Category: Religion
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Discussing Whitehead with Jeffrey Mishlove on “New Thinking Allowed”
It was a real pleasure to join host Jeffrey Mishlove on his show, New Thinking Allowed. He invited me on to discuss (surprise, surprise) the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. We explored Whitehead’s historical context, his engagement with contemporaries like Bertrand Russell, F.H. Bradley, and Ludwig…
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Christianity Beyond Itself (Dialogue with Jacob Kishere)
Transcript by ChatGPT: Host (Jacob Kishere): All right, welcome to Sense Space. Really, really happy to be joined today by Matthew Segall. Matthew has been connecting with a number of my friends and sister projects in the Lial web, like Cadell Last’s Philosophy Portal, Tim Adalin’s Voicecraft, John Vervaeke, and Brandon Graham Dempsey. He’s really shown up for…
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Reflections on the Whitehead Centennial at Emerson Hall
My trip to Harvard gave me occasion to reflect not only on Whitehead’s legacy, but on his resonances with Emerson and their shared vision of philosophical education. It was raining Thursday afternoon when I arrived in Cambridge. My room at The Friendly Inn was a few blocks from Harvard Yard, and with the rain slowed…
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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…
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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…
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C. S. Peirce’s “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God” (1908)
In his 1908 essay, “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God,” Charles Sanders Peirce offers a “humble hypothesis” meant to be accessible to the expert logician and clodhopper alike. God is identified as the ens necessarium, or the necessary being. This necessary being, according to Peirce, is the creator of all three (or at least…
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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…
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The Relevance of Whitehead’s Process Theology to Natural Science
Below is a rough transcript of a Cobb Institute class lecture I gave earlier today. I’m going to speak a little bit about the relevance, as I see it, of process theology to natural science. Whitehead was kept in print, I would say, for the better part of the second half of the 20th century…
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Exploring the Physics of the World-Soul (dialogue with Sam Al-Qattan)
Below is a rough transcript of my dialogue with Sam. Sam: Do you mind just giving a definition? What is mechanistic materialism? Matt: Mechanistic philosophy emerges in the 16th and 17th centuries in Western Europe and it’s really a rather sharp divergence from the sort of worldview that had characterized human societies for thousands of…
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Paradigm Shifts, Human Experience, Panpsychism, and Psychedelics (dialoguing with Jack Roycroft-Sherry)
Jack and I discussed a number of topics, beginning with how science and philosophy might be demarcated. I suggest that science, born from natural philosophy, relies on metaphysical presuppositions and requires philosophical foundations to justify its knowledge claims. Philosophy seeks the general and universal, while science specializes in isolated regions of inquiry. Both are valuable…
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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…
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Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy: A dialogue with Evan Sola, PsyD and Casey Paleos, MD
A clinical psychologist and psychiatrist involved in MAPS’ phase 3 MDMA trials weigh in on the ethical and ontological challenges of psychedelic psychotherapy. Here is a rough transcript of this conversation. Evan and Casey both have chapters in a soon to be published American Psychological Association textbook on psychedelic therapy, which formed the basis of…
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What is Metamodern Christianity?
Yesterday, I listened to this wonderful dialogue between Brendan Graham Dempsey and John Vervaeke: They discuss Brendan’s proposal of a “metamodern” Christianity and explore the potential to reclaim faith in Christ in a contemporary, intellectually responsible way. The conversation revolved around the evolution of human understanding and relationship with what, following Jung, we can call “the…
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Part 2 on Jung’s ‘Answer to Job’ (dialogue with Tim Jackson)
Some key themes that emerge in our dialogue: Jung begins the book with an emotional, active imagination style condemnation of Yahweh’s behavior in the Book of Job. In the second half, he steps back to analyze not just what is going on in Yahweh’s unconscious and in Job, but to look at all of Western civilization…
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Reading Jung’s ‘Answer to Job’
In my dialogue with Tim Jackson a few days ago, we began exploring perhaps Jung’s most important book, Answer to Job. We’ll be meeting again tomorrow to record a part 2. In the meantime, below are some of my preliminary reflections on the second half of the text. … Jung explores the psychospiritual implications of the biblical…
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On Jung’s “Answer to Job” (dialogue with Timothy Jackson)
This recording is our first of at least two dialogues on a book I’ll never be done reading. Below is my own brief summary after re-reading roughly the first half of the text: Physical facts aren’t the only basis for truth. According to Jung, there are also psychic truths, and they are no less valid,…
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Open and Relational Christianity
Jonathan Foster invited me on his podcast today. Below is a rough transcript of our conversation. … Jonathan Foster Listeners of podcasts and watchers of YouTube’s people out in the internet. Thanks so much for hanging out with us today. We are continuing what I’m calling season eight, where we’re talking about open and relational theology, and…
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“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,…
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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…
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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…
Footnotes2Plato 