I went to my first Phish concert on Saturday night at Dick’s in Denver. I came in peace, was torn to pieces and made whole again once or twice, and by the end concresced into someone new. I also did some anthroposophical research. I should explain. I don’t mean any ordinary sort of research, the sort which separates science from art and art from nature, as if nous, techne, and physis were ever found apart.

I was back in Aspen, CO this past weekend for the second annual Frontiers of Knowledge event at Wheeler Opera House. I presented alongside David Peña-Guzman (who you’ll hear in the last few minutes asking me a question about artificial intelligence). All the talks should be available in the coming weeks on the Frontiers of Knowledge YouTube page. 

This seminar was hosted by Joe Lightfoot here in Chiang Mai.  In the talk, I reprised some ideas I shared in a post a few years ago: Plato and Platonism: Dividing the Line and Completing the Circle Plato and Platonism: Dividing the Line and Completing the Circle I approach Plato not just to offer a scholarly treatment of his arguments but as a teacher of how to live and die as a human being.

The audio is available above, but it is poor quality. Thanks to Joe Lightfoot for hosting us! It was a real joy to meet Michel Bauwens in person for the first time at this event. Slightly edited transcript:  All right—hello, everyone. I’m going to share something that’s very personal, but also transpersonal. I’ll be talking about the tension between Christianity and Buddhism within myself, if indeed there is a self.

Max Wade: My dissertation was on Plotinus’ ontology of artifacts, basically looking at Plotinus as a philosopher of technology. It was a fun project. It opens up a lot of interesting questions, and we’ll have a chance to talk about some of that, or just other things in general. Plotinus is my specialty. I’m primarily a historian of philosophy, though I’m also interested in contemporary metaphysics.

I enjoyed my chat with James Faulk the other day. Here’s the video: I had a mustache for like 5 minutes a few years ago. I have had to accept that online the stache may be restacked forever. Anyway. Here’s a recap of what was basically a long argument about why natural science is not equivalent to physicalism. Science Is Not Physicalism…

When I turn away from world-weariness, the child in me finds room to wonder, What is the grass? Is it the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven? Is it a scented gift designedly dropped by God? Or, is it the beautiful uncut hair of graves? Walt Whitman was a cosmic optimist, but he was not naïvely so.

The Rosy Crux The central issue is not simply whether Hegel is right, or whether we can derive a more empirically grounded metaphysics than absolute idealism from Darwin’s humble hypothesis of descent with variation. I agree with Charles Taylor that Hegel’s treatment of historical evolution is “disastrous.” By my lights what we are in urgent need of today is the healthy progeny of a happy marriage between the best of absolute idealism and radical empiricism.

Following up on my contribution to the Latour/AIME reading group, I wanted to say a bit more about the confused concept called "matter." There are many varieties of materialism, but for the sake of time, let's follow Robert Jackson by dividing them up into two basic categories: 1) that variety of materialism which understands matter as some…

Transcript: Dialogue on Raymond Ruyer with Jack and Pedro Matt: Well, I had already been reading some Raymond Ruyer—is that how you pronounce it? Jack: Yeah. Matt: Close enough? Okay. I guess it was you, Jack, who first suggested him a while ago because of my interest in Whitehead. I finally got around to it. Maybe a month ago, I started reading his book on cybernetics.

In our last Whitehead Research Project editorial board meeting, a very interesting issue came up as the critical edition of Science and the Modern World moves toward publication. It turns out that the position of a single “s” opens a huge can of metaphysical worms. In Science and the Modern World, there is a passage where an “isolated system” is described as free from “casual contingent dependence” upon the rest of the universe.

It was rather serendipitous that a media agent representing Stephen Meyer reached out to me several weeks ago, since the Discovery Institute’s work popularizing intelligent design had just been brought up in a comment exchange I was having. The agent shared a link to the new film, The Story of Everything, which is based on Meyer’s book Return of the God Hypothesis…

An LLM summary based on the transcript of my panel discussion with Ed Kelly and Iain McGilchrist, moderated by Curt Jaimungal, at last week's Mind-at-Large conference. Videos of the event will be posted soon! Curt Jaimungal opened by cutting past preliminaries and asking the most basic metaphysical question possible: “What do you all think exists? Like what is your fundamental ontology?” He directed the question first to Iain McGilchrist, then to Ed Kelly, then to Matt Segall.

The following is a transcript of my talk last week at our Mind-at-Large Project’s inaugural conference, “A New Dawn.” Video of all the talks, including this one, will be available in a few weeks on the Mind-at-Large website. Buenos días, everyone. I’m here at the Casa Oasis Guest House in Mérida, on the ancestral lands of the Yucatec Maya, whose descendants continue to live here on the Yucatán Peninsula.

A recap of my remarks on Day 2’s Mind-at-Large Conference Plenary Panel (also featuring Ed Kelly and Iain McGilchrist, moderated by Curt Jaimungal). I repeat the questions when relevant so you will know what Curt asked. 1. Well, I am tempted to take this in a direction that might sound a little idealistic, but when you ask what is real, I want to begin with human personhood as the most basic reality, at least the one most relevant to beings like us who would ask such a question.

LLM transcript of my chat with Seekers Mindtalks. Chapter 1: Exploring Reality and Consciousness Raj: What if the way you experience reality isn't reality itself? What if this constant feeling of disconnect, the low-level anxiety, the sense that something's missing isn't modern life, but just a misunderstanding of who you are? In this episode of Seekers Mind Talks, I sit down with Matt Segall, a visionary philosopher known for his work on consciousness and process philosophy, to explore why, despite more knowledge than ever, we feel more disconnected than ever.

Was there ever a time before metaphysics? Will there be a time after it? Pre and post, a priori and a posteriori, the here and now and the infinite Beyond: always and everywhere the opposites are meeting and making one another! We can strive to grow out of puerile metaphysics, but the claim to have transcended metaphysics entirely is not a sign of philosophical maturity.

Nathan Hawkins and I just finished a podcast recording (above) that I hope will contribute to amplifying the deeper notes that are still just barely audible beneath the surface noise of the culture war. We both agree that dialogue must replace partisan shouting, and that philosophy has an important public role to play in helping to bring such a shift about.

A Whiteheadian Reading of Hartmut Rosa and Charles Taylor

We finished our Hartmut Rosa reading group this morning (recordings are available here). I am grateful for Tripp Fuller’s invitation to study this text. It was my first time reading Rosa, and I found his sociological intervention convergent with many of my own ways of thinking. As I’ll relate below, Tripp and I had no trouble finding connections to Whitehead’s cosmology.

I came to this cityat the edge of the continentas so many dreamers before mefollowing the westward winds of timelike the gold-glinting eyesof greedy men who mistook the ocean’s endless horizonfor a promise made only to them.I was destined by a different orenot yet hardened but still molten to the core,

Revisiting My Dialogue with Matt Segall On Michael Brooks & CIIS

YouTube video by Rahul Sam

The frogs are croaking on my left down in the Eel River, and on my right is the low roar of semis on the 101. This is nearly my last night in Humboldt County. I came out to the hot tub one last time to take in the night sky. It happened to be clear tonight, for a moment. The fog has already rolled in, but I was able to sneak a few prayers through to our astral ancestors before they vanished.

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?

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.” …