Matthew David Segall
Transdisciplinary researcher, process philosopher, and teacher.
A digital experiment in public thinking tracing my philosophical development across two decades, through metaphysics and myth, psychology and poetry, science, religion, and politics.
A. N. Whitehead reconciling the opposites.
My philosophical approach and Curriculum Vitae
Enter →Physics of the World-Soul, Crossing the Threshold, and more.
Browse →Articles across metaphysics, science, psychology, and religion.
Read →Talks and seminars on Whitehead, Schelling, and the philosophy of organism.
Watch →Dialogues on consciousness, cosmology, and the love of wisdom.
Listen →Private sessions for feedback, guidance, or deeper conversation.
Request →Philosophy begins with the recognition that we are beings who die.
We and everyone we love was born and will die. This mortal knowledge envelops our lives in tragedy, mystery, and beauty. Philosophy invites us to widen our gaze from the grave to the stars. Where does the universe come from, and where is it going? It also invites us to deepen our relation to ourselves, so that we might attend not just to things but to thinking. Who am I?
These are speculative questions that human reason cannot help but ask, even if we cannot expect natural science alone to answer them.
Drawing especially on Whitehead and Schelling—in dialogue with the histories of philosophy, esotericism, and contemporary natural science—my work labors to heal what Whitehead called the bifurcation of nature: the modern habit of severing a measurable world of dead matter "out there" from a private theater of mind "in here." Against that mechanistic myth I articulate a vision of animate nature, where the world is not made of blindly colliding objects but actively communicating subject-superjects.
New essays and dialogues, posted first to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀︎☾.
Replies to some critics
Read on SubstackMy recent Frontiers of Knowledge talk in Aspen, CO
Read on SubstackReflections on the Platonic Mysticism podcast
Read on SubstackProcess-relational Naturphilosophie in the lineage of Schelling and Whitehead.
In the Age of Mechanized Intelligence
Challenges the myth of "artificial intelligence" and the emerging threat of cognitive enclosure: the attempt to meter and monetize our very capacity for thought. Moving from Pope Leo XIV's warnings about AI to the deeper history of media technologies, I enlist Hegel, Whitehead, and Ruyer as allies in the resistance against the mechanization of mind.
Etheric Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead
Conceives the etheric imagination—the creative power mediating between thinking and being—tracing a hidden lineage from Schelling's Naturphilosophie to Whitehead's philosophy of organism.
Whitehead's Adventure in Cosmology
Reads the universe as an ensouled, evolving organism rather than a machine, bringing Whitehead into dialogue with relativity and quantum physics, evolutionary biology, and complex systems science.
A selection of articles and chapters.
Co-authored with plasma physicist and process philosopher Timothy Eastman and physicist-philosopher Ruth Kastner, this essay challenges spacetime actualism and develops an alternative process-relational quantum foundation for cosmology.
Challenges the belief that human minds are biological computers and that large language models might become conscious. Recovering the ancient image of the human as microcosm, this monograph calls for a new relationship with AI that might amplify rather than amputate our consciousness.
Traces the concept of prehension through its philosophical origins, its role in overcoming the bifurcation of nature, and its implications for integrating causality and creativity.
A bid to bring natural science to its senses — turning to Schelling and Whitehead for an alternative to the model-centric idealism afflicting contemporary physical cosmology.
Recorded lectures on Whitehead, Schelling, and the philosophy of organism.
On consciousness, cosmology, and the love of wisdom.
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▶Philosophical guidance or open dialogue on process philosophy, cosmology, consciousness, or a question of your own.
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