Matthew David Segall (@footnotes2plato)
I’m excited to be on the editorial board of the new Integration Journal of Big Picture Theory and Practice. Check out the page below for the inaugural CfP.
My work engages integrative thinking across metaphysics, natural science, the humanities, and spirituality. Schelling and Whitehead are central inspirations—both attempted to synthesize the emerging sciences of their times (electricity, magnetism, geology, embryology for Schelling; relativity, quantum theory, evolutionary theory for Whitehead) into comprehensive cosmologies adequate to lived experience. Academia in the twentieth century produced very few attempts at that kind of integrative worldview construction. Much of my work aims to pick up that thread: to weave together the sciences, metaphysics, and human spiritual life into a coherent picture of reality.
I’ve increasingly felt that naturalism—even in its emergent, non-reductionistic forms—is too confining. I have no interest in defending supernaturalism, but the entire natural/supernatural dichotomy is a modern construction that does little conceptual or rhetorical work for me. Here I resonate with Raimon Panikkar’s vision: instead of naturalism or supernaturalism, we need a cosmotheanthropic perspective—one that integrates rigorous natural science with an account of human consciousness that cannot be captured by empirical and mathematical methods alone, and that also acknowledges some form of spiritual reality without lapsing into “God of the gaps” reasoning.
For me, this requires affirming a plurality of ways of knowing: empirical, mathematical, imaginative, phenomenological, somatic, contemplative, and more. Any viable cosmology must integrate these modes and recognize the participatory nature of knowledge itself. The world is not a finished object awaiting our detached observation; we are participants in a world that is continuously expressing itself through our attempts to understand it. Ontology and epistemology are mutually entangled. That participatory insight is core to my work.
This is why I’m enthusiastic about this journal. There are very few integrative spaces within academia where big-picture thinking is valued, and outside academia, where people attempt it, the work can often drift into the flaky or undisciplined. What I see emerging here is something different: an intellectually serious, creatively speculative, academically rigorous space where we can hold one another to high standards while also allowing genuine metaphysical imagination to flourish.
Isabelle Stengers’ book Making Sense in Common: A Reading of Whitehead in Times of Collapse speaks powerfully to this challenge. We live in a world overflowing with expert knowledge, yet starved of meaning. The problem is not simply that ordinary people lack access to specialized insights—it’s that our institutions have failed to translate those insights into forms that matter for people’s lives. Most knowledge remains paywalled or locked behind the gatekeeping of academic jargon, available only to those with university affiliations or years of technical training.
To address this, we must cultivate a style of writing that is accessible across disciplines and across the boundary between academic and popular culture.
This requires developing a genuinely meta-theoretical language that does not eliminate technical precision but is not beholden to the siloed vocabularies of particular disciplines. Transdisciplinarity demands this kind of linguistic creativity.
This is my hope for a journal that stands at the living threshold between rigorous scholarship and public meaning-making, a space where philosophy, science, spirituality, and art can converge to articulate a worldview adequate to our planetary moment.
https://integrationjournal.org
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