Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 13:22 — 12.6MB)
Mark Linsenmayer outlines Alfred North Whitehead's book The Concept of Nature (1920) on the relation between experience and science, and how to think about space, time, and objects. After listening to this, get the full discussion.
Read more about the topic and get the text.
PEL Citizens can download the transcript from the Free Stuff for Citizens page.
dmf says
January 19, 2015 at 8:16 pmhttp://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=1274
Whitehead on Causality and Perception
Leon says
January 19, 2015 at 8:49 pmhttp://afterxnature.blogspot.com/p/process-relational-thought-guide.html
Guide to process thought for the perplexed.
burl says
January 22, 2015 at 8:33 ammark,
i am pleased that pel is taking up whitehead. using CN as the text is an interesting choice. i have great difficulty trying to read and follow whitehead, especially his nature studies up to and including PR. your summary of CN was very helpful, and i look forward to the podcast.
PBS has a slew of physics videos post LHC Higgs Boson. they get into massless spin-2 gravitons as the final thing the standard model needs from future uber-powered LHC runs. this would be the ‘gravitational field’ mentioned in the Summary CN chapter. discussing massless spin-2 particles. physicist feynman was very whiteheadian in his criticism of einstein’s curved space. i once noted here in a combox that the closest thing i know of as a picture of an ‘actual occasion’ is a feynman diagram.
i think whitehead was actually very involved and influenced by quantum physice, but QED and the standard model were post ANW.
dmf,
shaviro’s article is simply fantastic. he manages to brilliantly and eloquently convey the rich profundity of whitehead for anyone to follow – i want more! philosophy needs more.
burl says
January 22, 2015 at 12:51 pmleon,
you have all the whitehead links i have see and a many more. anthony flood has a website DEEP in ANW papers from a vast variety of process and ANW scholars. there, too, you may find hosinski and felt and a fordham priest prof whose name i forget all deep process theology guys. hosinski wrote a very good undergrad text _brute fact and creative advance_
luke says
January 24, 2015 at 10:59 pmI found Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality incredibly interesting, I look forward to reading this. I would also be interested in hearing all of your thoughts on the philosopher and public speaker, Terence Mckenna, whom strongly recommended Whitehead in one of his lectures.
Karl Young says
February 28, 2015 at 3:58 pmThanks for the heroic summary Mark ! That was very helpful and a seemingly masterful job of distillation (I only say seemingly because I don’t yet understand enough of Whitehead’s work to make any meaningful statements about distilling it).
One issue that occurred to me was that it seemed that Whitehead might have been running the risk of recreating distinctions, like those between primary and secondary qualities that he so decried in Locke, via his active and passive conditioning events (though that’s no doubt just based on a misunderstanding on my part).
ps – dmv, technically speaking, I think spin 2 bosons (as force carriers) are beyond the province of the standard model (i.e. as of yet there’s no quantum field theory of gravity) and potential discovery of such at the LHC excites physicists because it would presumably be an indication of physics beyond the standard model (i.e. whatever kind of physics will be required to include gravity in any complete theory of the fundamental forces).