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.

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?” conference on ecological civilization (you can watch my conference presentation on Whitehead’s advice for the business mind here). 

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 nature of the shift that historians call “the Enlightenment.” I then connect their innovations to a couple of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophers to gesture toward an altered form of modern consciousness, or the modernity that could have been (or could still be).

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 surrounding these two thinkers. I was not disappointed on this front. Stewart combed the archives and stitched together an entertaining story about the important influence (even if negative) that Spinoza had on Leibniz.

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 neutrality and dogmatic theology. I believe that any attempt at thinking the most general conditions of reality inevitably touches the spiritual. If it did not then natural science would suffice and metaphysics would be superfluous.

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 best explained by reference to modes of causality not traceable to genetic histories or molecular components. While he has chosen to refer to a “Platonic morphospace,” Levin is quick to add that he is not necessarily affirming or denying Plato’s philosophy but only trying to link his hypothesis to a contemporary position in the philosophy of mathematics. 

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 listen to mine here). Below are some LLM assisted notes on Tim's exegesis of the Simondon and Jung nexus, followed by some scattered thoughts of my own that draw together some of my comments in the dialogue with Tim. 

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 associate professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness Department here at CIIS. His presentation is titled Remembering the Repressed with Jung and Steiner. Matt Segall:

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 divide people and does not suddenly become virtuous because he was killed by an unhinged ideologue. Those of us trying to reverse the decay of whatever whimpers of democracy may remain in this country must discover new ways of talking to one another.

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 all for allowing your curiosity to draw you here. We are engaged in a project of mythic proportion, as Bruce was just alluding to.