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: 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…

  • A taste of what’s to come…

    Two abstracts for the papers I am writing for courses on Carl Jung and the Philosophy of Relgion, respectively. ————————————————— “Uncovering the Unconscious: Psychology and the Soul” William James credits W. H. Myers with the discovery of “subliminal consciousness” (i.e., the unconscious) in 1886, a discovery James’ suggests is psychology’s most important insight into human…

  • A personal correspondence about the universe.

    The following is an email exchanged with a good friend of mine doing doctoral work on complexity theory as it applies to neuroscience at Florida Atlantic University. My email is in response to this Science Daily article about a measured variance in a specific physical constant: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100909004112.htm Perhaps I’ll post his response when it comes…

  • A comment to Hyper Tiling concerning anthropocentrism

    You can find Fabio’s blog here: http://hypertiling.wordpress.com/ Fabio, You’ve succeeded in getting me interested in speculative realism and object-oriented philosophy. Kantian skepticism is perhaps the main obstacle I must overcome in my dissertation, which loosely described is an argument for a more richly textured ontology, such that any full accounting of reality must include its…

  • “The Luminous Ground” by Christopher Alexander

    Christopher Alexander is an architect, but in order to build living structures resonant with human feeling, he had also to become a cosmologist. “A person who adheres to classical 19th- or 20th-century beliefs about matter,” writes Alexander, “will not be able, fully, to accept the revisions in building practice that I have proposed, because the…

  • Response to PZ Myers on Science and Philosophy

    A link to PZ Myers‘ post that I’m responding to: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/02/criticism_deferred_but_buildin.php A link to my first comment (also pasted below): http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/02/criticism_deferred_but_buildin.php#comment-2256674 You’ll have to refer to the link above if you want to see the other comments I am responding to below, though I do repeat them in brief in my own responses. ——————————————————————————— #…

  • On the Matter of Life: Towards an Integral Biology of Economics

    On the Matter of Life: Towards an Integral Biology of Economics Table of Contents Preface Introduction: What is Life? I. The Irruption of Time II. Ancient Biology III. Modern Biology IV. Teleology as a Regulative Principle of Living Organization V. Autopoiesis: Teleology as Constitutive of Living Organization VI. Concrescence and Bodily Perception VII. Concrescence and Autopoiesis…