Here is my conversation, recorded yesterday, with Dr. Wolfgang Smith. His new book PHYSICS: A Science in Quest of an Ontology is available from many online bookstores. We discussed a range of topics, including wholeness in physics and mathematics, Whitehead and Russell’s different interpretations of the failure of the Principia Mathematica project, the fallacy of… Read more
Below is a series of six lectures originally recorded in 2017 going through each part of Alfred North Whitehead’s magnum opus Process and Reality. Read more
It is hard to believe I’ve been thinking with Steiner for almost 15 years. He is, as the late BBC documentarian and author Jonathan Stedall put it in the title of his 2011 biopic, a “challenge.” In contemporary German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s words: Steiner created a kind of antenna anthropology that we can no longer… Read more
In November, Tim Eastman and I were invited by the Cobb Institute to reflect on the status of the cosmological theory popularly known as the “Big Bang,” a.k.a. the ΛCDM (Lambda cold dark matter) or Lambda-CDM model. Earlier this year, NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope came on line. Its huge mirrors allow for a six fold… Read more
This conversation was recorded earlier this year in San Francisco. TRANSCRIPT This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, featuring talks and conversations recorded live by the Public Programs department of California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit university located in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Land. Author, cultural ecologist, and geo philosopher David… Read more
“In one sense philosophy does nothing. It merely satisfies the entirely impractical craving to probe and adjust ideas which have been found adequate each in its special sphere of use. In the same way the ocean tides do nothing. Twice daily they beat upon the cliffs of continents and then retire. But have patience and look deeper; and you find that in the end whole continents of thought have been submerged by philosophic tides, and have been rebuilt in the depths awaiting emergence. The fate of humanity depends upon the ultimate continental faith by which it shapes its action, and this faith is in the end shaped by philosophy.”
—Alfred North Whitehead
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