FROM THE FOOTNOTES2PLATO ARCHIVE
Category: Descartes
Explore the evolving conversation, or begin with a guide to its central questions.
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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 -
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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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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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 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…
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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…
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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…
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Discussing “The Blind Spot” with Gregg Henriques
Here is a rough transcript of some of my comments to Gregg: I think this book speaks to both of us for obvious reasons. The work you’ve been engaged in…
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Metaphysics, Science, and Waking Up (dialogue with Roman Campolo)
Roman and Matt delved into Whitehead’s metaphysics, exploring its intersections with modern science and spiritual experience. Roman began by asking Matt about the distinction between Whitehead’s eternal objects and Plato’s…
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Review of “The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience”
Review of The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience (MIT Press, 2024) by Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson By Matthew David Segall In The Blind Spot, Frank, Gleiser, and…
Albert Einstein, Alfred North Whitehead, autopoiesis, Copernican Revolution, Daniel Dennett, Darwin, David Chalmers, Descartes, Donna Haraway, Edmund Husserl, Evan Thompson, Francisco Varela, Galileo, Goethe, Henri Bergson, Isabelle Stengers, Modern Philosophy, Ptolemy, reason, Rudolf Steiner, William James -
Schelling and the Return of Organic Science
Below is a video (talk, then Q&A) and transcript of my talk yesterday for the Scientific and Medical Network. I’m hoping to be able to share the video at a later…
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Whitehead’s Panprehensionism: A Feeling For Reality (Dialogue with Tim Jackson)
Video timestamps are available on YouTube. Below is Claude 3 Opus’ summary of the transcript (with a few edits by me): In this detailed conversation, Matt, a philosopher, and Tim,…
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Descendental Philosophy and the Confrontation with Nihilism (dialogue with Roman Campolo)
Roman has been reading my book Crossing the Threshold. In this dialogue, we explore Whitehead’s mathematical imagination, theory of perception, and attempt to overcome the nihilism that Nietzsche marked out as…
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Dying to be Born (Dialogue with Roman Campolo)
Roman and I sat down for another dialogue. Topics discussed this time include: anatman, evil, relevant novelty, death, the ontological argument for the existence of God and its discontents, and…
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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…
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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…
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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…
