Footnotes2Plato

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

Category: Alfred North Whitehead

  • Whitehead’s Experiential Universe (a response to Archive Fire)

    Michael posted another fine response to me yesterday. I have Process and Reality in hand, and will quote a bit in a minute. Alfred North Whitehead left us a cosmological scheme, not a complete system. His scheme aims for experiential coherence, not explanatory completion. “Explanation,” as modern (i.e., Cartesian) science came to understand it, is only…

  • Asking Terrence Deacon about Whitehead’s Reformed Platonism

    A few weeks back, Jason/Immanent Transcendence asked me if I’d like to start a reading group with him this summer for Terrence Deacon‘s new book. A few days later, I found out he’d be lecturing in San Francisco… I was impressed and hope to encourage more of you to join our reading/discussion group! I’ve transcribed the…

  • Responses to Archive Fire and Immanent Transcendence: Egos, Ideas, and Eternal Events

    Jason/Immanent Transcendence and Michael/Archive Fire have been continuing the discussion that began almost two weeks ago HERE and HERE. In his latest response to me, Michael writes: Matt wants to think the Absolute (unity), with an eye towards cultivating the existential implications which flow from an acquaintance therein, while I want to think the Possible (multiplicity), with a wonky fish…

  • Whitehead and the Role of Ideas in the Universe: A Psychedelic Experiment

    “[In the philosophy of organism], the actualities constituting the process of the world are conceived as exemplifying the ingression (or ‘participation’) of other things which constitute the potentialities of definiteness for any actual existence. The things which are temporal arise by their participation in the things which are eternal. The two sets are mediated by…

  • The Eternal Form of Philosophy (a response to Archive Fire)

    Michael/Archive Fire has just written a gracious and astute response to my recent comment about Whitehead’s reformed Platonism. He has made me aware of the fact that my referring to Whitehead or to Plato in the hopes that they offer some sort of authoritative disambiguation is insufficient to support the arguments I am trying to…

  • Formal Causality and Materialism

    There have been a flurry of responses recently to an exchange between Michael/Archive Fire and I regarding formal causality (also, be sure to read Adam/Knowledge Ecology‘s comments over on Archive Fire for a nice defense of Whitehead). Jason/Immanent Transcendence posted some of his reflections, relating the issue to the old debate between realists and nominalists.…

  • Whitehead, Eternal Objects, and God

    Those who take the time to familiarize themselves with Whitehead’s philosophy are almost always lead to praise him for the originality of his thought. He dissolves many longstanding problems by rooting abstract disembodied reason in concrete feelings of inheritance. The subject-to-object vector of the Kantian school of philosophy is reversed, such that the structure of…

  • “Whitehead, LSD, and Transpersonal Psychology” by Leonard Gibson

    This is a truly fascinating piece written by Leonard Gibson bringing Whitehead into conversation with Stan Grof. Gibson uses Whitehead’s account of experience to undertake a rhetorical explication of the LSD experience. A few samples: Every event prehends the entire universe, with gradations of relevance. In our ordinary perception of events we take into account…

  • James Hillman on Metaphysics and Cosmology

    Back in 1983, Claremont Graduate School invited Whiteheadian philosophers and Jungian psychoanalysts to a dialogue concerning possible cross-fertilizations between process metaphysics and archetypal psychology (published as Archetypal Process: Self and Divine in Whitehead, Jung, and Hillman in 1989). James Hillman gave the keynote, wherein he admitted that “something further [was] needed” than his typical psychologizing…

  • William James on the Philosophy of Religious Experience

    I must begin by quoting that “adorable genius” (as Whitehead called him in Science and the Modern World), William James. This from The Varieties of Religious Experience: “In all sad sincerity I think we must conclude that the attempt to demonstrate by purely intellectual processes the truth of the deliverances of direct religious experience is…

  • The Varieties of Causal Experience

    Michael over at Archive-Fire has a new post up distinguishing his notion of epistemic withdrawal from Harman’s ontological withdrawal. While claiming to hold tight to an embodied account of mind, Michael nonetheless wants to carve out a distinction between two kinds of interaction: mental and physical. Mental interaction is always detached and abstract due to…

  • Tilting at windmill materialism: Towards an Ontology of Organism (OoO)

    Adam at Knowledge-Ecology has posted some reflections on the issues at stake in the confrontation between philosophical realism and philosophical materialism. Levi Bryant (Larval Subjects) and Michael (Archive-Fire) place their bets on materialism, while Graham Harman (Object-Oriented Philosophy) and Steven Shaviro (Pinocchio Theory) prefer realism. This isn’t the whole story, however. When we shift to…

  • Harman’s Crucified Objects and Whitehead’s God: More on Withdrawal

    Continuing the discussion that begin on Knowledge-Ecology earlier today, here are some highly speculative reflections after reading the first few pages of Graham Harman‘s Guerrilla Metaphysics (2005) again: I’m reminded that we must deal with more than the absolute difference between objects and relations, but that between an object and itself. Objects withdraw not just from…

  • Withdrawal: Ancient and Modern Accounts

    Adam over at Knowledge-Ecology has been in discussion with Michael at Archive Fire regarding the varieties of withdrawal in object-oriented philosophy. Below I’ve pasted my comment in response to Adam’s post: I’ve just read Michael’s piece, and I agree with your assessment of the shortcomings of materialism. Materialism, as you’ve defined it (following Whitehead), only acknowledges the…

  • Thinking with Hegel: Preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit

  • Disambiguating Spirit and Matter (reflections on scientific materialism)

    For several years now, I have from time to time engaged in philosophical debate with commenters over at Pharyngula (the atheist and biologist PZ Myers‘ well-traffic blog). It is often impossible to maintain a civil discussion or sympathetic reflection about the topic at hand (usually having to do with the ontology of life, the meaning of consciousness,…

  • On Corporate and Creaturely Personhood

      Adam at Knowledge-Ecology has posted a reflection on the need for an object-oriented ecology (what’d I’d call an ecological ontology, or, following Whitehead, a philosophy of organism). Adam agrees with my comment about the moral significance of techno-capitalism’s assault on Gaia, writing that “this moment is, ecologically, what slavery was, sociologically.” What the world…

  • The Spirit of Integral Poetry: “Waring” the Symbolism of Organism

    The Spirit of Integral Poetry: “Waring” the Symbolism of Organism Introduction In the preface of his magisterial account of the evolution of consciousness, The Ever-Present Origin (1985), Jean Gebser warns of a crisis “of decisive finality for life on earth and for humanity,” a spiritual crisis heralding the end of the deficient mentality of the…

  • Occasionalism in Whitehead and Harman

    An important discussion continues to unfold in the comment section of this post over at Knowledge-Ecology. We are trying to figure out what metaphysical work Whitehead’s eternal objects do, among other things. Here is my last comment: I think Whitehead gives you withdrawal without returning to an ontology of substances. Adam and I have been…

  • Thinking with Latour and Bellah: Religion beyond Nature and Culture

    I’m giving a brief presentation in a course on Christianity and Ecology with Prof. Jacob Sherman on Thursday. In what follows, I’ll try to sketch out what I’d like to say. I plan to briefly summarize the cosmotheandric potential of Robert N. Bellah’s recent tome, Religion and Human Evolution (2011). Bellah develops an account of the…

  • research papers for graduate courses on Ernst Cassirer and Jean Gebser, and Christianity and Ecology

    I’m enrolled in two courses this semester here at CIIS. The first is taught by Prof. Eric Weiss; the second by Prof. Jacob Sherman. We’re well into the second week of November already, so its time to start fleshing out my term papers. Weiss’ course is on the evolutionary schemes of the 20th century cultural…