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: god

  • Is a Metaphysical Revolution Afoot in the Natural Sciences?

    In this conversation, Mahon McCann invited me to reflect on what he referred to as a metaphysical revolution in natural science—gesturing toward the shift I and others have been tracking across disciplines including physics, biology, and cognitive science, where the old mechanistic, substance-based ontology seems increasingly inadequate to account for what’s actually being discovered and needing…

  • Renewing Religion: Dialogue with Philip Goff and Brendan Graham Dempsey

    Brendan Graham Dempsey and I sat down with Philip Goff to discuss all things “pan”: panmatheism, panentheism, pangentheism, panpsychism… oh, and Christianity! Philip describes how he arrived at panpsychism: after initially embracing physicalism and even flirting with illusionism, he came to feel that reducing the mind to physical processes was incoherent. Turning to thinkers like Thomas Nagel, David Chalmers,…

  • “The Phenomenon of Life” By Hans Jonas: A dialogue with Timothy Jackson about Jonas’ treatment of Darwinism

    In this session, Tim Jackson and I discuss Hans Jonas’ book The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology. We focus in particular on two chapters, “Philosophical Aspects of Darwinism” and “Is God a Mathematician?”  Our aim was to explore how Jonas, emerging from an existential–phenomenological and religious–philosophical context, offered both criticisms and appreciations of Darwin’s…

  • Science and Religion in a Participatory Cosmos

    Last night I was invited by the Center for Christogenesis at Villanova University to share some thoughts on how the science/religion dialogue may be transformed by a participatory approach to cosmology. The video will be made available in a few weeks to those who register with the Center. I began by playfully suggesting I’d be proceeding as…

  • Whitehead’s Theory of Propositions

    The title of the article Ben Snyder and I are discussing is “The Objectivity of Whitehead’s Propositions: An Explication of the Truth-Relation” in Process Studies53 (2):256-274 (2024). Ben begins with a summary of his paper’s main argument, which I’ll try to capture below. Propositions, for Whitehead, are more than statements in language: they are metaphysical “lures”…

  • Review of Vol. 2 of ‘The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead’

    Below is a draft of my review of: BRIAN G. HENNING, JOSEPH PETEK, and GEORGE LUCAS, eds. The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead (1925-1927): General Metaphysical Problems of Science. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021: lxii + 511 pages. The version that is eventually published in Process Studies will likely need to be about half this length, so I’m…

  • Ingressing Minds: Causal Patterns Beyond Genetics and Environment – Reflections on Michael Levin’s Platonic Research Program for Biology

    Reflections on Michael Levin’s Platonic Research Program for Biology (a dialogue with Timothy Jackson) Timothy Jackson and I discuss  Michael Levin‘s new pre-print “Ingressing Minds: Causal Patterns Beyond Genetics and Environment in Natural, Synthetic, and Hybrid Embodiments” (which will eventually end up in the anthology collecting papers from the “Metaphysics and the Matter With Things: Thinking With Iain McGilchrist”…

  • Reflections on My Dialogue with Peter Rollins: Pyrotheology Meets Process Theology

    Earlier today I had the chance to speak with Peter Rollins on Rahul Sam’s podcast (video below). The conversation brought up many threads that have shaped my life over the last two decades. We discussed my unexpected encounter with Christ as a teenager, my interest in Alfred North Whitehead’s process theology and how it compares to Rollins radical…

  • Roberto Unger’s Religious Revolution and Its Anthroposophical Resonances

    I picked up Roberto Unger’s book The Religion of the Future (2014) for the first time yesterday.  On the back cover of his book, this excerpt is printed:  Everything in our existence points beyond itself. We must nevertheless die. We cannot grasp the ground of being. Our desires are insatiable. Our lives fail adequately to express our…

  • Evolution: Theory or Theology? – Reflections on Whitehead, Wolfgang Smith, and the Rise of Participatory Science

    Two years ago, I sat down with the late philosopher and physicist, Wolfgang Smith, to discuss his novel approach to quantum physics and the need for a return to Platonic conceptions of reality. You can watch that conversation here (there’s also a complete transcript): Earlier today, I met with Dr. Smith’s collaborator and archivist, Richard,…

  • God Beyond and Within (Dialogue with Roman Campolo)

    Below is a ChatGPT summary of my conversation with Roman (which I’ve reviewed for accuracy). You can find the exact transcript on Substack. Roman began by sharing his thoughts on a documentary he recently watched about Mount Athos, a place he had not known about before. He explained that Mount Athos is an island off…

  • Theory of Every0ne (Tyler Goldstein) responds to My Theories of Everything Dialogue with Curt Jaimungal

    I just finished listening (at x2 speed!) to  Tyler Goldstein’s very long but also very insightful YouTube commentary (see above) responding to my recent dialogue with Curt Jaimungal (“What is the Human Being?”). Tyler had never heard of me or Whitehead before, nor had I heard of Tyler’s “theory of every0ne.” From the sound of it there…

  • Look Who’s Knocking Now

    How do we open the door to divine love? Perhaps the only thing I am certain of in this domain is that each individual must find their unique path to that secret passageway. There are as many ways to God as there are human beings. The door to Spirit is not out there somewhere we…

  • Theories of Everything Podcast: Process Philosophy from Plato to Whitehead and Beyond (Dialogue with Curt Jaimungal)

    Below I am sharing a couple of outputs from ChatGPT4o1 as a hopefully interesting way of summarizing my 3 hour conversation with Curt.  In my prompt I asked it to create a very detailed narrative summary of the transcript written from the perspective of a 23rd century natural philosopher who had lived through the paradigm…

  • Why the World is Unfinished: Whitehead in 20 Minutes

    The following reflections are based on transcribed excerpts from a recent podcast that should appear at the end of the year and that I will be sure to share. Do I consider myself a Whiteheadian? On the one hand, obviously yes—he is certainly the most influential philosopher for me. But at the same time, I…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • C. S. Peirce’s Guess at the Riddle

    Later today, Timothy Jackson and I will meet to discuss Charles Sanders Peirce’s essay “A Guess at the Riddle” (1888; pages cited below from The Essential Peirce, Vol 1). I’ll update this post with the video once I’ve uploaded it. The essay lays out Peirce’s profound philosophical insight into the real idea of the triad, which he deploys (among…

  • 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…