“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”
–Alfred North Whitehead

Whitehead: Purpose and Reason

Great post over on the Prehended blog, partially in response to my book and recent post about Whitehead. Whitehead’s understanding of purpose in nature is enriched by being brought into fruitful comparison with Peirce’s semiotics.

It is true that I try to distance Whitehead from at least Kantian conceptions of rationality (Whitehead replaces Kant’s “critique of pure reason” with a “critique of pure feeling”). I appreciate the critiques here as I should be more clear that Whitehead is not advocating some sort of irrationalism, but rather a form of “aesthetic logic” or “relational rationality.”

conceptual prehension

Matthew Segall (who blogs over at footnotes2plato.com) has recently published a revised edition of his book Physics of the World Soul–an exploration of Alfred North Whitehead’s speculative philosophy, bringing it into dialogue with some recent science and discussing its relevance for our current era of ecological and intellectual turbulence. Reading it over, I felt Segall delivered an exciting and accessible exploration and application of Whitehead’s ideas (as well as plenty of creative thinking beyond Whitehead), hopefully getting many readers of various backgrounds eager to dive deeper into this philosophy. I don’t think there is that much in the substance of Segall’s characterization of Whitehead I disagree with–but I do think there may be possible ambiguities where I would want to draw some further clarification, which I hope to fruitfully pursue in this blog post, and thereby also, hopefully, contribute to further articulating a philosophy capable of centering organism and…

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