it didn’t matter. But I fear Christian nationalist Joel Webbon may be right when he says (in the first of a series of new interviews) that Fuentes is “not merely the most controversial man in America” but for men under 45…
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Simone Weil and the Sacred Heart of Humanity (dialogue with Pedro Brea and Karsten Jensen)
We discussed Simone Weil’s “Draft for a Statement of Human Obligation.” You can read it here: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/questionofgod/voices/weil.html Transcript: Matt Segall: Well, I really enjoyed our last conversation, and I haven’t read much Simone Weil, so this was a real treat—to hear her perspective on our obligations, human obligations, and her framing of what we usually…
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Anthroposophy and Critical Race Theory: Rudolf Steiner at Harvard Divinity School
A few days ago, I shared a conference retrospective about Harvard Divinity School’s Rudolf Steiner centennial: I’ve since had a chance to listen carefully to another talk on the subject of racism in Steiner’s work by Gopi Vijaya. You can listen to it below: I appreciate the methodological clarity that Gopi brought to this topic,…
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Romantic Imagination and the Recovery of Nature’s Intrinsic Value: Whitehead, Barfield, and Our Crisis of Perception (transcript)
Over on Substack, I shared an essay based on the transcript of my remarks at a presentation earlier today for the Center for Process Studies. You can read that essay here. Below is the exact transcript of my remarks: I am going to be discussing some ideas from one of Owen Barfield’s essays, “Where Is…
Footnotes2Plato 