Author: Matthew David Segall
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Process and Difference in the Pluriverse: Plato, William James, & W.E.B. Du Bois
I’m sharing the lecture from the first module of my course this semester at CIIS.edu, PARP 6135: Process and Difference in the Pluriverse. The lecture discusses Plato’s Republic, William James’ pluralism, and W.E.B. Du Bois’ critical inheritance of James’ philosophy. Here’s a PDF transcript of the lecture
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The Place of Psychedelic Chemistry/Alchemical Consciousness in Philosophy
Transcript: I wanted to see if you guys might help me think through Aldous Huxley’s psychedelic phenomenology, because I’m writing about it, preparing a draft of what will become a chapter in an anthology on the philosophy of psychedelics. I’m also writing about Descartes’ famous Meditations on First Philosophy and interpreting his experience as a…
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Imagination as the Topographical Inversion of Reality: Musings with Becca Tarnas
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Episode 6 of The Future Faces of Spirit
Bruce Alderman of Integral Stage has been releasing a multipart video series called “The Future Faces of Spirit.” Other participants include John Vervaeke and Bonnitta Roy. Here is Alderman’s description of the series and my contribution: “What paths lie ahead for religion and spirituality in the 21st Century? How might the insights of modernity and…
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Reading and Riffing on Murray Bookchin’s “The Ecology of Freedom”
Zooming out from the horror show of the upcoming presidential election, I decided to do some thinking with Bookchin about social contracts, participatory vs representative forms of democracy, and direct action as permanent revolution.
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Prayers to a Process-Relational God
In Whitehead’s scheme there is no equivalence with regard to the temporal ontology of past and future. There is no space-time block. There are multiple timelines in Whitehead’s relativistic pluriverse. His metaphysical scheme is perspectival, meaning that any statement about the cosmos must be situated in some actual occasion (this is Whitehead’s “Ontological Principle”). There…
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Ecological Civilization, or Anarcho-Primitivism?
Here’s my original blog post: Imagining a Gaian Reality After the Virus
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Imagining a Gaian Reality After the Virus
Imagining a Gaian Reality After the Virus by Matthew Segall What follows is a brief paper outlining a path forward for post-pandemic humanity. It attempts to integrate Marxist critiques of capitalism with the efforts of contemporary Whiteheadian philosophers to compose an alternative ecological civilization. … A specter is haunting modern civilization—the specter of Gaia. All the powers…
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Thoughts on William James, Pure Experience, and Materialism
Idealism and panpsychism seem to me to make easy friends in the debate against materialism. They both affirm that consciousness or experience or mind in some generic sense are intrinsic to Nature. There are important differences between idealism and panpsychism, of course, and there are a variety of ways one can be an idealist or…
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Musing on “Consciousness” with William James & Alfred North Whitehead
William James (from “A World of Pure Experience,” Part 2, p. 568): “With this we have the outlines of a philosophy of pure experience before us. At the outset of my essay, I called it a mosaic philosophy. In actual mosaics the pieces are held together by their bedding, for which bedding the Substances, transcendental Egos, or Absolutes of…
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What is life? interview with Tim Freke
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Metaphysics in Process (reflections on Whitehead’s system of philosophy)
As best I understand it, in Part IV of Process & Reality, Whitehead attempted to account for how geometrical measurement of the physical world is possible without any empirical presuppositions. He was worried that physics had not yet fully accounted for its own experimental practices and so searched for a presuppositionless mathematical starting point for…
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The Anthropocene: End Times/New Age
Sean Kelly and I delivered this a few weeks ago at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA at our philosophy program’s annual retreat.
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How is Natural Science Possible?: Whitehead’s first lecture at Harvard
I read Whitehead’s first lecture at Harvard, delivered in September 1924, which focuses on the metaphysical possibility of modern natural science. This lecture was just published in Process Studies 48.2; here’s the scan of the original that Whitehead read. Here’s a link to the interview of Lynn Margulis I mention at the beginning.
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Philosophy is a tree.
I don’t know whether I am a poet pretending to philosophize, or a philosopher who happens to rhyme. I am hungry for wisdom’s teaching. Feed me philosophy. These thoughts do not take place inside my head. I taste them in my mouth. They boil in my belly. My chest is resounding with their potential. The…
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Introduction to German Idealism
My lecture in two parts introducing German Idealism (focusing on Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Goethe, Hegel)
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Robert McDermott & Matt Segall on Rudolf Steiner’s 12 Ways of seeing the world
see also: Foreword to an upcoming anthroposophical book on twelve ways of seeing the world
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Divine Mereology, or Why Black Holes are Pores in God’s Face
Thinking and driving…about the evolution of matter, life, and mind.
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The Birth of Life & the Future of Consciousness
UPDATE. Here’s a video of our dialogue: Next Tuesday, October 22nd at 7pm, I’ll be in dialogue with astrobiologist Bruce Damer about his hot spring hypothesis of the origins of life. For Bay Area locals, the event will take place at the Mission Street campus of California Institute of Integral Studies and is free and…
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Sundays with Whitehead
Below are a couple of video sessions from my course on Whitehead’s Process & Reality.
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![Physicalism and Its Discontents: A Study in Whitehead’s Panexperientialist Alternative [draft]](https://footnotes2plato.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/fluorescence.jpg?w=1024)
Physicalism and Its Discontents: A Study in Whitehead’s Panexperientialist Alternative [draft]
UPDATE: Here is a PDF of the final draft accepted for publication under the revised title “The Varieties of Physicalist Ontology: A Study in Whitehead’s Process-Relational Alternative.” I’ve just finished drafting this article, which will hopefully be featured in a special issue of the Journal of Philosophy, Theology, and the Sciences focused on panpsychism. It still…
Footnotes2Plato 