Category: Religion
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Burning Man and the Seeds of a New Story
Mission at Tenth special supplement Vol. 7, 274-279 (2018) “Carnival of Consciousness: Practice as Research in Black Rock City” A Submission by Matthew T. Segall, PhD “Burning Man and the Seeds of a New Story” “We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.” –W. H. Auden, Another Time (1940) As religious scholar Lee Gilmore argues…
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A Process Theological Invitation
Below, I’m sharing my response to a student in my course this semester. I cannot thank you enough for sharing your childhood experiences of religion with us. Know that you are certainly not alone in having been so mistreated and shamed by repressive patriarchal dogmatism. I am so glad you were able to find your…
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Whitehead’s Final Interpretation of Reality: God and the World
Whitehead tells us at the start of the final part of Process & Reality (“Final Interpretation”) that the chief danger in philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence. For many modern, scientifically inclined philosophers, this narrowness has taken the form of an all too easy rejection of the world’s religious traditions and the religious experience which gave rise…
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The Side View podcast
Adam Robbert interviewed me over on The Side View Podcast. Check it out HERE. We discussed speculative philosophy, panpsychism, politics, and more.
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Foreword to an upcoming anthroposophical book on twelve ways of seeing the world
Below is the draft of a foreword I’ve coauthored with Robert McDermott. The book, Twelve Ways of Seeing the World by Mario Betti, should be out later this year via Hawthorn Press. Betti’s book builds fruitfully upon the ideas of Rudolf Steiner. You can read Steiner’s original lectures on the topic of the 12 human worldviews…
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Who is Alfred North Whitehead & What is Process Philosophy?
Environmental lawyer, philosopher, and fellow Whitehead enthusiast Tam Hunt and I started an email exchange a few weeks ago after I stumbled upon his interview with the physicist Carol Rovelli. Our emails grew into a pretty extensive conversation on all things Whitehead, which I am sharing below. We discuss the importance of Whitehead’s ideas for…
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An Evening with Alfred North Whitehead
Here are some clips from my video call with students earlier tonight wherein I discuss Whitehead’s cosmology, including his views of God, creativity, time, immortality, and education.
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The (Cosmo)Political Ontology of Abortion
A link to the Twitter tiff I mentioned: https://twitter.com/normonics/status/1090672373760692225
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Cosmopolitics and Decentralizing the Movement
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Catherine Keller: The Cosmopolitical Entanglements of Process-Relational Theology
In what follows, I offer some reflections on the feminist process theologian Catherine Keller’s book Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement (2015). Keller poetically folds her refreshingly open theological orientation into an array of important planetary topics,—including the ethical implications of quantum entanglement (chapter 4), the poststructuralist dissolution of substance (chapter 5)…
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My political autobiography
It has become a truism: every election is the most important of our lives. Is this any more true of the 2020 presidential election? Of course it is! As we approach what is already shaping up to be another prolonged and contentious primary season, I want to offer an autobiographical preamble to my ongoing commentary…
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Genes v. Organisms in Biological Explanation (responding to the Dawkins v. Weinstein debate)
Here’s the recent debate between Richard Dawkins and Bret Weinstein on the relationship between cultural and biological evolution: Here are two response videos from me arguing for the relevance of Francisco Varela and Evan Thompson et al.’s theory of autopoiesis and Alfred North Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism: Some relevant essays that expand on the…
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The Schelling & Hegel Tapes
I’m sharing some clips from a live video conference session a few days ago with students in my online course this semester, “Mind and Nature in German Idealism.”
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Whitehead’s Quantum of Explanation: Thinking with Auxier and Herstein
“Our central idea is that concrete existence explains the abstract aspects of experience and not vice-versa.” -Auxier and Herstein “So long as necessity is taken to be the guarantor of rationality, the conception of rationality advocated will be as useless to science as it is to practical life.” -Auxier and Herstein Below I offer some…
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the nature of consciousness and what to do about it, a dialogue
Here I am with Aaron Weiss, scholar of Tibetan Buddhism and doctoral candidate at CIIS, talking about the nature of consciousness and what to do about it. The first talk was filmed back in April; the second was filmed in September as a follow-up.
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Spring online course at CIIS.edu – Whitehead’s Adventure in Cosmology
Auditors are welcome, though space is limited. Email me at msegall@ciis.edu for more information. One of our core texts in this course will be my Physics of the World-Soul (a new third edition soon to be published).
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Schelling’s Philosophy of Freedom
The following was originally written in 2012 as a chapter in a short book titled Philosophy in a Time of Emergency. It feels relevant given our current political situation, so I’m sharing it again. The Nature of Human Freedom By Matthew D. Segall The Naturphilosoph comes to understand “Nature as subject.”1 This is not the Kantian…
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Back to teach at Schumacher College in April 2019: “The Evolution of Consciousness and the Cosmological Imagination”
I’ll be teaching another short course at Schumacher College in the UK the week of April 22nd-26th, 2019. Here’s a link if you’re interested in registering: https://www.schumachercollege.org.uk/courses/short-courses/re-enchanting-the-cosmos Here’s what I’ll be teaching on: “The Evolution of Consciousness and the Cosmological Imagination” This week-long course will trace the evolution of consciousness in the West from ancient…
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Mutations podcast interview
Thanks to Jeremy for hosting a great conversation! LINK to Podcast
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Participatory Spirituality in an Evolving Cosmos
Here’s my talk from the INTERSECT: Science & Spirituality conference in Telluride, CO earlier this summer. It’s titled “Participatory Spirituality in an Evolving Cosmos”
Footnotes2Plato 