Footnotes2Plato

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

Tag: eternal objects

  • Contemporary Natural Philosophy Needs a New Theory of Forms

    In this disputation with Jacob Given and Adam Robert, I was defending the thesis that contemporary natural philosophy needs a new process-relational theory of forms, and that Whitehead’s notion of eternal objects can play that role. Adam and Jacob structured the session as a kind of updated medieval disputatio: I offered a thesis and initial…

  • Whitehead, God, and Eternal Objects (Dialoguing with Darren Iammarino)

    Darren and I had an intense geek out session exploring some of Whitehead’s categoreal scheme. Key points include: Here’s my paper on eternal objects (a shorter version was just published in Process Studies): “Standing Firm in the Flux: On Whitehead’s Eternal Objects”

  • Standing Firm in the Flux: On Whitehead’s Eternal Objects (draft article)

    Standing Firm in the Flux: On Whitehead’s Eternal Objects (draft article)

    The article to follow is a draft posted here for your review. As usual, I invite your comments and criticisms (Note that I have been continually updating the draft below in light of helpful feedback and my own ongoing reflection: the doctrine of eternal objects is a deep ocean, but hopefully this study at least…

  • Sundays with Whitehead

    Sundays with Whitehead

    Below are a couple of video sessions from my course on Whitehead’s Process & Reality.

  • Nietzsche’s and Whitehead’s post-nihilist pluralistic process philosophies (part 2)

    Since my post a few days ago (“The ‘innocence of becoming’: Nietzsche, Whitehead, and Nihilism as a Pathological Transitional Stage between Monism and Pluralism“), I’ve re-read chapter 4 of William Connolly’s The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism (2013). Here is his summation of that chapter, which compared Nietzsche’s and Whitehead’s process philosophies: “It…

  • Answering some queries about Whitehead

    A college student emailed me with some questions about the technical details of Whitehead’s metaphysical scheme as laid out in Process and Reality. I figured I’d post my response to him here since I haven’t been able to blog much lately and don’t want anyone to think I’ve given it up, and because some of…

  • Deleuze’s Pedagogy of Problematic Ideas as an Example of Etheric Imagination

    Below is another section of my dissertation proposal… ………………. In What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between a singular pedagogy of the concept and a universal encyclopedia of the concept.155 What does it mean to say that Deleuze’s philosophical method is pedagogical, rather than encyclopedic? It means that philosophical concepts are not catalogued in…