Author: Matthew David Segall
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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…
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The Word in Every Tongue: From Crusade to Conversation in the Movement of Christianity Beyond Itself
I sat down with Jacob Kishere for another conversation as part of his Christianity Beyond Itself series. Our first conversation was over a year ago: you can listen to it at this link. This series, in his words, is an attempt to name the conversation that is trying to happen around the return, transformation, and transfiguration of Christian…
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Nick Fuentes and the Hollow Soul of America: Is there an America After the Idols?
Trump seems to be losing control over the MAGA movement he created. His surrogates remain confused, comparing Zoran Mamdani’s success mobilizing young New Yorkers to the rise of the Hitler Youth. Meanwhile Zoomers on the right are openly embracing white supremacism. Last night, I finally watched Tucker Carlson’s long interview with Nick Fuentes. I hesitate to…
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Patterns Are Not Puppeteers: The Return and Reformation of Platonic Form in Biology
I’ve discussed the return of Platonism in biology before. The following recounts some of what I discussed with Bonnitta Roy as a visitor at The Pop-Up School earlier today. The main driver of the Platonic turn in the life sciences is Michael Levin’s remarkable lab research on bioelectric patterning in morphogenesis. He is now framing this as…
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The Meaning of ‘Literal’: Thinking with Owen Barfield and Alfred North Whitehead
The following essay is adapted from the transcript of this recording on our Urphänomen research guild Substack. It is a poetic commentary on Owen Barfield’s essay in The Rediscovery of Meaning, “The Meaning of ‘Literal,’” which was also the subject of discussion in this morning’s reading group: When Whitehead remarked that every science has its…
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The Cosmic Poetry of Whitehead’s Philosophy: Notes on my dialogue with Ingrid Rieser
You can listen to my conversation with Ingrid over on her Forest of Thought podcast, or read the revised transcript of my remarks below. We recorded this in Claremont, CA back in June at the “Is It Too Late?” conference on ecological civilization (you can watch my conference presentation on Whitehead’s advice for the business mind here). “Philosopher” is…
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From Substance to Creativity, Or on the Modernity That Could Have Been
Yesterday in my history of Western philosophy course, where my students are reading Richard Tarnas’ Passion of the Western Mind (1991), I lectured on a couple of seventeenth century philosophers in an attempt to catch the nature of the shift that historians call “the Enlightenment.” I then connect their innovations to a couple of nineteenth and twentieth…
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Between the Speculative and the Prosaic: Life, Imagination, and Individuation
Timothy Jackson and I went deep into descendental philosophy and aesthetic ontology, core concepts developed in my last book Crossing the Threshold (2023). I try to argue against both scientistic neutrality and dogmatic theology. I believe that any attempt at thinking the most general conditions of reality inevitably touches the spiritual. If it did not then natural science…
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The Return of Form in Biology: Thinking Through Platonic Morphospace
The mystery of biological form has led some biologists, most prominently Michael Levin, back to Plato’s theory of Ideas. Levin is driven primarily by the surprising empirical findings of his lab. He argues that his results are best explained by reference to modes of causality not traceable to genetic histories or molecular components. While he has…
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Jung, Simondon, and the Ontogenesis of Philosophy
We just wrapped the “Forever Jung” conference co-hosted by CIIS and the San Francisco Jung Institute. Tim couldn’t be with us in person, but I enjoyed his Zoom presentation on Jung and Simondon (video of his talk should be online soon; you can listen to mine here). Below are some LLM assisted notes on Tim’s exegesis of the…
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Remembering the Repressed with Carl Jung and Rudolf Steiner
Judi: Hello, everybody. It’s my great pleasure to introduce Matt Segall. Matt is a PhD, a transdisciplinary researcher, philosopher, and teacher applying process-relational thought across the natural and social sciences. He is an associate professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness Department here at CIIS. His presentation is titled Remembering the Repressed with Jung and Steiner. Matt…
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Beyond MAGA and Wokeshevik Ressentiment: Or how to avoid a civil war
Charlie Kirk’s assassination is a national tragedy, an unmistakable symptom of civic decay. Kirk’s murder deserves clear condemnation. But condemnation need not include canonization. Kirk’s shock-jock rhetoric served only to divide people and does not suddenly become virtuous because he was killed by an unhinged ideologue. Those of us trying to reverse the decay of…
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Matter, Life, and Mind: Love as a Cosmological Power
This was recorded on Saturday, September 13, 2025 as part of the Frontiers of Knowledge event at Wheeler Opera House in Aspen, CO. Below is the recording and a lightly edited transcript. Good morning, everyone. I want to begin by thanking you all for allowing your curiosity to draw you here. We are engaged in a…
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Birthing a New Cosmology (reflections on my dialogue with Alexander Beiner)
I enjoyed dialoguing with my friend Alexander Beiner this morning. The recording will be published on Kainos soon. He asked whether I had a sense for whether the atheistic, secular orientation in academia is thawing, opening room for alternatives to physicalism. I do sense that! Panpsychism and idealism are the two broad categories that capture much of…
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Value at the Root: Cultivating Virtue in a Post-Truth World
Context The following reflections grow out of my live dialogue with Bonnitta Roy about the metaphysics of value. She’ll be sharing the discussion in her pop-up school for those who subscribe. Here I wanted to offer some further reflections on what was stirred up in me. A few orienting points: First, we wanted our philosophical conversation to…
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Facing the Face Within: Christopoetics in an Unfinished World in Process
Below is a draft of a chapter for a book on radical and process theologies. My contribution is based on a conversation I had with Peter Rollins earlier this year: Facing the Face Within: Christopoetics in an Unfinished World in Process By Matthew David Segall Ahead of turning to the body of this exposition, a…
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Notes from the Edge of the Ordinary
Recapping my time in the twilight zone between physics and psi in Charlottesville, Virginia two weeks ago. I left the DOPS Psi Theory Meeting feeling like I’d been sitting around a camp fire telling ghost stories at the edge of a new continent. In fact, we spent the week together in the Marriott Hotel’s appropriately named Louis…
Footnotes2Plato 