A field guide to nearly twenty years of philosophical inquiry, from 2006 to the present.
Welcome. Footnotes2Plato is the public notebook of my philosophical life. The earliest entries date to November 2006, when I was twenty years old and trying to understand consciousness, mystical experience, evolution, and the peculiar modern conviction that nature is fundamentally a machine. Nearly twenty years and more than a thousand posts later, the questions have grown more demanding, but they remain recognizably related: What is a mind? What is nature? How does anything genuinely new come into being? What might science, philosophy, art, and religion learn from one another?
I am Matthew David Segall, a philosopher and professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. My research centers on process-relational philosophy, especially Alfred North Whitehead, in conversation with Plato, Goethe, Schelling, William James, Rudolf Steiner, Teilhard de Chardin, and contemporary work in physics, biology, and consciousness studies. But this site is not only an academic archive. You will also find arguments with friends, book notes, poems, lectures, political interventions, and the occasional report from an experiment in living.
The name comes from Whitehead’s remark that European philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. I have always taken the remark as an invitation rather than a verdict. A footnote can extend, question, complicate, or overturn the text it accompanies. Philosophy is an unfinished conversation, not a museum of settled answers.
The Thread Running Through the Work
My guiding intuition is that reality is better understood in terms of relationships, experience, and creative becoming than in terms of self-contained substances pushed about by external forces. Consciousness is not an alien addition to an otherwise meaningless universe; nor does the world simply dissolve into the human mind. We are participants in the same natural processes we seek to understand. Whitehead calls this a philosophy of organism. I have tried to bring its implications into contact with scientific practice, evolutionary theory, religious imagination, ecological politics, and the technological transformations of human life.
This does not mean that scientific findings can be replaced by metaphysical speculation, or that spiritual traditions are exempt from criticism. It means that the interpretation of scientific facts already raises philosophical questions, and that our deepest questions about meaning and value deserve to be pursued without abandoning intellectual rigor.
How the Questions Developed
2006–2009 | Searching for a Language
The early posts are exploratory, often personal, sometimes impatient. I was writing about spirituality and skepticism, embodied cognition, integral theory, and the possibility of a living universe before I had found a stable philosophical vocabulary for these concerns. You can see the tensions in “Open Letter to Richard Dawkins”, the attempt to connect cognitive science and spiritual practice in “Enactivism, Integral Theory, and 21st Century Spirituality”, and an early cosmological sketch in “The Living Cosmos”.
2010–2016 | Finding Whitehead and Schelling
Graduate study sharpened the philosophical questions. Whitehead’s philosophy of organism and Schelling’s philosophy of nature offered ways beyond the modern partition of mind from matter and value from fact. “Towards a Naturalistic Panentheism” explores religion in a naturalistic frame; the long 2012 project Physics of the World-Soul puts process metaphysics into conversation with physics and evolutionary cosmology; and “Organic Science in Schelling and Whitehead” carries that inquiry into the history of science.
2017–2022 | Cosmology Enters History
The inquiry widened toward ecological civilization, democratic pluralism, the politics of knowledge, and participatory approaches to science. “Politics and Pluralism in the Anthropocene” asks what a relational philosophy demands of our common life. “Science and the Soul of the World” returns to Goethe and Whitehead as guides to an organic approach to knowing nature.
2023–2026 | New Conversations, Old Questions
My more recent writing brings these concerns into dialogue with contemporary biology, artificial intelligence, the return of Platonic form, and renewed questions about theology and personhood. For an accessible statement of my philosophical orientation, begin with “Why the World Is Unfinished: Whitehead in 20 Minutes”. For live controversies, try “Patterns Are Not Puppeteers”, “Human Consciousness in a Cybernetic Age”, and “To See a World in a Grain of Sand: Whitehead’s Participatory Realism”.
Follow the Question That Brought You Here
What if the universe is alive with becoming?
Start with the Whitehead archive and the more-than-mechanical account of living nature in “A History of Life from Plato and Descartes to Darwin and Lovelock”. These pieces connect metaphysics with cosmology, biology, and the question of where experience belongs in nature.
Can imagination be a way of knowing?
Explore the imagination archive and the Schelling archive. A recent point of entry is “Romantic Imagination and the Recovery of Nature’s Intrinsic Value”, where poetry, perception, and philosophical inquiry meet.
How can we rethink evolution and biological form?
The Darwin archive follows debates over mechanism, organismic agency, and purposiveness. “On Genesis: Toward a New Evolutionary Theology” asks whether creativity and genuine novelty can be made intelligible without reducing them to a prewritten plan.
What becomes of religion after the modern critiques?
The religion archive ranges from process theology and comparative religion to mystical experience and the spiritual crises of modernity. “Between the Cross and the Bodhi Tree” is one recent, more personal point of entry.
Are brains computers? Could AI be conscious?
My concern with mechanized intelligence goes back at least to a 2007 encounter with Marvin Minsky’s Emotion Machine. It continues in my 2026 monograph Remembering the Human Microcosm in the Age of Mechanized Intelligence, which argues for distinguishing the simulation and transmission of meaning from its living genesis.
What would a process-relational politics look like?
The politics archive explores ecology, democracy, capitalism, spiritual freedom, and ideological polarization. “Beyond MAGA and Wokeshevik Ressentiment” is an attempt to think through political violence without surrendering to the familiar camps.
The Less Academic Footnotes
The philosophical experiment does not always take the form of an argument. There is poetry, autobiography, and sometimes a willingness to put the notebook down and let an experience do some thinking. See, for example, “Field Notes from a Mass Hallucination: A Process Philosopher Goes Phishing for the World-Soul”.
Beyond the Blog
For more sustained treatments, visit my books and philosophical essays. If you would rather listen, there are lectures and podcast conversations. For newer work, see Latest Writing. You can also learn more about me.
One final suggestion: read the older posts as records of inquiry, not as a timeless statement of my present views. Some were written in haste; some contain claims I would now qualify or abandon. I have left them here because thinking has a history, and philosophy becomes more interesting when its revisions remain visible. If you find an argument worth continuing, you are already part of the conversation.
