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: Plato

  • Prehensions, Propositions, and the Cosmological Commons (dialogue with Tevin Naidu)

    Tevin Naidu recently hosted me on his Mind-Body Solutions podcast. Above is the video and below is an edited and somewhat condensed transcript. Tevin: I have shaped today’s episode around your paper, “Physics Within the Bounds of Feeling Alone.” It is a wonderful piece—a beautiful read. One thing I often ask my guests to do is give a…

  • 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 now, once and once only, he is in the flesh and potent. For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for…

  • “Psychedelic Realism”: My presentation at Breaking Convention

    Below is an audio version and edited transcript of my talk at Breaking Convention last week, hosted by the University of Exeter. Video should be available in the coming weeks.  Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes (Introduction) It is my pleasure to introduce our next speaker, all the way from California: Dr. Matthew David Segall. Matt is an Associate…

  • Plotinus Without Emanation: Dialogue with Pedro Brea and Jack Bagby

    Pedro Brea, Jack Bagby, and I decided to continue digging into Plotinus—specifically the Sixth Ennead—focusing on the relationship between the One and the Intellect, and between the World-Soul and individual souls. Why and how does the One overflow into the Many? We also read a helpful chapter by Gina Zavota titled “Plotinus’ ‘Reverse’ Platonism: A Deleuzian Response to the Problem…

  • 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…

  • 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,…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Metaphysics Today

    Monday musings on the necessity of history and its overcoming.  Mythos is an indispensable method in metaphysics. Metaphysics only comes to life in the midst of philosophical dialogues, and so sometimes it is helpful to perform a seance by invoking conceptual personae: Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Aquinas, Hegel, Whitehead. These and many other names tell a…

  • Whitehead’s Revolutionary Concept of Prehension (Thinking with Tim Jackson and Charles Hartshorne)

    Tim Jackson and I discussed Hartshorne’s article, “Whitehead’s Revolutionary Concept of Prehension.” Charles Hartshorne offers a detailed and insightful examination of Alfred North Whitehead’s process-relational philosophy. Hartshorne, who served as Whitehead’s assistant at Harvard University during the 1920s, was also profoundly influenced by Charles Sanders Peirce, whose papers he edited during that same period. This background…

  • Minds All Around Us: Dialoguing with Michael Levin

    You can read my reflections on this dialogue here.

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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”…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Evolution: Theory or Theology? – Reflections on Whitehead, Wolfgang Smith, and the Rise of Participatory Science

    Two years ago, I sat down with the late philosopher and physicist, Wolfgang Smith, to discuss his novel approach to quantum physics and the need for a return to Platonic conceptions of reality. You can watch that conversation here (there’s also a complete transcript): Earlier today, I met with Dr. Smith’s collaborator and archivist, Richard,…

  • 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…