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

Whitehead, God, and Eternal Objects (Dialoguing with Darren Iammarino)

Darren and I had an intense geek out session exploring some of Whitehead’s categoreal scheme. Key points include: Here’s my paper on eternal objects (a shorter version was just published in Process Studies): “Standing Firm in the Flux: On Whitehead’s Eternal Objects”

December 22, 2023
Kant, Reality, Freedom: Dialoguing with Mahon McCann

Timestamps:

December 8, 2023
Debating the Place of the Human in Cosmology with Brendan Graham Dempsey

After some back and forth in his Facebook group, Brendan was gracious enough to invite me on his Metamodernism podcast to discuss several core ideas, including the nature of scientific inquiry, the role of human experience in understanding the cosmos, and the limitations of mechanistic models in science. We discussed the intersection of philosophy, science,…

December 7, 2023
God and Cosmogenesis: Thinking With Catherine Keller

A lecture on process theology for my graduate course on Whitehead’s cosmology.

November 4, 2023
Taming the Technological Dragon, with Michael Levin

Selections from the transcript of this conversation (complied by AI): Matt Segall: I just finished your paper “Technological Approaches to Mind Everywhere” that came out last year and really enjoyed it. The more I read your stuff, the more I am shaken free of some philosophical commitments that I think I had arrived at because…

September 15, 2023
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…

September 13, 2023
From Transformational Festival to Whitehead Conference and Back Again

On Wednesday I’ll board a jet-powered steel tube and sky-sail to Europe for a few weeks. I land in Madrid, Spain where I’ll immediately catch a shuttle to drive along the southern side of the Sierra de Gredos mountains across the boarder to the small town of Idanha-a-Nova, Portugal, just north of which is the…

July 17, 2023
Energy is Information, Information is Communication: Thinking with Vervaeke and Henriques

Have a listen to Greg Henriques and John Vervaeke exploring the limits of reductive naturalism and the dangerous of decadent romanticism: John and Greg got some thoughts stirring, which I shared in the video below: For more on the communicative ontology I am proposing here, see this article of mine in Process Studies on Whitehead…

July 10, 2023
Crossing the Threshold on the War Machine Podcast

Yet another podcast discussing my book, this time with Matt from the War Machine podcast. We talk theurgy, the role of feeling and willing in our thinking, and how to experience the soul, God, and the cosmos after Kant’s critiques.

June 4, 2023
“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,…

June 3, 2023
Michael Levin’s Latent Space of Biological Form

Iain McGilchrist mentions my dialogue with Michael Levin a few weeks ago at the start of this video, before proceeding into an inquiry concerning the whereabouts of ideal form: Where are the forms in the ‘latent space’ of biological possibility? I think everyone in the conversation, including Iain, senses that asking “where”–while essential for noting…

May 30, 2023
Platonizing Biology: a dialogue with Michael Levin

Thanks to Karen for hosting this conversation on The Meaning Code. We started with a high level issue: the relationship between metaphysics and/or (philosophical) cosmology and the special sciences. I wanted to be sure he understood that I as a philosopher am in no way trying to tell scientists how to define or understand their…

May 12, 2023
The Integral Stage Authors Series (interview by Layman Pascal about “Crossing the Threshold”)

I’ve pasted the transcript below with timestamps (this is autogenerated from YouTube and so has some errors, but it is readable!). 0:34 welcome back to the author series on guess what The Integral Stage. I’m Layman Pascal on behalf of myself, Bruce 0:41 Alderman, and the Unspeakable future of life on Earth. And today we’re…

April 30, 2023
Philosophy as learning to die: Woven Wings Podcast

March 14, 2023
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…

March 4, 2023
“Modes of Thought” (1938) by Alfred North Whitehead

I was re-reading Whitehead’s final book, Modes of Thought (1938), and decided I may as well record an audiobook version. Below is the YouTube playlist with all 9 lectures/chapters (click the menu button in the upper right corner to expand the playlist).

January 24, 2023
Platonic Physics: In Dialogue with Wolfgang Smith

Here is my conversation, recorded yesterday, with Dr. Wolfgang Smith. His new book PHYSICS: A Science in Quest of an Ontology is available from many online bookstores. We discussed a range of topics, including wholeness in physics and mathematics, Whitehead and Russell’s different interpretations of the failure of the Principia Mathematica project, the fallacy of…

January 23, 2023
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.

January 6, 2023
Thinking with Rudolf Steiner

It is hard to believe I’ve been thinking with Steiner for almost 15 years. He is, as the late BBC documentarian and author Jonathan Stedall put it in the title of his 2011 biopic, a “challenge.” In contemporary German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s words: Steiner created a kind of antenna anthropology that we can no longer…

December 22, 2022
In dialogue with Iain McGilchrist

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

October 16, 2022
Urphänomen Reading Group – Rudolf Steiner’s “Riddles of Philosophy”

Below is a playlist featuring the recordings of our Urphänomen Reading Group, which is open to anyone interested (message us on Patreon or email archetypalphenomenon@gmail.com to join). New sessions will be added to this playlist as we go. We are reading the works of Rudolf Steiner, starting with Riddles of Philosophy. Next we’ll be reading…

October 2, 2022