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. Below is the transcript.  Whitehead popping Kant's phenomenal bubble. RAHULIt’s funny. I was reading some of your articles, Graham. You mention Whitehead quite a lot.

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 sky, together with its local and cosmic ecologies achieving the status of a self-organizing, living being.

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. Always another update. Andreas: Exactly. It’s not the first time it’s happened, but it always seems to happen when you’re already late and trying to get into a call, and you have no choice.

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 Consciousness Studies, 30 (11–12): 159-89. doi: 10.53765/20512201.30.11.159. Ezequiel will be joining us to present in the biophilosophy track at this summer’s International Whitehead Conference in China…

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, shaped the political categories that all the modern liberal democracies have been assuming for the last couple of centuries. And here we are studying Hegel in a time when we are once again, I would say, on the verge of some kind of revolution—when perhaps those categories that have held sway for a few centuries are being dialectically overcome to bring forth something new that we’re struggling to see.

“…‘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 of which there can be no ‘many things’ which are not sub­ordinated in a concrete unity. Thus a set of all actual occasions is by the nature of things a standpoint for another concrescence which elicits a con­crete unity from those many actual occasions.

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 dialogue. If you’re a paid subscriber to either my Substack or Tripp’s, you’ll have access to…

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 wanting to prevent effective theories from hardening into a metaphysics. His “Ouroboros” claim that you can start from physics, or from language, or from biology, and then close a circular explanatory chain is anti-foundationalist at the level of our…

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 effective theory ontology with an account of ontogenesis. One consequence of such an approach is that we can only ever talk about ontolo…

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, data—from something tangible in the world into a mathematical model? Can I make predictions, and then go see whether those predictions are confirmed by the next observation?

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 inte…

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 being conflated with civilizational chauvinism. Midway through our dialogue, Islam came up. I felt how ill-equipped I am for that encounter, and how quickly a conversation that should be healing can instead further inflame civilizational divisions that have been raging for a millennium, more recently under the shadow of weapons of mass destruction.

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 to imagine how to shape what I hope will be at least another 40 years of life loving wisdom here on planet earth.

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 controversial man in America” but for men under 45 “the most significant.” …

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 this was a real treat—to hear her perspective on our obligations, human obligations, and her framing of what we usually call human rights. And the way she grounds that in the sacredness of the human heart and our connection to the good, I found quite moving, and I believe correct.

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 Gopi Vijaya. You can listen to it below: I appreciate the methodological clarity that Gopi brought to this topic, which helpfully clears the ground for a renewed spiritual scientific inquiry that invites us to “jump in and swim” alongside Steiner.

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 here. Below is the exact transcript of my remarks: I am going to be discussing some ideas from one of Owen Barfield’s essays, “Where Is Fancy Bred?,” about the nature of imagination, and linking them to Whitehead’s protest against the bifurcation of nature and his sense that imagination is of profound philosophical significance as a way of knowing—as a means of contacting a deeper layer of reality than our physical senses might otherwise allow.

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 and Jacob structured the session as a kind of updated medieval disputatio: I offered a thesis and initial exposition; Jacob replied with critical questions; I responded; then Adam entered with his own objections and developments; and we ended with a more free-form exchange.

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, in his words, is an attempt to name the conversation that is trying to happen around the return, transformation, and transfiguration of Christian forms in our time.

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 right are openly embracing white supremacism. Last night, I finally watched Tucker Carlson’s long interview with Nick Fuentes. I hesitate to even mention the guy, but the frog is clearly already out of the bag.

The second volume of The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead (HL2), edited by Brian G. Henning, Joseph Petek, and George Lucas, provides a further glimpse into the evolution of Whitehead's thou...

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 life sciences is Michael Levin’s remarkable lab research on bioelectric patterning in morphogenesis. He is now framing this as a Platonic research program and claiming that both biological form and organismic agency ingress from a realm beyond physical spacetime, with external bodies functioning as “thin user interfaces.” …

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 'Literal,'" which was also the subject of discussion in this morning's reading group: When Whitehead remarked that every science has its instruments—physics its telescopes and microscopes, biology its binoculars and slides—he added that 

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, which I hope will be both interesting and entertaining. You should have found the score cards on your seat to decide who ends up holding forth in the most profound way.