Why Your Politics Need a Better Cosmology (Whether You Know It or Not) w/ Matt Segall & Aaron Simmons

Tripp Fuller

Y’all, this was our third live stream for the Democracy in Tension Summit, and boy did we get nerdy! I got Aaron Simmons (the Kierkegaard guru and summit co-pilot) and Matt Segall (our process philosophy friend fresh back from Europe) together to wrestle with Carl Schmitt, Christian nationalism, cosmology, and why the heck a new vision of reality might actually be the most practical response to our political mess. We talked about everything from phenomenology and foam dancing in 1990s England to why Aaron stays Pentecostal in Trump’s America and how Matt found his way back to being “Jesus-ish” in the Bay Area. Aaron keeps wanting to be pragmatic about reaching people where they are, while Matt and I are convinced you can’t fix democracy without a whole new cosmology that includes our non-human neighbors. Plus we got into some real talk about church baggage, process theology versus process philosophy, and why hurricanes sometimes reveal more about genuine community than years of political theory. It’s philosophy, theology, and cultural criticism all mixed up with some good old-fashioned Southern storytelling.

You can join the Democracy in Tension online summit and get access to all the lectures today.

Dr. Matthew Segall is a transdisciplinary researcher and teacher who applies process philosophy to various natural and social sciences, including consciousness. He is also an Assistant Professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness Program at the? California Institute of Integral Studies? in San Francisco, CA.

Make sure you check out ?SubStack Footnotes to Plato,? ?his YouTube channel? and ?recent book?.

Previous Podcasts with Matt

• ?the Meaning Crisis in Process?
• ?Processing the Political?
• ?Cosmology, Consciousness, and Whitehead’s God?.
• ?Science, Religion, Eco-Philosophy, Etheric Imagination, Psychedelic Eucharist, Ecological Crisis and more…?

Aaron Simmons is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Furman University. You can f??ollow his Substack ‘Philosophy in the Wild.’?

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