Author: Matthew David Segall
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Part 2 of my dialogue with Vervaeke and Henriques on Transcendent Naturalism
You can find part 1 of our conversation here. We spoke about the sacred, which we can discover in our relationships with one another, in art, and in our encounter with nature. I shared my attempt to recognize interiority in the cosmos, which I’ve referred to (drawing on the neoplatonic term) as the world-soul. I…
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Transcendent Naturalism: Dialoguing with John Vervaeke and Gregg Henriques
Here is the first of two conversations that I’ve recently recorded with John Vervaeke and Gregg Henriques as part of the “Transcendent Naturalism” series. Part two is available here. Transcendent Naturalism and Process Philosophy: The episode begins with some of my reflections on the “transcendent naturalism” that John and Gregg have been laying out in…
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Whitehead, God, and Eternal Objects (Dialoguing with Darren Iammarino)
Darren and I had an intense geek out session exploring some of Whitehead’s categoreal scheme. Key points include: Here’s my paper on eternal objects (a shorter version was just published in Process Studies): “Standing Firm in the Flux: On Whitehead’s Eternal Objects”
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Whitehead’s ‘Foresight,’ Or How Philosophy Can Shape the Business Mind of the Future
What follows is a brief essay reflecting on the relevance of Whitehead’s philosophy for shaping the business mind of the future. It is written for the Institute of Transactional Philosophy. I’ll be elaborating on these ideas at their annual Institute Study next month. Whitehead’s “Foresight,” Or How Philosophy Can Shape the Business Mind of the…
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Prehension: Is Experience Fundamental?
Brendan Graham Dempsey and I connected again to continue our discussion, this time focusing on Whitehead’s concept of “prehension.” I explained that, contrary to Ken Wilber’s placement of the concept in the upper left (individual-interior) quadrant of his AQAL map, prehension does not entail just an internal or subjective experience. It’s a transformative process where…
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Kant, Reality, Freedom: Dialoguing with Mahon McCann
Timestamps:
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Debating the Place of the Human in Cosmology with Brendan Graham Dempsey
After some back and forth in his Facebook group, Brendan was gracious enough to invite me on his Metamodernism podcast to discuss several core ideas, including the nature of scientific inquiry, the role of human experience in understanding the cosmos, and the limitations of mechanistic models in science. We discussed the intersection of philosophy, science,…
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In Dialogue with Seth Zuihō Segall about Virtue, Wisdom, and Pluralism
I had a wonderful time dialoguing with my cousin Seth Zuihō Segall about his new book The House We Live In: Virtue, Wisdom, and Plurailsm (2023). We started with Frank Sinatra’s song “The House I Live In” recorded toward the end of WWII. The lyrics were written by Abel Meeropol, a blacklisted Jewish Communist who…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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),…
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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…
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God and Cosmogenesis: Thinking With Catherine Keller
A lecture on process theology for my graduate course on Whitehead’s cosmology.
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Science, Religion, and Earth Evolution: Thinking With Teilhard and Whitehead
I gave this presentation at my graduate program’s retreat earlier this week.
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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.
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