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 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…

  • Minds All Around Us: Dialoguing with Michael Levin

    You can read my reflections on this dialogue here.

  • Process Metaphysics Meets Possibilist Physics (Dialoguing with Ruth Kastner)

    Ruth Kastner and I first met several years ago in the context of a seminar series focused on plasma physicist and philosopher Timothy Eastman’s work. Ruth also participated in the “Metaphysics and the Matter With Things: Thinking With Iain McGilchrist” conference I co-hosted at CIIS last March. We’ve been meaning to sit down to see what bridges might…

  • Process, Reality, and Context: Timothy E. Eastman Unties the Gordian Knot – Summaries of the Seminar Series

    Below is a detailed summary of each of the nine seminar sessions that ran monthly from June 2021 through February 2022 focused on Dr. Timothy Eastman’s book, Untying the Gordian Knot: Process, Reality, and Context (2020). This event was sponsored by the Cobb Institute’s Science Advisory Committee, which I chair. You can read my review of…

  • Review of Vol. 2 of ‘The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead’

    Below is a draft of my review of: BRIAN G. HENNING, JOSEPH PETEK, and GEORGE LUCAS, eds. The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead (1925-1927): General Metaphysical Problems of Science. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021: lxii + 511 pages. The version that is eventually published in Process Studies will likely need to be about half this length, so I’m…

  • Ingressing Minds: Causal Patterns Beyond Genetics and Environment – Reflections on Michael Levin’s Platonic Research Program for Biology

    Reflections on Michael Levin’s Platonic Research Program for Biology (a dialogue with Timothy Jackson) Timothy Jackson and I discuss  Michael Levin‘s new pre-print “Ingressing Minds: Causal Patterns Beyond Genetics and Environment in Natural, Synthetic, and Hybrid Embodiments” (which will eventually end up in the anthology collecting papers from the “Metaphysics and the Matter With Things: Thinking With Iain McGilchrist”…

  • Evolution by Natural Induction (Dialogue with Timothy Jackson)

    A near verbatim transcript: Matt Segall: Hey, Tim. Timothy Jackson: Hey, Matt. How are you? Matt Segall: Hanging in there, doing all right. Yeah. Matt Segall: Nice shirt. Timothy Jackson: Oh, this? Yeah, it’s a tiger snake. They’re very common around here. The design was drawn by a friend of ours who does really cool reptile art. Matt Segall: Local in…

  • Reflections on My Dialogue with Peter Rollins: Pyrotheology Meets Process Theology

    Earlier today I had the chance to speak with Peter Rollins on Rahul Sam’s podcast (video below). The conversation brought up many threads that have shaped my life over the last two decades. We discussed my unexpected encounter with Christ as a teenager, my interest in Alfred North Whitehead’s process theology and how it compares to Rollins radical…

  • Roberto Unger’s Religious Revolution and Its Anthroposophical Resonances

    I picked up Roberto Unger’s book The Religion of the Future (2014) for the first time yesterday.  On the back cover of his book, this excerpt is printed:  Everything in our existence points beyond itself. We must nevertheless die. We cannot grasp the ground of being. Our desires are insatiable. Our lives fail adequately to express our…

  • Minds in the Making: Bringing Formal and Final Causes Back into Evolutionary Science, with Michael Levin

    Michael, host of the podcast Third Eye Drops, invited me and the developmental biologist Michael Levin into dialogue. The video should be posted in the coming weeks, and I will share it here. I’ve had several conversations with Mike before (see here). In this post, I want to riff on some of the themes we explored…

  • Evolution: Theory or Theology? – Reflections on Whitehead, Wolfgang Smith, and the Rise of Participatory Science

    Two years ago, I sat down with the late philosopher and physicist, Wolfgang Smith, to discuss his novel approach to quantum physics and the need for a return to Platonic conceptions of reality. You can watch that conversation here (there’s also a complete transcript): Earlier today, I met with Dr. Smith’s collaborator and archivist, Richard,…