FROM THE FOOTNOTES2PLATO ARCHIVE
Category: Francisco Varela
Explore the evolving conversation, or begin with a guide to its central questions.
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Platonic Space, Organic Agency, and Creative Evolution
One of the important ideas that Tim and I discussed last night was his threefold differentiation of the inquired (natural science), the speculative (metaphysics), and the prosaic (everyday experience). I…
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Poetics of Life and Death: Dialoguing with Andreas Weber
Matt: Hi, Andreas. Good morning. Andreas: Good morning. Sorry to keep you waiting. Matt: That’s quite all right. Andreas: I was late anyway, and then Zoom decided it needed to…
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Ontologizing Enactivism: Worldmaking with Ezequiel Di Paolo (dialogue with Tim Jackson)
Timothy Jackson and I were back in the saddle, this time to discuss Ezequiel Di Paolo’s article seeking an enactive ontology: Di Paolo, E. A. (2023). F/acts: Ways of enactive worldmaking. Journal…
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There’s no scientific evidence that consciousness exists.
Evidence, in a scientific age, is usually thought of in a very specific way. We tend to assume evidence means empirical measurement: can I record this on a camera, or…
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Romanticizing Evolution: Whitehead’s Organic Realism and the Return of Organic Science
A transcript of my talk at the Cognizing Life conference in Tübingen, Germany July 18, 2025. Other contributors at the Cognizing Life conference include: Benjamin Bembé (Witten), Bohang Chen (Zhejiang), Luke Fischer (Sydney), Andrea Gambarotto (Wien), Levi Haeck(Ghent), Craig Holdrege (Ghent, NY), Christoph Hueck (Tübingen), Philippe…
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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…
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An Anthropocosmic Approach to the Nature of Consciousness (My Talk at the UTOK Conference on Consciousness)
“What man most passionately wants is his living wholeness and his living unison, not his own isolate salvation of his ‘soul.’ Man wants his physical fulfillment first and foremost, since…
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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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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 -
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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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…
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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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Evolution as Cosmic Cognition (dialogue with Richard Watson)
Matt Segall: Well, where do I want to begin? Richard, I know that you do a lot of work on evolutionary theory and evolution as a learning process or a cognitive…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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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 -
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…
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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…
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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…
