"The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." —Alfred North Whitehead
My German is schrecklich, but since I couldn't find any translations I liked, I spent the afternoon struggling with Goethe's poem "Eins und Alles" (“One and All”), with a dictionary and several other translations in tow. What follows is my best attempt to render this Englishly. I am convinced that translation is impossible, but I [...]
Below are a couple of video sessions from my course on Whitehead's Process & Reality. https://youtu.be/ILOyq8ZuOXw https://youtu.be/J9trXkxiK5g
“Our central idea is that concrete existence explains the abstract aspects of experience and not vice-versa.” -Auxier and Herstein “So long as necessity is taken to be the guarantor of rationality, the conception of rationality advocated will be as useless to science as it is to practical life.” -Auxier and Herstein Below I offer some [...]
The following is a lecture from a course I'm currently teaching called Whitehead's Adventure in Cosmology: Toward a Physics of the World-Soul. Watch the PBS Space Time video first for context. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJzoelANL_Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOdhdT454N8 "The animal body is only the more highly organized and immediate part of the general environment for its dominant actual occasion [i.e., [...]
I'm headed halfway around the world today to present a paper at the IWC in Poland. Roland Faber, Catherine Keller, Herman Greene and others will be giving talks. I'll do my best to record and/or live blog during their remarks. I'll be presenting a paper in the religion section on the secularization of God in [...]
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 [...]
A colleague at CIIS presenting on Process Philosophy in Whitehead, Bergson, and Teilhard last Friday.
Conclusion: Towards a Physics of the World-Soul “In my view the creation of the world is the first unconscious act of speculative thought; and the first task of a self-conscious philosophy is to explain how it has been done.” -Whitehead239 “The religious insight is the grasp of this truth: That the order of the world, [...]
Graham Harman has jumped in offering his own response to my recent comment directed at Levi Bryant regarding his interpretation of Whitehead. The core issue, for Harman, is whether Whitehead's position is ultimately reducible to some form of relationism, wherein an actual occasion is no more than the sum of its prehensions, or whether Whitehead's [...]
Re-posting my comment to Bryant's recent criticism of Whitehead and process-relational thought below: Levi, I'm not so sure treating an actual occasion as a "bundle of prehensions" is at all faithful to Whitehead's scheme. Maybe you arguing that some other aspect of his thought forces him into an inconsistency on this point? If that's not [...]
Levi Bryant/Larval Subjects has laid down a clear and clarifying plumb-line definition for a contentious word that finds itself being thrown around the OOO blogosphere from time to time: Correlationism. It has a fascinating biography. Harman recently offered his version of its history and conceptual origin. Bryant's was a very helpful post for me. His [...]
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 [...]
Several months ago, a discussion erupted across the SR/OOO blogosphere concerning the implications of various forms of nihilistic and theistic realism. Some of my critiques have since ended up in a Wikipedia article. In one of my responses to Graham Harman and Levi Bryant, I toyed with the idea of Whitehead's panentheism as a kind [...]
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 [...]
Adam Robbert over at Knowledge-Ecology recently responded to After Nature's (Leon Niemoczynski) post on anthrodecentrism in Object-Oriented Ontology. I’ve visited this topic several times lately, but I’d have to admit that I seem to have failed to fully develop my own position in regards to the place of the human in the universe. What I [...]
Footnotes2Plato 