Category: Plato
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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 “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…
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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 it here. It seems to me that this conversation (see prior episodes) is necessarily transdisciplinary, drawing on natural sciences, aesthetics and art, myth and religion,…
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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 video will be made available in a few weeks to those who register with the Center. I began by playfully suggesting I’d be proceeding as…
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Processing Plotinus: A Bergsonian Reading
I was joined again by Pedro Brea (we discussed Bergson and Whitehead a few weeks ago) and now also by Jack Bagby(a colleague of mine at CIIS). We discussed Jack’s translation of Bergson’s lectures on Plotinus (1898-99). We also discussed an essay by Wayne J. Hankey on Bergson and Plotinus. Although I had previously known Plotinus influenced Bergson, our discussion highlighted…
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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 the physiologoi. His dialogue Timaeus represents a synthesis rather than a pure start in the evolution of philosophy. He attempted to reconcile different positions and…
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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 Metaphysics Meets Possibilist Physics (Dialoguing with Ruth Kastner)
Ruth Kastner and I first met several years ago in the context of a seminar series focused on plasma physicist and philosopher Timothy Eastman’s work. Ruth also participated in the “Metaphysics and the Matter With Things: Thinking With Iain McGilchrist” conference I co-hosted at CIIS last March. We’ve been meaning to sit down to see what bridges might…
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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: Process, Reality, and Context (2020). This event was sponsored by the Cobb Institute’s Science Advisory Committee, which I chair. You can read my review of…
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Review of Vol. 2 of ‘The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead’
Below is a draft of my review of: BRIAN G. HENNING, JOSEPH PETEK, and GEORGE LUCAS, eds. The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead (1925-1927): General Metaphysical Problems of Science. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021: lxii + 511 pages. The version that is eventually published in Process Studies will likely need to be about half this length, so I’m…
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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 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”…
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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 tiger snake. They’re very common around here. The design was drawn by a friend of ours who does really cool reptile art. Matt Segall: Local in…
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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 it here. I’ve had several conversations with Mike before (see here). In this post, I want to riff on some of the themes we explored…
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God Beyond and Within (Dialogue with Roman Campolo)
Below is a ChatGPT summary of my conversation with Roman (which I’ve reviewed for accuracy). You can find the exact transcript on Substack. Roman began by sharing his thoughts on a documentary he recently watched about Mount Athos, a place he had not known about before. He explained that Mount Athos is an island off…
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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 mission of the U.S. They expressed concerns over populism and the need for a moral vision amidst societal fragmentation, emphasizing a harmonious approach to spirituality…
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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 create a very detailed narrative summary of the transcript written from the perspective of a 23rd century natural philosopher who had lived through the paradigm…
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Why the World is Unfinished: Whitehead in 20 Minutes
The following reflections are based on transcribed excerpts from a recent podcast that should appear at the end of the year and that I will be sure to share. Do I consider myself a Whiteheadian? On the one hand, obviously yes—he is certainly the most influential philosopher for me. But at the same time, I…
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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 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…
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