Category: Plato
-
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…
-
“Making Sense in Common: A Reading of Whitehead in Times of Collapse” By Isabelle Stengers
Isabelle Stengers’ recent book Making Sense in Common: A Reading of Whitehead in Times of Collapse provides a thorough exploration of the relevance of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy, particularly in navigating the “post-truth” era and the broader planetary emergency. Stengers focuses on how Whitehead’s ideas can help reconstitute a form of common sense in a world where…
-
Whitehead on Logical and Aesthetic Order
A few weeks ago, Tim Jackson and I discuss M. Beatrice Fazi’s book Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics (2018), focusing in particular on her interpretations of Gilles Deleuze and Alfred North Whitehead. You can listen to that conversation here: Deleuze, Whitehead, and the Computational Aesthetics of M. Beatrice Fazi About an hour and…
-
Notes on Carl Jung’s Problem of the Fourth (with help from Rudolf Steiner)
In part five of his essay “A Psychological Approach to the Trinity,” titled “The Problem of the Fourth,” Carl Gustav Jung turns to Christian, Gnostic, and Hermetic religious symbolism for clues about the collective psychological development of Western humanity. His aim is not to offer metaphysical disambiguations of theological dogmas but to illuminate the path toward…
-
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…
-
C. S. Peirce’s Guess at the Riddle
Later today, Timothy Jackson and I will meet to discuss Charles Sanders Peirce’s essay “A Guess at the Riddle” (1888; pages cited below from The Essential Peirce, Vol 1). I’ll update this post with the video once I’ve uploaded it. The essay lays out Peirce’s profound philosophical insight into the real idea of the triad, which he deploys (among…
-
Re-Thinking Economics and the Meaning of Value with Tim Adalin and O. G. Rose
It was a genuine joy to be in dialogue with Daniel and Tim yesterday. I want to reflect on some of what I shared during our discussion. The first thing I think, to frame my remarks, would be to say that over the last couple decades of my adult life, in thinking about economics and…
-
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 process. While you have a lot of respect, if that’s the way I can put it, for Darwin’s theory of natural selection, it seems not…
-
Metaphysics, Science, and Waking Up (dialogue with Roman Campolo)
Roman and Matt delved into Whitehead’s metaphysics, exploring its intersections with modern science and spiritual experience. Roman began by asking Matt about the distinction between Whitehead’s eternal objects and Plato’s eternal forms. Matt explained that although Whitehead was influenced by Plato, the two concepts are different. Plato saw the physical world as an imperfect imitation…
-
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…
-
Some Philosophical Implications of Michael Levin’s New Paradigm Biology
Over the last year, I’ve had a couple of extremely stimulating conversations with the developmental biologist Mike Levin. The first was moderated by Karen Wong: Platonizing Biology: A Dialogue with Michael Levin Read full story The second was a one-on-one exchange on my YouTube channel: Taming the Technological Dragon, with Michael Levin Read full story…
-
Alfred North Whitehead: Ideas and Influence
Below is an article I’ve just finished that will eventually be translated into German and published in The Whitehead Handbook (Verlag).
-
“In Defense of Truth as Participation,” my McGilchrist Conference Presentation
First, here’s a clip of Iain McGilchrist’s impromptu remarks on the opening night of our “Metaphysics and the Matter With Things” conference (which happened to be Good Friday). Next, my welcome and opening comments about the conference (partial transcript to follow): Welcome to CIIS. I’m Matt Segall. I’m an associate professor here in the Philosophy,…
-
Transcendent Love and the Possibility of Revolutionary Political Change
I’ll be joining Cadell Last on Philosophy Portal next week to discuss the relationship between politics and love. At least as I relate to the topic, this is fundamentally a question of political theology. I’ve explored this terrain frequently over the years (eg, this process theological response to Carl Schmitt). In this post, I’ve dug up some old exchanges with Levi…
-
Descendental Philosophy and the Confrontation with Nihilism (dialogue with Roman Campolo)
Roman has been reading my book Crossing the Threshold. In this dialogue, we explore Whitehead’s mathematical imagination, theory of perception, and attempt to overcome the nihilism that Nietzsche marked out as a pathological transition stage. Watch on YouTube for timestamps. ChatGPT summary: 📘 Perception and Reality: Perception is not merely passive reception through the senses but…
-
Plato and Platonism: Dividing the Line and Completing the Cirlce
To listen to the live recording from which this transcript was produced, visit: https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1OwxWYrEnznGQ?s=20 I’m driving home from a talk that AE Robbert just gave at The Alembic in Berkeley. Adam’s a good friend of mine, and he’s finishing up a dissertation on the role of askēsisor training/exercise/practice in philosophy. He’s reading a lot of Pierre Hadot, and thinking about…
-
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…
-
Renewing Philosophy (Dialogue with Tim Adalin)
Tim Adalin hosted me on his Voicecraft podcast to discuss process philosophy and its applications. The conversation opened with an exploration of the relationship between philosophy, the elite, and democracy (particularly its susceptibility to tyranny and the importance of wise leadership over populism). I emphasized the role of education in a democratic society, proposing a culture…
-
Part 2 of my dialogue with Vervaeke and Henriques on Transcendent Naturalism
You can find part 1 of our conversation here. We spoke about the sacred, which we can discover in our relationships with one another, in art, and in our encounter with nature. I shared my attempt to recognize interiority in the cosmos, which I’ve referred to (drawing on the neoplatonic term) as the world-soul. I…
Footnotes2Plato 