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Introduction: Tales from the Whitehead Mines – On Whitehead, His Students and the Challenges of Editing the Critical Edition

Joseph Petek

in Whitehead at Harvard, 1924–1925

Joseph Petek discusses some of the more exciting of the Whitehead Research Project’s archival finds, including photographs of Whitehead as a teenager, while describing the atmosphere of Harvard upon ... More

Joseph Petek discusses some of the more exciting of the Whitehead Research Project’s archival finds, including photographs of Whitehead as a teenager, while describing the atmosphere of Harvard upon Whitehead’s arrival and its reception of him. The chapter discusses Whitehead’s teaching style and his students’ attitudes towards him, including those of the Radcliffe women. In its latter half, the chapter discusses the challenges involved in editing student notes together to form a coherent account of Whitehead’s lectures, providing exemplars of three sets of handwritten notes.Less

Stories, Geometries, and Angels: Muriel Rukeyser, Charles Olson, and Robert Duncan in the 1950s

Peter Middleton

in Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After

This chapter traces the development of Rukeyser and Olson’s thinking about physics over the next two decades, as they gradually jettisoned conceptual schemes based on the system and the field. Their ... More

This chapter traces the development of Rukeyser and Olson’s thinking about physics over the next two decades, as they gradually jettisoned conceptual schemes based on the system and the field. Their trajectory is contrasted with the shifting interests in science of Robert Duncan. Rukeyser begins with high hopes of editing a major anthology on science and the humanities, but gradually loses confidence in schemas borrowed from physics. After her long poem One Life she largely abandons the use of poetic masks, and writes in The Speed of Darkness that the fundamental unit of the universe is the story not the atom. The chapter then offers close readings of science in Olson’s poems “The Kingfishers,” the unpublished “Maximus Letter #28,” and “Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27 [withheld].” This last poem is read in detail against its sources in Whitehead’s metaphysics, which provided Olson with a readymade conceptual scheme. The final section explores Duncan’s discursive responses to public knowledge of the sciences, and gives close readings of two poems, “Apprehensions” and “The Fire: Passages 13.” “The Fire” is a poem that Olson could not have written, because it expresses and then examines the poet’s rage at scientists like Oppenheimer.Less

Whitehead in Class: Do the Harvard-Radcliffe Course Notes Change How We Understand Whitehead’s Thought?

Brian G. Henning

in Whitehead at Harvard, 1924-1925

Brian Henning’s chapter takes a close look at numerous key passages that shift our understanding of Whitehead (including, for instance, the influence of C. D. Broad as a philosophical foil), and, ... More

Brian Henning’s chapter takes a close look at numerous key passages that shift our understanding of Whitehead (including, for instance, the influence of C. D. Broad as a philosophical foil), and, just as importantly, notes the subjects and terms missing from this first year of lectures which we might have expected to find, including God and even (mostly) creativity. While there may be no ‘smoking gun’ in the lectures which fundamentally contradicts previous understandings of Whitehead, they deepen our understanding of his philosophical development, not to mention reveal his explicit thoughts on specific philosophers and scientists who are seldom discussed in his published works.Less

Footnotes to Plato

Aljoscha Berve

in Whitehead at Harvard, 1924-1925

Aljoscha Berve examines Whitehead’s relationship to Plato’s philosophy in the Harvard lectures, arguing that the lectures clarify Plato’s influence on Whitehead as one half of an idealised contrast ... More

Aljoscha Berve examines Whitehead’s relationship to Plato’s philosophy in the Harvard lectures, arguing that the lectures clarify Plato’s influence on Whitehead as one half of an idealised contrast with Aristotle, the mathematician as opposed to the biologist. In his published writings, Plato’s influence on Whitehead could already be seen in his adoption of Plato’s chorá, his discussion of seven general notions in Adventures of Ideas, his juxtaposition of Plato and Ulysses as representing two modes of reason in The Function of Reason, and his style of presentation. But the Harvard lectures show that Whitehead also conceived of Plato as mainly a mathematician whose metaphysics is a result of his dealing with eternal forms.Less

Whitehead’s Early Harvard Period, Hartshorne and the Transcendental Project

George W. Shields

in Whitehead at Harvard, 1924-1925

In this chapter, George Shields compares Whitehead’s Harvard lectures to the philosophy of Charles Hartshorne, arguing that the two are united in defending the possibility of a ‘transcendental ... More

In this chapter, George Shields compares Whitehead’s Harvard lectures to the philosophy of Charles Hartshorne, arguing that the two are united in defending the possibility of a ‘transcendental project’ and an ‘ontological approach’. The chapter argues that for both philosophers, ‘something exists’ is a necessary postulate, ontology precedes epistemology, that their critiques of Kant’s noumena are sound and their return to pre-Kantian modes of thought is justified, and that formal logic and mathematical analysis are wholly necessary in philosophy.Less

Examining Whitehead’s ‘First Lecture: September, 1924’

Paul A. Bogaard

in Whitehead at Harvard, 1924-1925

A quick comparison of Whitehead’s manuscript for his first Harvard lecture and the notes of his Harvard and Radcliffe students reveals that the manuscript does not exactly reflect the lecture that he ... More

A quick comparison of Whitehead’s manuscript for his first Harvard lecture and the notes of his Harvard and Radcliffe students reveals that the manuscript does not exactly reflect the lecture that he actually delivered at Harvard on September 25, 1924. Paul Bogaard, the editor of the first year of Whitehead’s Harvard lectures during the academic year 1924-1925, undertakes a thorough examination of the manuscript and the notes of Winthrop Bell and Louise Heath and draws some conclusions which help explain the differences between these different sources. The manuscript was likely a little long to be delivered within the allotted time on the day, and it seems that Whitehead made some adjustments of the fly, including the removal of British anecdotes with which Americans would have been less familiar.Less

Bodies of the Void: Polyphilia and Theoplicity

Roland Faber

in Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality

In Alfred North Whitehead and Gilles Deleuze, there are two direct accounts of “bodies of the void”, that is, of “apophatic bodies”, that conceptualize the “bodying of the ... More

In Alfred North Whitehead and Gilles Deleuze, there are two direct accounts of “bodies of the void”, that is, of “apophatic bodies”, that conceptualize the “bodying of the apophatic” (in the second sense). Both concepts undercut any negation of bodying, but negate its dualistic construction of identity and unity. A better way of phrasing it might be that they uncover bodying in its apophatic dimension of becoming, and they insist on multiplication as the veiled event in all structuring and subject-creating of the body. In bodying the apophatic, these bodies live only by the traversing multiplicities of their becoming. Apophatic bodying, hence, is the caring about multiplicity, the love for the multiple. Its event of becoming is polyphilic. In God's apophatic activity, God is the event of theoplicity, of insistence on multiplicity, in being the apophatic bodying of multiplicity, in being the polyphilic Eros of initiation and, at the same time, the polyphilic salvation of the self-created multiplicity of the World of Creative Act, thereby insisting on its diversity.Less

Whitehead and His Philosophy of Evolution

Paul A. Bogaard

in Whitehead at Harvard, 1924-1925

Paul Bogaard discusses Whitehead’s ‘philosophy of evolution’, tracing the concepts of organism, environment and evolution through the Harvard lectures and his published works, concluding that ... More

Paul Bogaard discusses Whitehead’s ‘philosophy of evolution’, tracing the concepts of organism, environment and evolution through the Harvard lectures and his published works, concluding that ‘evolution’ as a concept seems to fade in importance for Whitehead in subsequent years (somewhat surprisingly, given its prevalence in the lectures). Of special importance to Whitehead was the work of his new Harvard colleague Lawrence Henderson, whose book The Fitness of the Environment he recommended to his students’ attention.Less

Organicism and Complexity:: Whitehead and Kauffman

Wahida Khandker

in Philosophy, Animality and the Life Sciences

This chapter focuses on the writings of Alfred North Whitehead and the complexity theorist, Stuart Kauffman, both of whom undertake critiques of certain scientific conceptions of life and organic ... More

This chapter focuses on the writings of Alfred North Whitehead and the complexity theorist, Stuart Kauffman, both of whom undertake critiques of certain scientific conceptions of life and organic complexity, in particular the fundamental problem of the reduction of biological processes to the laws of physics. Whitehead's arguments against what he characterises as scientific materialism, or the presupposition of ‘the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter’ distributed throughout space, begin with the criticism of this matter as senseless, valueless and purposeless. The challenge is to reverse the hierarchy in which materiality and mechanism precedes and determines the organic. As Kauffman goes on to argue, evolutionary processes are irreducible to physics, insofar as it would require infinitely many simulations of these processes in order to model the development of life as it has occurred in this specific biosphere. We require instead an account of the emergence of biological systems, and the uniquely biological laws that govern life on earth (and the possible emergence of life elsewhere). Kauffman discusses a number of alternatives, but the focus in this chapter is on his account of autocatalytic sets: that is, Kauffman's equivalent to Whitehead's account of the interdependence of parts in an organic whole.Less

Whitehead and Kant at Copenhagen

Jason Bell and Seshu Iyengar

in Whitehead at Harvard, 1924-1925

Jason Bell and Seshu Iyengar examine Whitehead’s complicated relationship to Kant, of whom he is highly critical in parts of the Harvard lectures, and yet with whom he also shares some common themes, ... More

Jason Bell and Seshu Iyengar examine Whitehead’s complicated relationship to Kant, of whom he is highly critical in parts of the Harvard lectures, and yet with whom he also shares some common themes, including ‘the limits of both empirical and cognitive investigations, and the role of the subject in generating mechanics’. The chapter argues that while Whitehead called himself anti-Kantian, what he actually rejected was neo-Kantian analytic tendencies, and not Kant himself, who never intended to promote an epistemic prison or to promote subjectivism. In the end, Whitehead’s Harvard lectures ‘represent a harsh rejection of anti-scientific “Kantianism”, but a more careful editorial revision of the scientifically minded Kant, with the addition of new discoveries in science to which Kant did not have access.’Less

Ageing, Perpetual Perishing and the Event as Pure Novelty: Péguy, Whitehead and Deleuze on Time and History

Jeffrey A. Bell and Claire Colebrook (eds)

in Deleuze and History

This chapter evaluates the history in relation to life by Charles Péguy, Alfred North Whitehead and Gilles Deleuze. It is noted that the time and history run on ageing. To age in the past is to ... More

This chapter evaluates the history in relation to life by Charles Péguy, Alfred North Whitehead and Gilles Deleuze. It is noted that the time and history run on ageing. To age in the past is to become tarnished; to age in the future is lose even the possibility of acquiring lustre. Péguy's argument is sophisticated and knowing, for it addresses the purity sought by Deleuze in the return of difference to show that purity itself is a concept that ages and that depends on ageing its surroundings. Whitehead introduces the concept of perpetual perishing and inflects the role of memory to preserve Deleuze's eternal return of pure novelty from Péguy's historical pessimism. Péguy and Whitehead maintain a direction in time and this characterises their views of time. Apparently, there is never a pure ageing, since the present is a form of novelty that can change what it ages from.Less

A Purified Liberal Theology

John Allan Knight

in Liberalism versus Postliberalism: The Great Divide in Twentieth-Century Theology

This chapter describes the liberal theological method of Schubert Ogden. It begins by describing the most important contributors to Ogden’s thought: Rudolf Bultmann’s existential hermeneutics, Alfred ... More

This chapter describes the liberal theological method of Schubert Ogden. It begins by describing the most important contributors to Ogden’s thought: Rudolf Bultmann’s existential hermeneutics, Alfred North Whitehead’s analysis of human subjectivity, and Charles Hartshorne’s concept of God. The chapter then describes Ogden’s method of interpreting and validating theological claims, displayed in his dual criteria of adequacy. Theological claims must be appropriate to Jesus Christ (an existential criterion) and credible to common human experience and reason. Ogden derives his articulation of common human experience through a transcendental analysis of the conditions of the possibility of any and all acts of human subjectivity. Further, Ogden’s transcendental argument for God’s existence yields an understanding of God whose existence is necessary. The descriptive sense Ogden associates with “God” thus picks out God alone as its referent. Additionally, the descriptive senses associated with the predicates of theological claims are also derived from elements of human experience. We can therefore have knowledge, either through acquaintance or through description, of whether the conditions described in those descriptive senses are satisfied. Therefore, This allows him to meet the demands of Russell as well as Flew and other falsification theorists.Less

Whitehead’s Highly Speculative Lectures on Quantum Theory

Ronny Desmet

in Whitehead at Harvard, 1924-1925

Ronny Desmet endeavors in this chapter to examine Whitehead’s theory of quantum theory and primates as found in his Harvard lectures using Clerk Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism as a starting ... More

Ronny Desmet endeavors in this chapter to examine Whitehead’s theory of quantum theory and primates as found in his Harvard lectures using Clerk Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism as a starting point while refusing to abandon the idea of continuous space-time, using wave equations as his mathematical vehicle. The chapter contains sections detailing Whitehead’s alternative theory of gravitation, his paradigm of the electron as a complex organism, and his reaction to Niels Bohr’s model of the atom. The chapter concluded that Whitehead wanted a complete reconceptualisation of the atom in terms of atomic structures of vibrations, intending to leave behind all remnants of the materialistic theory in favour of an organic theory.Less

Becoming Intermezzo: Eco-theopoetics after the Anthropic Principle

Roland Faber

in Theopoetic Folds: Philosophizing Multifariousness

This chapter proposes that our ecological future is indispensably entangled with a different view of nature that is sensible to the necessity of wildness in which we are only strangers or guests. The ... More

This chapter proposes that our ecological future is indispensably entangled with a different view of nature that is sensible to the necessity of wildness in which we are only strangers or guests. The author proposes, using Whitehead, that we must become an intermezzo within this necessity and that to become such an intermezzo we must give up on all forms of power of control, manipulation, and destruction in the name of our survival. We must become what we always have been: an expression of the rhythms of necessity in which our contingent existence is an overflow of its patient grace. The art of becoming “one” with its multiplicity is the realm of poetics, the rupture of the continuity of power, where “God” indicates a suspension of all existence in this wilderness that breaks all cycles of the omnipotence of power.Less

Energy, Ecology, and Intensive Alliance: Bringing Earth Back to Heaven

Luke B. Higgins

in Cosmology, Ecology, and the Energy of God

Drawing on the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and Ilya Prigogine in conjunction with Isabelle Stengers, this chapter traces some of the problematic theological underpinnings of the specifically ... More

Drawing on the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and Ilya Prigogine in conjunction with Isabelle Stengers, this chapter traces some of the problematic theological underpinnings of the specifically modern dichotomization (“bifurcation” in Whitehead's language) between human culture and nature's processes that has centrally informed current discourses around “energy.” Whitehead's process philosophy provides an alternative to the reductive materialism that justifies current environmental exploitation, seeing at the base of reality not some mute, mindless matter or energy—knowledge of which can only exist in an ontologically separate, “mental” sphere—but instead a co-creative process of ecological becoming set in motion by an immanent divine “lure” towards “intensity.” A theology of “intensive alliance,” as the chapter calls it, encourages us to encounter the living God in and through the webs of dynamic human/non-human partnerships that are the basis of a healthy ecology.Less

From Physics to Philosophy, and from Continuity to Atomicity

Ronny Desmet

in Whitehead at Harvard, 1924-1925

This chapter by Ronny Desmet has two major sections. The first is a close reading of Whitehead’s first lecture as illustrating the synthetic and critical and common sense character of Whitehead’s ... More

This chapter by Ronny Desmet has two major sections. The first is a close reading of Whitehead’s first lecture as illustrating the synthetic and critical and common sense character of Whitehead’s philosophy in conversation with Aristotle, Hume, and Kant, concluding that all three are guilty of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness and performative contradictions. The second section traces a change in Whitehead’s metaphysics from continuous to atomic becoming between his first and second semester of lectures, with Whitehead using the concept of process to harmonise divisibility and indivisibility, but eventually concluding that atomicity requires a theory for discontinuous existence.Less

Is God Creator of the Universe? Whitehead's Position

W. NORRIS CLARKE, S.J.

in The Philosophical Approach to God: A New Thomistic Perspective, 2nd Revised Edition

This chapter presents the position of Alfred North Whitehead on whether God is the creator of the universe or not. God does play an indispensable role in this world ... More

This chapter presents the position of Alfred North Whitehead on whether God is the creator of the universe or not. God does play an indispensable role in this world system. God is a source of the eternal object. He provides the ideal goal of each newly arising actual occasion. Moreover, He guides the universe toward the greatest possible realizable value. Finally, He preserves the objectified values achieved by the successively perishing actual entities.Less

Intelligent Design and the Matter of Matter

Strachan Donnelley

Ceara Donnelley and Bruce Jennings (eds)

in Frog Pond Philosophy: Essays on the Relationship Between Humans and Nature

Reflecting on the debate in American education concerning the scientific validity and teaching of biological evolution, this chapter suggests that speculative philosophical thinking offers a better ... More

Reflecting on the debate in American education concerning the scientific validity and teaching of biological evolution, this chapter suggests that speculative philosophical thinking offers a better alternative than either dogmatic theology or dogmatic science. It touches briefly on the work of three thinkers who are discussed at length in later chapters—Alfred North Whitehead, Hans Jonas, and Ernst Mayr.Less