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

  • Goals Go All the Way Down: Responding to the Deacon-Levin Dialogue

    I’m grateful to Tevin Naidu for getting Deacon and Levin together. They only had 90 minutes but still managed to cover a lot of territory, including where they overlap and where some tensions may exist. I first met Deacon back in 2011 during a lecture he gave on his then new book Incomplete Nature. Regular readers may not…

  • The Essence of Evolution: Reflections on my dialogues with evolutionary biologist Tim Jackson about God and Eternal Objects

     My friend Timothy Jackson and I have been engaged in a rich interdisciplinary dialogue for nearly four years now. Where does the time go? After a bit of an email correspondence in the summer of 2021, our first podcast conversation occurred back in March 2022. We discussed the importance of generalizing evolution beyond biology so that the whole universe can be…

  • Reality is a Process: Dialogue with Maitreyabandhu at the London Buddhist Centre

    Slightly abridged transcript: Maitreyabandhu: So what we’re going to do this evening is have a conversation—obviously between Matt and me—about process philosophy and Buddhism. Really simply, that’s what we’re doing. To put it very simply, the central act of Buddhism—what Buddhism is really about, whether it’s here in Bethnal Green, Tibet, Burma, or wherever—is that a…

  • Prehensions, Propositions, and the Cosmological Commons (dialogue with Tevin Naidu)

    Tevin Naidu recently hosted me on his Mind-Body Solutions podcast. Above is the video and below is an edited and somewhat condensed transcript. Tevin: I have shaped today’s episode around your paper, “Physics Within the Bounds of Feeling Alone.” It is a wonderful piece—a beautiful read. One thing I often ask my guests to do is give a…

  • An Anthropocosmic Approach to the Nature of Consciousness (My Talk at the UTOK Conference on Consciousness)

    “What man most passionately wants is his living wholeness and his living unison, not his own isolate salvation of his ‘soul.’ Man wants his physical fulfillment first and foremost, since now, once and once only, he is in the flesh and potent. For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for…

  • “Psychedelic Realism”: My presentation at Breaking Convention

    Below is an audio version and edited transcript of my talk at Breaking Convention last week, hosted by the University of Exeter. Video should be available in the coming weeks.  Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes (Introduction) It is my pleasure to introduce our next speaker, all the way from California: Dr. Matthew David Segall. Matt is an Associate…

  • Boundless Body Podcast with Brian Tierney

    My conversation with Dr. Brian Tierney traces a winding path through the imaginal dimensions of philosophy, beginning with the etheric imagination as the subtle medium through which connection between self and world is actualized. Imagination emerges not as fantasy or escape, but as an onto-epistemic link between our inner life and cosmogenesis. Our discussion touches on the…

  • Plotinus Without Emanation: Dialogue with Pedro Brea and Jack Bagby

    Pedro Brea, Jack Bagby, and I decided to continue digging into Plotinus—specifically the Sixth Ennead—focusing on the relationship between the One and the Intellect, and between the World-Soul and individual souls. Why and how does the One overflow into the Many? We also read a helpful chapter by Gina Zavota titled “Plotinus’ ‘Reverse’ Platonism: A Deleuzian Response to the Problem…

  • Is a Metaphysical Revolution Afoot in the Natural Sciences?

    In this conversation, Mahon McCann invited me to reflect on what he referred to as a metaphysical revolution in natural science—gesturing toward the shift I and others have been tracking across disciplines including physics, biology, and cognitive science, where the old mechanistic, substance-based ontology seems increasingly inadequate to account for what’s actually being discovered and needing…

  • Participating in the Liturgy at Holy Trinity Cathedral in San Francisco

    This morning my friend Edward and I attended the Divine Liturgy of St. Basil the Great at Holy Trinity Cathedral in San Francisco, part of the Orthodox Church in America. We are cooking up another podcast to follow our discussion of “The Spiritual Mission of America” a few months ago. I imagine we’ll both have…

  • Sacred Hospitality and the Dynamics of Initiation: Dialogue with Orland Bishop

    This transcript is an abridged version of Orland and Matt’s conversation. For the full two hours, including dialogue with CIIS students, see the video at the bottom of this post. Abridged transcript:  Orland Bishop: Thank you so very much. Since the inspiration to have this forum and arriving here this evening, so much has unfolded in…

  • Renewing Religion: Dialogue with Philip Goff and Brendan Graham Dempsey

    Brendan Graham Dempsey and I sat down with Philip Goff to discuss all things “pan”: panmatheism, panentheism, pangentheism, panpsychism… oh, and Christianity! Philip describes how he arrived at panpsychism: after initially embracing physicalism and even flirting with illusionism, he came to feel that reducing the mind to physical processes was incoherent. Turning to thinkers like Thomas Nagel, David Chalmers,…

  • “The Phenomenon of Life” By Hans Jonas: A dialogue with Timothy Jackson about Jonas’ treatment of Darwinism

    In this session, Tim Jackson and I discuss Hans Jonas’ book The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology. We focus in particular on two chapters, “Philosophical Aspects of Darwinism” and “Is God a Mathematician?”  Our aim was to explore how Jonas, emerging from an existential–phenomenological and religious–philosophical context, offered both criticisms and appreciations of Darwin’s…

  • Realizing the Noosphere

    Below are some reflections following my dialogue with Layman Pascal and  Brendan Graham Dempsey as part of Limicon 2025. The video of our dialogue should be online soon, and I’ll be sure to share it here.  It seems to me that this conversation (see prior episodes) is necessarily transdisciplinary, drawing on natural sciences, aesthetics and art, myth and religion,…

  • Science and Religion in a Participatory Cosmos

    Last night I was invited by the Center for Christogenesis at Villanova University to share some thoughts on how the science/religion dialogue may be transformed by a participatory approach to cosmology. The video will be made available in a few weeks to those who register with the Center. I began by playfully suggesting I’d be proceeding as…

  • Processing Plotinus: A Bergsonian Reading

    I was joined again by Pedro Brea (we discussed Bergson and Whitehead a few weeks ago) and now also by Jack Bagby(a colleague of mine at CIIS). We discussed Jack’s translation of Bergson’s lectures on Plotinus (1898-99). We also discussed an essay by Wayne J. Hankey on Bergson and Plotinus.  Although I had previously known Plotinus influenced Bergson, our discussion highlighted…

  • Culture as The Lifeblood of The Machine Economy (dialogue with Michael Garfield)

    This was a really rich conversation. Michael just recently launched his new podcast Humans on the Loop. You can find more episodes and the show notes for this episode on his Substack: https://michaelgarfield.substack.com/p/h-12. Some brief reflections on the themes we explored: We began with the premise that money is a form of communication, a means…

  • Whitehead’s Theory of Propositions

    The title of the article Ben Snyder and I are discussing is “The Objectivity of Whitehead’s Propositions: An Explication of the Truth-Relation” in Process Studies53 (2):256-274 (2024). Ben begins with a summary of his paper’s main argument, which I’ll try to capture below. Propositions, for Whitehead, are more than statements in language: they are metaphysical “lures”…

  • Schelling’s Reading of Plato’s “Timaeus”

    In this dialogue, Tim Jackson and I return almost to the beginning of philosophy–“almost” in the sense that Plato himself was already responding to a few centuries of philosophizing by the physiologoi. His dialogue Timaeus represents a synthesis rather than a pure start in the evolution of philosophy. He attempted to reconcile different positions and…

  • Metaphysics Today

    Monday musings on the necessity of history and its overcoming.  Mythos is an indispensable method in metaphysics. Metaphysics only comes to life in the midst of philosophical dialogues, and so sometimes it is helpful to perform a seance by invoking conceptual personae: Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Aquinas, Hegel, Whitehead. These and many other names tell a…

  • Whitehead’s Revolutionary Concept of Prehension (Thinking with Tim Jackson and Charles Hartshorne)

    Tim Jackson and I discussed Hartshorne’s article, “Whitehead’s Revolutionary Concept of Prehension.” Charles Hartshorne offers a detailed and insightful examination of Alfred North Whitehead’s process-relational philosophy. Hartshorne, who served as Whitehead’s assistant at Harvard University during the 1920s, was also profoundly influenced by Charles Sanders Peirce, whose papers he edited during that same period. This background…