About
Matthew D. Segall is an associate professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness department at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). His work bridges process-relational metaphysics with contemporary science, drawing on Whitehead, Schelling, and Goethe. His research explores the intersections of philosophy of mind, philosophy of nature, and cosmology.
Key Contributions
- Develops process-relational philosophy for contemporary questions in mind, nature, cosmology, and science
- Interprets Whitehead and Schelling as resources for moving beyond mechanistic materialism
- Wrote Physics of the World-Soul, connecting process philosophy with modern physics and cosmology
- Teaches at CIIS, bringing metaphysics, ecology, and consciousness studies into public-facing philosophy
- His work opens alternatives to reductionism, though sympathetic metaphysics can be hard to separate from speculative overreach
Questions they sharpened View the streams
Does reality descend or emerge?
2021Emergence and emanation need not be enemies. Read through Whitehead, the world's upward creativity and its lure toward an ideal pole are two beats of one movement — novelty rises, but it rises toward possibilities held out to meet it.
Where does agency come from?
2024Levin's agential material is Whitehead in the lab — final and formal causes returned to biology, purpose without a designer.
Videos & Interviews
David Abram and Matt Segall on Animism, Panpsychism, and the More than Human World
Abram and process philosopher Matt Segall compare two ways of describing a living world: animism, rooted in the felt experience of a landscape that gazes back, and panpsychism, the metaphysical claim that experience goes all the way down. Along the way they circle the questions this site keeps returning to — whether mind requires a body, what language does to perception, and how a culture of screens might recover its senses.
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Alfred North Whitehead: His Life and Work
Matthew D. Segall traces Whitehead's life from mathematician to process philosopher, surveying the arc of his thought
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Alfred North Whitehead's Strange Theory Of Reality
Matt Segall on Whitehead's process philosophy and his radical rethinking of what reality is
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Hidden Consciousness & The Living Patterns That Shape Reality | Michael Levin & Matt Segall
A long-form dialogue (THIRD EYE DROPS, Mind Meld 424) between developmental biologist Michael Levin and process philosopher Matt Segall on hidden minds, the patterns that organize living form, and where cognition comes from.
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Emergence-emanation, Whitehead, Kastrup: a dialectic ontology w/ Matt Segall - Voices with Vervaeke
Segall and Vervaeke work the axis between emanation and emergence: does reality descend from the One, as Plotinus taught, or climb from below, as Whitehead's process philosophy suggests — and can a dialectical ontology hold both? A follow-up to their Whitehead dialogue, set between Vervaeke's conversations with Bernardo Kastrup.
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Is The Universe Conscious? | Matt Segall
View DetailsConnections
Alfred North Whitehead
Influenced byMathematician & Process Philosopher
Segall has put Whitehead at the centre of his philosophical work: Physics of the World-Soul (2018, revised 2021) rereads Whitehead's philosophy of organism against relativity, quantum theory and evolution, and Crossing the Threshold (2023) sets him beside Schelling. On his own channel he walks through Whitehead's life from mathematician to process philosopher. He carries Whitehead's process view into today's arguments about mind, nature and machines.
ctr4process.org · youtube.com
David Abram
In conversationCultural Ecologist & Philosopher
Abram and process philosopher Matt Segall recorded a long dialogue comparing animism and panpsychism — two ways of describing a living world, one rooted in felt experience of a landscape that gazes back, the other a metaphysical claim that experience goes all the way down. The conversation is on this site.
youtube.com
Elif Shafak
KindredNovelist & President, Royal Society of Literature
Segall argues process-relational metaphysics as philosophy, reading Whitehead and Schelling against a world of inert, separate things. Shafak reaches the neighbouring claim through story rather than argument: fiction, she says, 'dismantles dualities,' and the mystical traditions she reads converge independently on interconnectedness — 'whatever exists in me exists in the universe and vice versa.' She carries it into nature with a Yazidi teaching, that in April you tread the earth gently because the earth is pregnant, granting that 'to our rational modern minds this is ridiculous' before answering that 'only a culture that sees nature as its equal, as its companion, will come up with such a philosophy.'
William James
Influenced byPhilosopher & Psychologist
Segall reads James's pure experience as a third path between materialism and absolute idealism: consciousness is not a thing but a relational process, and physical and mental experience are of a kind. He then argues that Whitehead completed what James began, generalising 'James' psychology of "pure experience" into a cosmology of concrescing prehensions'. For Segall, James is the bridge between how a mind feels from inside and how a world might be built of feeling.
footnotes2plato.substack.com
