32. God as the poet of the world – on Whitehead’s process philosophy // MATTHEW DAVID SEGALL

I was born into a world where many of the things that are most important to me, like art, beauty, relationships, embodied experience, love, and the sacred, are not really considered very important to our understanding of the cosmos. They are thought of as ‘extra fluff’ rather than being at the core of our existence and reality.

One of the thinkers who has tried to create a science more attuned to these philosophical questions was mathematician turned philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. In the early 20th century, this really radical time when quantum and relativity theory had begun to undermine the old mechanistic view of physics, Whitehead developed his process philosophy, which focused on the co-creative processes of the world’s becoming, and where lived experience, creativity and a poetic God took centre stage. Matthew David Segall, PhD, is a transdisciplinary philosopher and Associate Professor at California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. His scholarship challenges dualistic and mechanistic paradigms and bridges process philosophy with contemporary science and spirituality. 

LINKS

Matthew David Segall’s website and Substack

California Institute of Integral Studies

Centre for Process Studies

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