FROM THE FOOTNOTES2PLATO ARCHIVE
Category: Darwin
Explore the evolving conversation, or begin with a guide to its central questions.
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“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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Minds All Around Us: Dialoguing with Michael Levin
You can read my reflections on this dialogue here.
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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:…
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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…
Alfred North Whitehead, Ancient Philosophy, Aristotle, autopoiesis, Carl Jung, Catherine Keller, Daniel Dennett, Darwin, Descartes, Emmanuel Levinas, Evan Thompson, Francisco Varela, Galileo, Gilles Deleuze, Hegel, Henri Bergson, Heraclitus, Hume, Kant, Modern Philosophy, Plato, reason, Religion, Romantic Philosophy, Schelling, Socrates -
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…
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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…
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Experiential Philosophy, Psychedelic Entities, and Naturalistic Reincarnation: Cheltenham and UK Philosophers Interview
I recorded this dialogue with Matthew Gray of the Cheltenham and UK Philosophers group a few days ago. A transcript is below. Introduction and Matt Segall’s Credentials Matt Gray: “Hey guys,…
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The Evolution of Consciousness and the Destiny of America (Dialogue with Formscapes)
In a spontaneous three-hour livestream, Kehlan and Matt explored the thoughts of influential thinkers and the implications of America’s Pluto Return. They discussed consciousness evolution, materialism’s challenges, and the spiritual…
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Theories of Everything Podcast: Process Philosophy from Plato to Whitehead and Beyond (Dialogue with Curt Jaimungal)
Below I am sharing a couple of outputs from ChatGPT4o1 as a hopefully interesting way of summarizing my 3 hour conversation with Curt. In my prompt I asked it to…
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Machinic Heterogenesis and Ecosophic Futures: Thinking With Félix Guattari
The video above records my thoughts after reading a chapter from Felix Guattari’s book Chaosmosis (1995). Turning again to the work of Guattari and his frequent collaborator Gilles Deleuze felt important as the…
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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…
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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…
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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.…
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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,…
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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…
