Category: Alfred North Whitehead
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Reading Whitehead on Evolutionary Theory (Dialogue with Tim Jackson)
Tim Jackson and I just read Whitehead’s 1929 book The Function of Reason together. Here is our discussion: I begin with historical context about two important biologists who influenced Whitehead at Harvard: Lawrence Henderson and William Wheeler. Henderson, in his 1913 book The Fitness of the Environment, argued for continuity between cosmic and biological evolution, suggesting…
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The Nature of Consciousness and What To Do About It (Dialogue with Jack Bagby)
In this dialogue, Jack and I explore the nature of consciousness. I suggested at the get go that conscious thought is a process of “becoming other,” an ongoing participatory transformation with reality rather than a separate substance or quality somehow realized inside the head. I opened with a couple of lighthearted but probing questions to…
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Good Science, Bad Philosophy: Predictive Processing as Reheated Kantianism
Below I am sharing some open-ended reflections on the turf war between enactivist cognitive science, predictive processing approaches, and Whiteheadian cosmology. … Predictive Processing (PP) approaches (including Active Inference, the Free Energy Principle, etc.) are fantastic models that will surely continue to find important applications not only in cognitive neuroscience and developmental psychology, but in…
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Discussing Whitehead with Jeffrey Mishlove on “New Thinking Allowed”
It was a real pleasure to join host Jeffrey Mishlove on his show, New Thinking Allowed. He invited me on to discuss (surprise, surprise) the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. We explored Whitehead’s historical context, his engagement with contemporaries like Bertrand Russell, F.H. Bradley, and Ludwig…
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Christianity Beyond Itself (Dialogue with Jacob Kishere)
Transcript by ChatGPT: Host (Jacob Kishere): All right, welcome to Sense Space. Really, really happy to be joined today by Matthew Segall. Matthew has been connecting with a number of my friends and sister projects in the Lial web, like Cadell Last’s Philosophy Portal, Tim Adalin’s Voicecraft, John Vervaeke, and Brandon Graham Dempsey. He’s really shown up for…
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Whitehead’s Philosophy of Science
According to Susanne Langer, who was one of Whitehead’s students at Radcliff in the 1920s, every great philosophical scheme “must, in its original form, be regarded as a myth[1], which sets forth freshly and naively some new point of view [and] reveals new opportunities for rational construction” (The Practice of Philosophy, p. 178). Whitehead understood…
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Reflections on the Whitehead Centennial at Emerson Hall
My trip to Harvard gave me occasion to reflect not only on Whitehead’s legacy, but on his resonances with Emerson and their shared vision of philosophical education. It was raining Thursday afternoon when I arrived in Cambridge. My room at The Friendly Inn was a few blocks from Harvard Yard, and with the rain slowed…
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“Making Sense in Common: A Reading of Whitehead in Times of Collapse” By Isabelle Stengers
Isabelle Stengers’ recent book Making Sense in Common: A Reading of Whitehead in Times of Collapse provides a thorough exploration of the relevance of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy, particularly in navigating the “post-truth” era and the broader planetary emergency. Stengers focuses on how Whitehead’s ideas can help reconstitute a form of common sense in a world where…
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‘No Thinker Thinks Twice’: On the Attempt to Catch Whitehead in the Act of Philosophizing
What follows are some preliminary reflections on my panel presentation for the “Whitehead at Harvard” centennial conference this Friday, September 27. This Friday, I’ll be traveling to Harvard University for “A Century of Process Thought: Commemorating Whitehead’s Legacy at Harvard and Beyond.” The event is free to attend in-person or online (follow the link to register). The…
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Whitehead on Logical and Aesthetic Order
A few weeks ago, Tim Jackson and I discuss M. Beatrice Fazi’s book Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics (2018), focusing in particular on her interpretations of Gilles Deleuze and Alfred North Whitehead. You can listen to that conversation here: Deleuze, Whitehead, and the Computational Aesthetics of M. Beatrice Fazi About an hour and…
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Whitehead Centennial Conference at Harvard on September 27th
Sign up to attend for free either online or in-person at Harvard’s Emerson Hall (where Whitehead taught his first philosophy course a century ago): https://ctr4process.org/conference/whitehead-harvard-2024/
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C. S. Peirce’s “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God” (1908)
In his 1908 essay, “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God,” Charles Sanders Peirce offers a “humble hypothesis” meant to be accessible to the expert logician and clodhopper alike. God is identified as the ens necessarium, or the necessary being. This necessary being, according to Peirce, is the creator of all three (or at least…
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Quantum Physics and Process Metaphysics (dialogue with Flavio Lanfanconi)
A transcript of our conversation: Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: Good to see you. Great. I was just trying to keep up with everything you’ve posted recently. It’s difficult, but… Matt Segall: Sorry about that. Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: Never mind, it’s great. I was just finishing your last conversation with… Matt Segall: Roman. Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: Roman. Yep, exactly. I’m bad with…
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Discussing C. S. Peirce’s “A Guess at the Riddle” with Tim Jackson
A rough transcript: Matt Segall: Hey, Tim? One sec. Just getting my earmuffs on here. Timothy Jackson: Oh, good! Matt Segall: There we go! Hey! How’s it going? Timothy Jackson: Yeah, not too bad, man. How are you? Matt Segall: Doing well. Good morning. Timothy Jackson: Evening to you. Matt Segall: Yeah. Super excited to talk about Peirce. Haven’t read Peirce for…
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C. S. Peirce’s Guess at the Riddle
Later today, Timothy Jackson and I will meet to discuss Charles Sanders Peirce’s essay “A Guess at the Riddle” (1888; pages cited below from The Essential Peirce, Vol 1). I’ll update this post with the video once I’ve uploaded it. The essay lays out Peirce’s profound philosophical insight into the real idea of the triad, which he deploys (among…
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Etheric Imagination as Participatory Knowing: A Process-Relational Reading of Rudolf Steiner’s “Light Course”
Transcript: It’s really lovely to be here this morning, though it’s quite early for me. I’ve been enjoying the last three days of the Mysteries of Technology conference very much, and I’m very grateful to have been invited. I think what MysTech is doing is important, not only for the wider world to see the ways in…
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The Relevance of Whitehead’s Process Theology to Natural Science
Below is a rough transcript of a Cobb Institute class lecture I gave earlier today. I’m going to speak a little bit about the relevance, as I see it, of process theology to natural science. Whitehead was kept in print, I would say, for the better part of the second half of the 20th century…
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The Physics and Metaphysics of Evolutionary Learning
Below is the video and a transcript of a conversation with Brendan Graham Dempsey following my review of his essay “A Universal Learning Process.” You can listen to the audio on my Substack. BRENDAN Hey, everyone. Today, I’m joined again by Matt Segall. Matt’s an associate professor at California Institute of Integral Studies in the…
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Evolution as a Universal Learning Process
“Meaning arises out of the most fundamental dynamics of the physical world: energy and information…[I]t is precisely via the thermodynamic forces driving cosmic evolution as a whole that meaning evolves into more complex biological and social registers such as we experience as conscious agents…[M]eaning is a particular kind of information—namely, information linking entities with their…
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Becoming the World-Body
You are not your brain, and you’re not just your body either, at least not if you think of your body as just what’s encased within the skin. To really understand what’s going on inside your body, you would need to understand its history, which is as old as the universe. Understanding the body means…
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Exploring the Physics of the World-Soul (dialogue with Sam Al-Qattan)
Below is a rough transcript of my dialogue with Sam. Sam: Do you mind just giving a definition? What is mechanistic materialism? Matt: Mechanistic philosophy emerges in the 16th and 17th centuries in Western Europe and it’s really a rather sharp divergence from the sort of worldview that had characterized human societies for thousands of…
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