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: Evan Thompson

  • My Biophilosophy Conference Talk: Romanticizing Evolution with Schelling, Peirce, and Whitehead

    Below is my talk at the “Revitalizing Biophilosophy” conference I co-hosted earlier this week. It is based on a long paper I am working on both for this conference and for “Cognizing Life,” another conference that I’ll present at next week in Tübingen, Germany (there is a free livestream option if you’d like to tune…

  • Is a Metaphysical Revolution Afoot in the Natural Sciences?

    In this conversation, Mahon McCann invited me to reflect on what he referred to as a metaphysical revolution in natural science—gesturing toward the shift I and others have been tracking across disciplines including physics, biology, and cognitive science, where the old mechanistic, substance-based ontology seems increasingly inadequate to account for what’s actually being discovered and needing…

  • “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 “Is God a Mathematician?”  Our aim was to explore how Jonas, emerging from an existential–phenomenological and religious–philosophical context, offered both criticisms and appreciations of Darwin’s…

  • 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 Natural, Synthetic, and Hybrid Embodiments” (which will eventually end up in the anthology collecting papers from the “Metaphysics and the Matter With Things: Thinking With Iain McGilchrist”…

  • 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 US enters a dangerous moment in its own history. Fascism is not just an external threat, not just about those bad people over there. As…

  • Dialogue with Evan Thompson about “The Blind Spot”

    The Theōros Project hosted philosopher Evan Thompson at CIIS for a dialogue with me about his new book (with Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser) The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience (2024).  We covered a lot of territory:

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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 with your UTOK system to bring together the humanities and the natural sciences in a more comprehensive, systematic perspective, and any of the dialogues you’ve…

  • Between Phenomenology, Science, and Process Ontology (dialogue with James Schofield)

    In this video,  James Schofield and I have detailed discussion about process philosophy, with a focus on our respective backgrounds, interests, and scholarly work. James begins by introducing his academic journey, highlighting his studies in anthropology, consciousness, and philosophy, which led to his book on Errol Harris. He shares his dissatisfaction with traditional anthropology and psychology, which propelled…

  • Philosophy of/as Information in Simondon, Floridi, and Whitehead (dialogue with Tim Jackson)

    We discuss Ashley Woodward’s paper on Simondon: “Philosophy of/as Information” Here’s a ChatGPT4o summary:  Matt greeted Tim, sharing about the warm weather in Oakland and the ongoing Independence Day celebrations with fireworks already exploding despite it being 4 o’clock in the afternoon. They had both read Luciano Floridi’s work on Philosophy of Information and Ashley…

  • Discussing “The Blind Spot” (2024) with Timothy Jackson

    Tim joined me to discuss Frank, Gleiser, and Thompson’s new book. Below are some timestamps of what we covered in this long conversation: 0:10 The contemporary urban life-world 10:36 In defense of “direct experience” 19:26 Life is a surprise to physics? 35:45 Real time vs. Clock time 42:13 Organization precedes Evolution? 1:04:27 Organicism includes mechanism;…

  • More Reflections on “The Blind Spot”: Life, Cognition, and Consciousness

    These are rough notes that capture some of my ongoing reflections after re-reading the core chapters of The Blind Spot. You can read my original review here: Blind Spot Review. I composed these notes in preparation for a dialogue tomorrow with biologist Timothy Jackson. Stay tuned for that! Chapter 6, titled “Life,” begins with the authors’ reflection…

  • 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 Thompson offer an urgent philosophical intervention into humanity’s all but doomed technoscientific civilizational project. The authors argue cogently that our contemporary scientific culture has steered…

  • Fantasy, Science, and Beauty in an Evolving Universe (dialogue with Tim Jackson)

    Tim and I continued our dialogue about the Free Energy Principle and Whitehead’s cosmology. I began by recounting a short video of Karl Friston saying all human perception is fantasy. From there we discussed FEP’s instrumentalism, the Peirce-James pragmatist difference, and explored the implications of evolution as a general principle extending beyond just biology. We also…

  • Whitehead and the Free Energy Principle: The Physics and Metaphysics of Information (dialogue with Tim Jackson)

    Tim Jackson and I met for another thought jam to explore the interplay between contemporary physics, information theory, biology, and Whitehead’s process philosophy. We got into the ontology of abstraction and in the end found ourselves ruminating on the nature of reality in an increasingly technologically mediated world. Our conversation unveiled a shared concern: as…

  • Conference Update – Metaphysics and the Matter With Things: Thinking With Iain McGilchrist

    Andrew Davis and I sat down with Iain McGilchrist to discuss our upcoming conference at CIIS in San Francisco, March 29-31. In-person tickets have already sold out, but online registration is still open. Learn more and register to attend the conference online at the Center for Process Studies webpage. Among other topics, we discuss Iain’s…

  • 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…

  • 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),…