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

  • Imagining the Cosmos: notes on my dissertation…

    In the past year or so, the blueprint of my dissertation topic has gone through multiple iterations. Last year, while applying for my PhD studies at CIIS, I wrote a goal statement that still reflects the general theme I am envisioning. Now that I’m entering the last term of course work, I wanted to take…

  • Science, Art, Religion: The Role of Speculative Philosophy in the Adventure of Rationality

    I’ve just completed Isabelle Stengers‘ formidable but rewarding text, Thinking With Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts (2011). The final chapters concern the viability of Whitehead’s theology, specifically his articulation of the relationship between God and the World. Stengers’ asks the reader to go slowly while considering why a divine function became necessary…

  • Soul and World: Fragments written upon reading “Thinking with Whitehead” by Isabelle Stengers

    Stengers has succeeded in bringing Whitehead back to life. Whitehead’s speculative cosmology succeeds, if it does, by avoiding bifurcations between disassociated categories. Instead of placing “subjective illusion” and “objective reality” in irremediable conflict with one another; instead of separating “man” and “nature,” “mind” and “matter,” or “God” and “the World” in order to explain one…

  • Thinking etho-ecology with Stengers and Whitehead

    I’ve been reading Stengers’ recently translated book Thinking with Whitehead (2011) with an eye to developing an eco-ontology, or ecological realism. Adam and I are still in the process of searching for an adequate characterization for this project, but in nuce, we want to untangle the ethical, epistemological, cosmological, and ontological knot that is the ecological…

  • Beyond the Bifurcation of Nature

    I’ve been struggling through Isabelle Stengers‘ newly translated book Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts (2011). The first quarter of the book focuses primarily on Whitehead’s first explicitly philosophical text, The Concept of Nature (1920), in which he sets for himself the task of avoiding an account of nature based in…

  • The Myth of Eliminativism

    Tim Morton drew my attention to this post about the demise of the humanities due to neoliberal economic policies grounded in the supposed truth of neurocomputational eliminativism. I agree with Morton’s appraisal, that the eliminative materialism that seems to be gaining favor among philosophers (like Ray Brassier) offers little in the way of new theoretical…

  • Process Ontology in Schelling and Whitehead

    In preparation for a larger speculative project, I’ve been reading a translation by Judith Norman of the 2nd draft of Schelling’s unfinished manuscript entitled Ages of the World (1813). I’ve been intrigued by Schelling’s philosophies of nature and freedom for several years, but never had the time to do a closer study. Iain Hamilton Grant‘s…

  • Towards an Eco-Ontology

    Adam over at Knowledge Ecology has posted about the need for a pluralistic ontology in thinking the differences between nature and culture. I’ve copied my response to him below: ——————————————— Another stimulating post, Adam. I love the thinkers you are bringing into conversation. I have not yet read Carolan’s essay, but I have a few…

  • Ecology of Mind, Economy of Play, Energy of Delight

    Meaning is infinite because language is indefinitely recursive, because “world” is a word, such that “word” has no world to refer to. Words refer only to themselves, except Yours, your Name, who is the Word but mustn’t know it. “Reality” is a word referring to a set of alphanumeric-audiovisual symbols inherited from an ancient alchemical cult. Sense is infinite…

  • Object as subject-superject, or why Harman is wrong about Whitehead

    Graham Harman and Alfred North Whitehead have a lot in common, but they differ in what they say about substance as a metaphysical category. I think Harman overstates this difference. Whitehead suggests “the whole universe consists of elements disclosed in the experiences of subjects” (Process and Reality, p. 166). This multiple disclosure of the One…

  • Speculative Realism @ CIIS: “Here Comes Everything”

    [For a text review and audio recording of the presentations, click HERE.] Here Comes Everything:An Introduction to Speculative Realism Featuring Keynote Speaker Professor Jacob Sherman at 830pm Food and beverages will be provided! When: Friday, April 8th , 5:30-9:30pm (with a break at 7:15) Where: The California Institute of Integral Studies, Room 210 5:30pm –…

  • The Psychoanalysis of Philosophy: Towards the Eroticization of Logos

    The following is an essay written for a course called “post-secular Jewish emancipatory thought,” taught by Richard Shapiro in the Social and Cultural Anthropology department at CIIS. ———————————————————————- In May of 2010, the Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities at Middlesex University, Ed Esche, informed the philosophy department that its funding had been…

  • Thinking and Sensing, Space and Time

    Philosophy and science can be distinguished: the former is primarily concerned with thinking, the latter with sensing. This distinction is superficial, however, since there can be no pure science or pure philosophy; no pure concept or pure intuition. Phenomenologically, what exists is an interpenetration of cognitive action and carnal reaction, a vast network of felt…

  • Whitehead: Aesthetics as First Philosophy

    I’ve jumped from Meillassoux‘s After Finitude to reading Steven Shaviro‘s book on Whitehead, Kant, and Deleuze Without Criteria (2009). A few thoughts have occured to me… Whitehead’s philosophy of organism possesses an immunity to post-Kantian skepticism, since it arises out of a radically embodied characterization of sensory experience. Empiricism, for Whitehead, does not mean paying…

  • A Random Fragment on the Philosophy of Biology

    Randomness is a concept that Dawkins usually attempts to qualify and differentiate. The process of adaptation within his neo-Darwinian paradigm of selfish genes and natural selection is not random at all–it is driven by the brute physical agency of the Natural Selector. What is random are the mutations, which he apparently conceives of as happening…

  • The Decline Effect and the Scientific Method: newyorker.com

    The Decline Effect and the Scientific Method: newyorker.com. This is a big blow to big science. Apparently, the scientific method, with all its supposed statistical objectivity, is not as good at proving facts as you think. Is this just some sort of confirmation bias inherent to the process of publishing research findings, or is there…

  • Religion and the Modern World: Towards a Naturalistic Panentheism

    Religion and the Modern World: Towards a Naturalistic Panentheism “Dear people, let the flower in the meadow show you how to please God and be beautiful at the same time. —The rose does not ask why. It blooms because it blooms. It pays no attention to itself nor does it wonder if anyone sees it.”…

  • Constructive v. Critical Philosophy – Responding to Isabelle Stengers at CGU

    Once it has begun to swallow the overwhelmingly wondrous fact of existence–that there is anything at all!–philosophy can perhaps catch its breath and ask the most fundamental question: what is there? From this comes the only slightly more specific questions: What is a thing? What is an idea? Isabelle Stengers and Donna Haraway spoke on Thursday night…

  • Religion: Tony Blair v. Christopher Hitchens

    my rough transcription of some of what Blair and Hitchens had to say (not necessarily in order): Tony Blair: “Fanaticism is not confined to the sphere of religious life… My belief in Jesus Christ is not about oppression and servitude, but about finding the best way to express the human spirit… Faith is not about…

  • The Whitehead Research Project to feature Isabelle Stengers

    I’m going to listen to Isabelle Stengers and Donna Haraway speak at Claremont Graduate University tomorrow! For more information, I’ve posted a link to a new collaborative blog called “The New Knowledge Ecology” that I’m contributing to: http://thenewknowledgecology.wordpress.com/2010/12/02/the-whitehead-research-project-features-isabelle-stengers-cgu/

  • Response to Kelosophy about Science and Materialism

    Kel’s blog: http://kelosophy.blogspot.com/ Hey Kel, So I’d much rather enter a dialogue with you here than on Pharyngula. It doesn’t seem to me to be the best place to critically discuss these issues. I hope that is okay with you. You wrote “What I worry about Matthew is that this [my comment that a scientific cosmology…