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: Henri Bergson

  • 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…

  • 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;…

  • 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…

  • Space, Time, and Religion in the Making (dialogue with Roman Campolo)

    Roman and I had another dialogue session to discuss Alfred North Whitehead’s book Religion in the Making (1926). This book lays out Whitehead’s understanding of the evolution of religious consciousness through the phases of emotion, ritual, belief, and rationalization. We touched on the significance of play behavior in animals and human beings, the transition from…

  • 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…

  • Toward a Goethean Astronomy: Reflections on Rudolf Steiner’s “Interdisciplinary Astronomy” (GA 323)

    The following are quickly edited transcripts of my introductory remarks at six of our Urphänomen reading group sessions that began back in August of this year. I’ve included some screenshots of the slides I refer to below, but most of them are animated. You’ll have to watch the embedded videos to see the full context…

  • 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…

  • 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),…

  • 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.

  • 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…

  • Metaphysics and the Matter With Things: Thinking With Iain McGilchrist

    I’m very excited to announce that my graduate program (Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at CIIS) and the Center for Process Studies are cohosting a conference March 29-31, 2024 focused on the work of Iain McGilchrist. The temporary conference landing page is HERE. You can provide an email address for updates on conference registration in the…

  • “Whitehead’s Transcendental Cosmology” By James Bradley

    I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Collected Essays in Speculative Philosophy: James Bradley (2021; edited by Sean J. McGrath). Bradley is criminally under-appreciated, but this collection is sure to change that. While reading McGrath’s wonderful introduction, I noted his footnote (p. 7) about an as yet untranslated article Bradley published in the French journal Archives de philosophie,…

  • Pre-order my new book ‘Crossing the Threshold’

    My new book Crossing the Threshold: Etheric Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead is now available for pre-order (thanks to Revelore Press/Integral Imprint). Orders ship on Earth Day (April 22). “Segall’s new book is a sustained blissful effort to re-infuse 21st century thought with the courage, generosity, and imagination that he himself…

  • Six Lectures on Whitehead’s ‘Process and Reality’

    Below is a series of six lectures originally recorded in 2017 going through each part of Alfred North Whitehead’s magnum opus Process and Reality.

  • Carl Schmitt’s ‘Political Theology’: A Process Theological Intervention

    “Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology: A Process Theological Intervention” By Matthew David Segall Introduction This essay critically engages with Carl Schmitt’s anti-liberal political theology, offering important interventions from the related perspectives of Alfred North Whitehead’s cosmopolitical process theology, philosophical personalism, and Bruno Latour’s Gaian political ecology. Schmitt’s criticisms of early 20th century liberalism are tested against Dan Dombrowski’s…

  • In dialogue with Iain McGilchrist

    See also my blog review of McGilchrist’s new book The Matter With Things.

  • “The Matter With Things” by Iain McGilchrist

    “The Matter With Things” by Iain McGilchrist

    “Questions such as those concerning scientific truth, the nature of reality, and the place of man in the cosmos require for their study some knowledge of the constitution, quality, capacities and limitations of the human mind through which medium all such problems must be handled.” -Roger Sperry (1952) I’ve just finished reading The Matter With…

  • Integral Facticity podcast with Erik Haines: Varieties of Integral & the Next Left

    Integral Facticity podcast with Erik Haines: Varieties of Integral & the Next Left

    More info: https://medium.com/integral-facticity/matt-segall-on-the-varieties-of-integral-michael-brooks-the-next-left-af41e79a8a0e

  • Tim Eastman Unties the Gordian Knot: Complete Seminar (Sessions 1-9)

    Tim Eastman Unties the Gordian Knot: Complete Seminar (Sessions 1-9)

    Above is an embedded playlist featuring all 9 of the Eastman Seminars that I facilitated for the Science Advisory Committee of the Cobb Institute from June 2021 through February 2022. Tim Eastman, a plasma physicist and philosopher, is the author of Untying the Gordian Knot: Process, Reality, and Context (2020). These seminars invited other scholars…