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

  • Steiner and Whitehead on the true relationship between Sun, Moon, and Earth

    Below is a slide from my summary at this morning’s Urphänomen reading group. We are reading Rudolf Steiner’s “Interdisciplinary Astronomy” lecture cycle (GA 323), originally delivered in January 1921. A video of my summary of Lecture 14 is also embedded below. Here’s a link to the text of Steiner’s lecture. In this particular lecture, Steiner…

  • On the Place of Life in the Cosmos: Whitehead and Contemporary Theoretical Biology

    This is an excerpt from the final session of our “Intuiting Life” Seminar Series hosted by the Cobb Institute Science Advisory Committee last month. You can find the full playlist here. Outline of lecture: Introduction to Participatory Cosmology Critique of Mechanistic Explanations The Philosophical Shift from Life to Death Organic Ontology in Biology and Physics…

  • In Dialogue with Gary Herstein on War Machine Podcast

    Matt Baker invited me back on the War Machine podcast to chat with Gary Herstein, coauthor with Randall Auxier of The Quantum of Explanation: Whitehead’s Radical Empiricism (Routledge, 2017). We discussed Gary’s recent blog post about the uses and abuses of Whitehead’s God concept: “Happy-Touchy-Feely-God talk”. I tried to push back a bit as I…

  • Intuiting Life Seminar Series

    Above is a playlist including four sessions from the “Intuiting Life” seminar series hosted by the Cobb Institute Science Advisory Committee. Click on the hamburger menu icon in the top right corner of the video to see the playlist. The series featured the authors of a new book, Process-Philosophical Perspectives on Biology: Intuiting Life (2023),…

  • Schelling, Whitehead: Crossing the Threshold (dialogue with Cadell Last)

    Cadell Last invited me on his Philosophy Portal podcast a few weeks ago. Here’s the video, which just premiered on YouTube. The Genesis of an Idea “Crossing the Threshold” germinated from my dissertation, titled “Cosmotheanthropic Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead” (2016). This work was a philosophical experiment, a quest to…

  • God and Cosmogenesis: Thinking With Catherine Keller

    A lecture on process theology for my graduate course on Whitehead’s cosmology.

  • William Irwin Thompson’s Thoughts on Evil

    I don’t think the copyright gods would frown on me reposting the late Bill Thompson’s blog reply to me June 11, 2013. It is available here on the Way Back Machine. He was responding to a philosophical memoir about my encounter with evil in Israel that I’d titled “Thinking the Holocaust With Schelling.” THOUGHTS ON…

  • Cosmic History in Steiner and Whitehead (dialogue with Formscapes)

    This was a really fun conversation with Formscapes (check out his content on YouTube). The dialogue begins with Whitehead’s ideas on hybrid prehension and how they might relate to Steiner’s cultivation of higher organs of spiritual perception. Whitehead appears to have been open to esoteric ideas, based on some evidence that he tried contacting his…

  • Register for McGilchrist Conference

    Registration is now open for in-person and online attendance at the Metaphysics and the Matter With Things conference. We expect the limited number of in-person tickets to sell out quickly. Student discounts are available (please email me from your .edu student email account for information about this: msegall@ciis.edu). I’m very excited about the line-up of…

  • Panpsychist Pluralism

    The following is based on a revised transcript of a recent lecture. Anyone paying attention to academic philosophy over the last decade or so will have noticed the new philosophical kid on the block. I’m talking about panpsychism. While a couple of decades ago the position would have been laughed out of court or met…

  • Science, Religion, and Earth Evolution: Thinking With Teilhard and Whitehead

    I gave this presentation at my graduate program’s retreat earlier this week.

  • Intuiting Life Seminar Series, a preview with Spyridon Koutroufinis

    If you’d like to join us for the Saturday morning seminar series beginning this weekend, you can RSVP HERE.

  • Navigating Kantian Thought with John Vervaeke

    This dialogue with John Vervaeke about my new book Crossing the Threshold was recorded earlier this year. Claude’s summary: The book discusses overcoming Kant’s epistemological barrier between the world and human reason. Kant erected this barrier to preserve human freedom and agency against the mechanistic worldview of science. Matt aims to develop an “etheric imagination”…

  • Process Theology and the Modern World: Science, Religion, and Christology After Teilhard and Whitehead

    Below is a draft of my chapter to be published as part of an anthology coming out of the Teilhard and Whitehead conference hosted by the Center for Christogenesis at Villanova University a few weeks ago.

  • Thinking With Machines

    A rough transcript of the video above of me cleaning dog poo out of my robot vacuum: My earlier conversation about machines and organisms with Levin:

  • Seminar Series next month on Process Approaches to the Philosophy of Biology

    The Cobb Institute Science Advisory Committee, which I chair, will be hosting a series of seminars next month featuring the contributors to a new book, Process-Philosophcal Perspectives on Biology: Intuiting Life (Cambridge, 2023). The book challenges the reductionist, materialistic metaphysics often adopted by biologists, arguing that this approach overlooks the intricate complexities and essential characteristics…

  • Summary Reflections on Rudolf Steiner’s “Interdisciplinary Astronomy” (GA 323)

    Our Urphänomen reading group is back in action, this time reading Steiner’s lecture cycle titled Interdisciplinary Astronomy (1921, GA 323). Frederick Amrine recently published a wonderful new translation. Earlier this week I summarized lecture 5 (video above). Below is a rough transcript of my reflections: The key issue here for Steiner is that we need…

  • Taming the Technological Dragon, with Michael Levin

    Selections from the transcript of this conversation (complied by AI): Matt Segall: I just finished your paper “Technological Approaches to Mind Everywhere” that came out last year and really enjoyed it. The more I read your stuff, the more I am shaken free of some philosophical commitments that I think I had arrived at because…

  • Metaphysics and the Matter With Things: Thinking With Iain McGilchrist

    I’m very excited to announce that my graduate program (Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at CIIS) and the Center for Process Studies are cohosting a conference March 29-31, 2024 focused on the work of Iain McGilchrist. The temporary conference landing page is HERE. You can provide an email address for updates on conference registration in the…

  • Music, Memory, and the Song of Life (dialogue with Karen Wong)

    Karen Wong invited me on The Meaning Code again to discuss ideas we both find enriching. Below I’ll share a near transcript of some interesting tidbits, including discussion of Michael Levin’s work. Mike Levin frequently quotes William James, who defines intelligence as the ability to accomplish the same goal by different means. This definition emphasizes…

  • Digital Poiesis: Rhyme of Life and Death

    I pasted one of my recent stream of consciousness notebook entries about the role of death denial in the potentiation of trauma into Chat-GPT4 and prompted it to write a poem in the style of Novalis out of the material. Below is what it spit out. Many of its words and phrases are identical to…