Footnotes2Plato

“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”
–Alfred North Whitehead

Author: Matthew David Segall

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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,…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • “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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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,…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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,…

  • 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…

  • Contemporary Natural Philosophy Needs a New Theory of Forms

    In this disputation with Jacob Given and Adam Robert, I was defending the thesis that contemporary natural philosophy needs a new process-relational theory of forms, and that Whitehead’s notion of eternal objects can play that role. Adam and Jacob structured the session as a kind of updated medieval disputatio: I offered a thesis and initial…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…