Posts Tagged

catherine elgin

Each Occasion is Concerned With The Universe: Virtuous Oscilation, Whitehead, and Quaker Concernedness

“Consciousness flickers; and even at its brightest, there is a small focal region of clear illumination, and a large penumbral region which tells of intense experience in dim apprehension.” –Whitehead, Process and Reality “An exemplar can exemplify only some of its properties. It brings those properties to the fore by marginalizing, downplaying, or ignoring other…

Read More

Is it possible to find out about the world by making things up? Catherine Elgin, Exemplification and Understanding

“One attractive answer is that works of fiction are thought experiments. Like literary fictions, thought experiments neither are nor purport to be physically realized. Nevertheless, they evidently enhance understanding of the phenomena they pertain to. If fictions are thought experiments, they advance understanding of the world in the same way that (other) thought experiments do.”…

Read More