Footnotes2Plato

“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”
–Alfred North Whitehead

Tag: cosmology

In Dialogue with Gary Herstein on War Machine Podcast

Matt Baker invited me back on the War Machine podcast to chat with Gary Herstein, coauthor with Randall Auxier of The Quantum of Explanation: Whitehead’s Radical Empiricism (Routledge, 2017). We discussed Gary’s recent blog post about the uses and abuses of Whitehead’s God concept: “Happy-Touchy-Feely-God talk”. I tried to push back a bit as I…

November 19, 2023
Schelling, Whitehead: Crossing the Threshold (dialogue with Cadell Last)

Cadell Last invited me on his Philosophy Portal podcast a few weeks ago. Here’s the video, which just premiered on YouTube. The Genesis of an Idea “Crossing the Threshold” germinated from my dissertation, titled “Cosmotheanthropic Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead” (2016). This work was a philosophical experiment, a quest to…

November 13, 2023
God and Cosmogenesis: Thinking With Catherine Keller

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

November 4, 2023
Cosmic History in Steiner and Whitehead (dialogue with Formscapes)

This was a really fun conversation with Formscapes (check out his content on YouTube). The dialogue begins with Whitehead’s ideas on hybrid prehension and how they might relate to Steiner’s cultivation of higher organs of spiritual perception. Whitehead appears to have been open to esoteric ideas, based on some evidence that he tried contacting his…

October 23, 2023
Navigating Kantian Thought with John Vervaeke

This dialogue with John Vervaeke about my new book Crossing the Threshold was recorded earlier this year. Claude’s summary: The book discusses overcoming Kant’s epistemological barrier between the world and human reason. Kant erected this barrier to preserve human freedom and agency against the mechanistic worldview of science. Matt aims to develop an “etheric imagination”…

October 7, 2023
Summary Reflections on Rudolf Steiner’s “Interdisciplinary Astronomy” (GA 323)

Our Urphänomen reading group is back in action, this time reading Steiner’s lecture cycle titled Interdisciplinary Astronomy (1921, GA 323). Frederick Amrine recently published a wonderful new translation. Earlier this week I summarized lecture 5 (video above). Below is a rough transcript of my reflections: The key issue here for Steiner is that we need…

September 20, 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
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
Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism: Turning Idealism Inside Out [draft article]

Below is a draft of a chapter I was asked to write for a book on Cambridge Idealism. It is still a bit rough in places and I’ll be continuing to update it in the coming weeks and months. I’ll be presenting some of the ideas explored in it at the International Whitehead Conference in…

June 21, 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
Topological Inversions in the Life, Death, and Rebirth of Human Beings (lecture by Rudolf Steiner during WW1)

Rudolf Steiner Nachlass-VerwaltungTranslated by ChatGPT4 GA 174b – Lecture Eight Stuttgart, March 15, 1916 CLICK HERE FOR A PDF OF THIS LECTURE TRANSCRIPT The last time we spoke here, during my previous presence, we examined some spiritual facts that relate to the life of the human soul after the human has passed through the gateway…

May 23, 2023
Mind and Life in the Cosmos

I’m sharing a version of a lecture I delivered for the Pari Center earlier this morning.

May 7, 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
Online Book Release Event this Saturday, April 29 at 12pm PT

My new book Crossing the Threshold: Etheric Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead (Integral Imprint/Revelore Press) was published a few days ago. Next weekend (4/29 at 12pm Pacific), I’ll be doing an online book release event in my Discord server (you can access Discord from your browser if you don’t have…

April 24, 2023
RevLeft Radio podcast on my new book

April 10, 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
My presentation at the 50th Anniversary Conference of the Center for Process Studies

This presentation was given on February 16, 2023 at the Claremont United Church of Christ. My paper was titled “Physics Within the Bounds of Feeling Alone.” The draft is available here. Visit the conference website here.

February 19, 2023
“Physics Within the Bounds of Feeling Alone” [draft article]

I’m sharing the first draft of a paper that I’ll be delivering later this month at the Center for Process Studies’ 50th anniversary conference. My track is on February 16th, 2023 and is titled “Science and Philosophy: Nature and the Nature of Reality.” My panel within this track is titled “Physics and Metaphysics: Facts, Values,…

February 5, 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