THE PHYSICS OF THE WORLD-SOUL w/ Matthew David Segall
For the fourteenth episode of the Integral Stage Authors Series, Layman sits down with Matthew David Segall to talk about his book, Physics of the World-Soul: Alfred North Whitehead's Adventure in Cosmology. Whitehead's metaphysics has influenced Integral Theory (particularly the Wilber-V work), Deleuze's philosophy, Object-Oriented Ontology, and the growing process theology movement, but not many people are very familiar with it on its own. So Layman uses this opportunity to take a deep dive with Matt into some of Whitehead's key ideas, from prehension and pan-experientialism, to actual occasions and eternal objects, to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness and the fallacy of simple location; and to explore the relationship of Whitehead's ideas to quantum theory, Platonism, Nietzsche's postmetaphysical philosophy, contemporary Christianity, and much more. Matthew D. Segall, PhD, received his doctoral degree in 2016 from the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at CIIS. His dissertation was titled Cosmotheanthropic Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead. It grapples with the limits to knowledge of reality imposed by Kant's transcendental form of philosophy and argues that Schelling and Whitehead's process-oriented approach (described in his dissertation as a "descendental" form of philosophy) shows the way across the Kantian threshold to renewed experiential contact with reality. He teaches courses on German Idealism and process philosophy for the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at CIIS. He blogs regularly at footnotes2plato.com. Physics of the World-Soul: Alfred North Whitehead's Adventure in Cosmology https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B094Z9MXZ3/