Footnotes2Plato

“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”
–Alfred North Whitehead

Category: Alfred North Whitehead

  • 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: The complex nature of eternal objects in Whitehead’s philosophy and the lack of consensus on the subject among scholars. The interaction between eternal objects and actual occasions, and how this relates to the primordial and consequent natures…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Kant, Reality, Freedom: Dialoguing with Mahon McCann

    Timestamps: The podcast begins with an introduction and a discussion on the “Kantian Divide,” exploring how this divide has shaped modern philosophy. This segment delves into Kant’s concept of epistemological dualism, examining its implications and how it influences our understanding of knowledge and reality. The conversation shifts to the importance of imagination in Kant’s philosophy,…

  • 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,…

  • 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…

  • 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 Emphasis on an “endo-methodology” for studying life and the physical world. Challenge to Cartesian dualism and its…

  • 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…

  • 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),…

  • 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…

  • God and Cosmogenesis: Thinking With Catherine Keller

    A lecture on process theology for my graduate course on Whitehead’s cosmology.

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Science, Religion, and Earth Evolution: Thinking With Teilhard and Whitehead

    I gave this presentation at my graduate program’s retreat earlier this week.

  • 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.

  • Navigating Kantian Thought with John Vervaeke

    This dialogue with John Vervaeke about my new book Crossing the Threshold was recorded earlier this year. Claude’s summary: The book discusses overcoming Kant’s epistemological barrier between the world and human reason. Kant erected this barrier to preserve human freedom and agency against the mechanistic worldview of science. Matt aims to develop an “etheric imagination”…

  • Process Theology and the Modern World: Science, Religion, and Christology After Teilhard and Whitehead

    Below is a draft of my chapter to be published as part of an anthology coming out of the Teilhard and Whitehead conference hosted by the Center for Christogenesis at Villanova University a few weeks ago.

  • Seminar Series next month on Process Approaches to the Philosophy of Biology

    The Cobb Institute Science Advisory Committee, which I chair, will be hosting a series of seminars next month featuring the contributors to a new book, Process-Philosophcal Perspectives on Biology: Intuiting Life (Cambridge, 2023). The book challenges the reductionist, materialistic metaphysics often adopted by biologists, arguing that this approach overlooks the intricate complexities and essential characteristics…

  • Summary Reflections on Rudolf Steiner’s “Interdisciplinary Astronomy” (GA 323)

    Our Urphänomen reading group is back in action, this time reading Steiner’s lecture cycle titled Interdisciplinary Astronomy (1921, GA 323). Frederick Amrine recently published a wonderful new translation. Earlier this week I summarized lecture 5 (video above). Below is a rough transcript of my reflections: The key issue here for Steiner is that we need…

  • Taming the Technological Dragon, with Michael Levin

    Selections from the transcript of this conversation (complied by AI): Matt Segall: I just finished your paper “Technological Approaches to Mind Everywhere” that came out last year and really enjoyed it. The more I read your stuff, the more I am shaken free of some philosophical commitments that I think I had arrived at because…