Thinking Things with Graham Harman: Whitehead’s Way Beyond Philosophies of Human Access Rahul Samaranayake has had me on his podcast a few times over the years, including an especially generative conversation with Peter Rollins last year. This time he invited me and Graham Harman into dialogue.…

Thinking with rocks. These rocks, stacked by human hands along a canyon creek near Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, are not simply aggregates or piles. Neither are they simply the freely created artwork of humans. The left-hand stack of eleven rocks (if you count earth) towers toward the…

Poetics of Life and Death: Dialoguing with Andreas Weber Matt: Hi, Andreas. Good morning. Andreas: Good morning. Sorry to keep you waiting. Matt: That’s quite all right. Andreas: I was late anyway, and then Zoom decided it needed to do a new install, like in the old Windows times. Matt: Of course.…

Ontologizing Enactivism: Worldmaking with Ezequiel Di Paolo (dialogue with Tim Jackson) Timothy Jackson and I were back in the saddle, this time to discuss Ezequiel Di Paolo’s article seeking an enactive ontology: Di Paolo, E. A. (2023). F/acts: Ways of enactive worldmaking. Journal of…

A Hegelian Tour of Philosophy from Parmenides to the French Revolution A slightly revised transcript of my introductory lecture from a course on Hegel's Absolute Idealism. I just want to begin by noting that Hegel’s time was a time of revolution in Europe. The French Revolution, in many ways,…

Truth in the Making: On the Possibility of Metaphysics in a World-in-Process “…‘becoming’ is the transformation of incoherence into coherence.” -Whitehead (PR 25) “There is not one completed set of things which are actual occasions. For the fundamental inescapable fact is the creativity in virtue…

“Time and World” By Hartmut Rosa: Reading Group Invitation I want to invite you to join a new online reading group I’m co-hosting with my friend Tripp Fuller. We’re going to be working through Hartmut Rosa’s Time and World. The group will happen over Zoom in a seminar style with plenty of time for…

Thinking With David Krakauer Listening to David Krakauer on Jim Rutt’s “Worldview” podcast while making dinner made a few things snap into place for me. You can listen to it here: I appreciate how rigorously he avoids collapsing the epistemic into the ontological. Krakauer is very lucid about…

Philosophies of Ontogenesis: Evolution by Artistic Selection First, have a listen to Timothy Jackson’s recent Lepht Hand podcast about the ontogenetic stance: Then have a read of his essay on Darwin, Simondon, and Battaile and the importance of a “variation first” approach that replaces classical…

There’s no scientific evidence that consciousness exists. Evidence, in a scientific age, is usually thought of in a very specific way. We tend to assume evidence means empirical measurement: can I record this on a camera, or on some kind of detector? Can I transform what I observe—signals,…

Excellent reflection on the hideous distortion of the person and message of Christ by so-called 'Christian Nationalists' Matthew David Segall (@footnotes2plato.substack.com) - Christ and Ceasar: Christian Nationalism in the News footnotes2plato.com/2026/01/07/c...

Islam and the West: Dialoging with Jared Morningstar In my recent conversation with Jacob Kishere as part of his “Christianity beyond itself” series, we attempted to navigate the ways the “Christ impulse” can so easily get hijacked by culture-war crusader energy. Spiritual renewal thereby risks…

Flights and Perchings: A 2025 retrospective and a look ahead as I turn 40 As the new year begins, I decided to take a look back at my speaking engagements in 2025. I turn 40 later this month, so this has been an occasion not only to recollect the recent course of my intellectual development, but…

Christ and Ceasar: Christian Nationalism in the News I wish I didn’t care that Nick Fuentes’ star continues to rise. I wish it didn’t matter. But I fear Christian nationalist Joel Webbon may be right when he says (in the first of a series of new interviews) that Fuentes is “not merely the most…

Simone Weil and the Sacred Heart of Humanity (dialogue with Pedro Brea and Karsten Jensen) We discussed Simone Weil's "Draft for a Statement of Human Obligation." You can read it here: Transcript: Matt Segall: Well, I really enjoyed our last conversation, and I haven’t read much Simone Weil, so…

Anthroposophy and Critical Race Theory: Rudolf Steiner at Harvard Divinity School A few days ago, I shared a conference retrospective about Harvard Divinity School’s Rudolf Steiner centennial: I’ve since had a chance to listen carefully to another talk on the subject of racism in Steiner’s work by…

Romantic Imagination and the Recovery of Nature’s Intrinsic Value: Whitehead, Barfield, and Our Crisis of Perception (transcript) Over on Substack, I shared an essay based on the transcript of my remarks at a presentation earlier today for the Center for Process Studies. You can read that essay…

Contemporary Natural Philosophy Needs a New Theory of Forms In this disputation with Jacob Given and Adam Robert, I was defending the thesis that contemporary natural philosophy needs a new process-relational theory of forms, and that Whitehead’s notion of eternal objects can play that role. Adam…

The Word in Every Tongue: From Crusade to Conversation in the Movement of Christianity Beyond Itself  I sat down with Jacob Kishere for another conversation as part of his Christianity Beyond Itself series. Our first conversation was over a year ago: you can listen to it at this link. This series,…

"A truly novel political movement from outside the corporate duopoly is needed" Yes. The late 70s/80s in Europe saw the Green movement form in response to the impending ecological crisis. Because of its electoral system (and utilitarian leanings), the U.S. has so far not seen a comparable movement.

Nick Fuentes and the Hollow Soul of America: Is there an America After the Idols? Trump seems to be losing control over the MAGA movement he created. His surrogates remain confused, comparing Zoran Mamdani’s success mobilizing young New Yorkers to the rise of the Hitler Youth. Meanwhile Zoomers on…

The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead (1925–1927): General Metaphysical Problems of Science url: scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/ps/artic...

Patterns Are Not Puppeteers: The Return and Reformation of Platonic Form in Biology I’ve discussed the return of Platonism in biology before. The following recounts some of what I discussed with Bonnitta Roy as a visitor at The Pop-Up School earlier today. The main driver of the Platonic turn in…

The Meaning of ‘Literal’: Thinking with Owen Barfield and Alfred North Whitehead The following essay is adapted from the transcript of this recording on our Urphänomen research guild Substack. It is a poetic commentary on Owen Barfield's essay in The Rediscovery of Meaning, "The Meaning of…

Metaphysics and Theology (a dialogue with Jacob Sherman) This dialogue with my colleague Jake Sherman was recorded last week at our graduate program’s annual retreat. Below is a transcript: Matt: Welcome, everyone. Thanks for joining us this afternoon for a dialogue on metaphysics and theology,…

The Cosmic Poetry of Whitehead’s Philosophy: Notes on my dialogue with Ingrid Rieser You can listen to my conversation with Ingrid over on her Forest of Thought podcast, or read the revised transcript of my remarks below. We recorded this in Claremont, CA back in June at the “Is It Too Late?”…

From Substance to Creativity, Or on the Modernity That Could Have Been Yesterday in my history of Western philosophy course, where my students are reading Richard Tarnas’ Passion of the Western Mind (1991), I lectured on a couple of seventeenth century philosophers in an attempt to catch the…

Schelling & Whitehead inheriting Spinoza & Leibniz: God and the Modern World I've just finished Matthew Stewart's popular book The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World (2006). I was hoping to fill out my own understanding of the historical context…

Between the Speculative and the Prosaic: Life, Imagination, and Individuation Timothy Jackson and I went deep into descendental philosophy and aesthetic ontology, core concepts developed in my last book Crossing the Threshold (2023). Order a copy... I try to argue against both scientistic…

The Return of Form in Biology: Thinking Through Platonic Morphospace The mystery of biological form has led some biologists, most prominently Michael Levin, back to Plato’s theory of Ideas. Levin is driven primarily by the surprising empirical findings of his lab. He argues that his results are…

Jung, Simondon, and the Ontogenesis of Philosophy We just wrapped the “Forever Jung” conference co-hosted by CIIS and the San Francisco Jung Institute. Tim couldn’t be with us in person, but I enjoyed his Zoom presentation on Jung and Simondon (video of his talk should be online soon; you can…

Remembering the Repressed with Carl Jung and Rudolf Steiner Judi: Hello, everybody. It’s my great pleasure to introduce Matt Segall. Matt is a PhD, a transdisciplinary researcher, philosopher, and teacher applying process-relational thought across the natural and social sciences. He is an…

Beyond MAGA and Wokeshevik Ressentiment: Or how to avoid a civil war Charlie Kirk’s assassination is a national tragedy, an unmistakable symptom of civic decay. Kirk’s murder deserves clear condemnation. But condemnation need not include canonization. Kirk’s shock-jock rhetoric served only to…

Matter, Life, and Mind: Love as a Cosmological Power This was recorded on Saturday, September 13, 2025 as part of the Frontiers of Knowledge event at Wheeler Opera House in Aspen, CO. Below is the recording and a lightly edited transcript.  Good morning, everyone. I want to begin by thanking you…

Birthing a New Cosmology (reflections on my dialogue with Alexander Beiner) I enjoyed dialoguing with my friend Alexander Beiner this morning. The recording will be published on Kainos soon. He asked whether I had a sense for whether the atheistic, secular orientation in academia is thawing,…

Value at the Root: Cultivating Virtue in a Post-Truth World Context The following reflections grow out of my live dialogue with Bonnitta Roy about the metaphysics of value. She’ll be sharing the discussion in her pop-up school for those who subscribe. Here I wanted to offer some further…

Facing the Face Within: Christopoetics in an Unfinished World in Process Below is a draft of a chapter for a book on radical and process theologies. My contribution is based on a conversation I had with Peter Rollins earlier this year: Facing the Face Within: Christopoetics in an Unfinished World…

Notes from the Edge of the Ordinary Recapping my time in the twilight zone between physics and psi in Charlottesville, Virginia two weeks ago. I left the DOPS Psi Theory Meeting feeling like I’d been sitting around a camp fire telling ghost stories at the edge of a new continent. In fact, we spent…

Cosmology, Democracy, and the Spirit of the Earth: Talking Process-Relational Political Theology with Tripp Fuller and Aaron Simmons I joined Tripp and Aaron to discuss the changing role of religion in public life in our tumultuous political moment. We were discussing my lecture offering a…

Creativity and the Cross: Martinus, Bergson, and Whitehead in Dialogue A conversation with Pedro Brea and Karsten Jensen. Transcript below. Matt Segall: Hey, Karsten. Pedro Brea: Hey! Karsten Jensen: Hi, Matt! Hi, Pedro! I’m so happy you both agreed to have this conversation with me, and I really…

Sancta Maria Magdalena Last Tuesday, on Mary Magdalene’s Feast Day, I walked as a pilgrim with about a dozen others from Lewes train station to St. Peter’s Church in Firle along part of a historic route called the Old Way in the south of England that stretches from Winchester in Hampshire to…

Enjoyed being part of a *packed* final session of @ishpssb2025.bsky.social where we all witnessed @asmeincke.bsky.social make a compelling case to @kevinlala.bsky.social (in the room!) as to why he should explicitly adopt a process ontology for the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis! 🌱🐋

Romanticizing Evolution: Whitehead’s Organic Realism and the Return of Organic Science Other contributors at the Cognizing Life conference include: Benjamin Bembé (Witten), Bohang Chen (Zhejiang), Luke Fischer (Sydney), Andrea Gambarotto (Wien), Levi Haeck(Ghent), Craig Holdrege (Ghent, NY),…

Ever-Living Fire: Process Philosophy and Plasma Cosmology Below is a transcript of my talk at the Process Philosophy, Plasma Cosmology, and Transpersonal Psychology meeting in Exeter, UK, which took place July 24-27, 2025. Other attendees include Robert Temple, Timothy E. Eastman, Barnard Carr,…

My Biophilosophy Conference Talk: Romanticizing Evolution with Schelling, Peirce, and Whitehead Below is my talk at the "Revitalizing Biophilosophy" conference I co-hosted earlier this week. It is based on a long paper I am working on both for this conference and for "Cognizing Life," another…

A Biophilosophical Dialogue: Conversations at the Evolutionary Edge of the Life Sciences  The conversation above occurred earlier today at the end of a two-day conference I cohosted with Spyridon Koutroufinis focused on the revitalization of biophilosophy. You can learn more about it at the Center…

Thinking the Holocaust with Schelling Originally written in 2013, I decided to slightly revise and repost the following reflections in light of current events. Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809) is a text I have returned to time and again over the…

Three Academic Philosophers Sitting In A Tree: S-M-I-L-I-N-G Just came across this fun reply to my conversation with Pedro and Jack. Gentlemen, your enriching dialogue was as music to my ears and a Dionysian feast of the senses. By Zeus a lot has been covered in this interview, and… Three Academic…

Infinite Intimate: Dialoguing with Marc Gafni and Zak Stein Matt Segall: Hi Marc, pleasure to meet you. Marc Gafni: Good to meet you, Matt. Matt Segall: Really, as I said in my email, it's an honor and it's humbling to get to talk to you and Zak. I've had a chance to spend a little time with Zak.…