Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“After Aristotle had sketched the best science available in his day, he wanted to go further. What implications did that science have for the nature of the physical world with which it dealt? His intention was to develop the meta-physics only after the physics. If science had always followed this pattern the role of metaphysics…
“From Whitehead’s reformulated point of view, the questions of science “do not enable [it] to formulate the problem of the ‘mind’ because these questions and their answers presuppose it.” Science is a way of knowing nature; therefore, the pursuit of knowledge of nature presupposes that there is a knower, i.e., a mind.” I made a…
I just read an article in HuffPo about a recent study which explores the perceived “negative effects” of children being exposed to religion at an early age. The article really frustrated me because of the negative spin and blind, erroneous presuppositions contained within it. When I come across stuff like this I just want to…
According to McGrath, though the esoteric schools represent a diverse set of theories and practices, they are nonetheless “united by a common enemy: the desacralization of nature (material nature, human nature, cosmological nature) by techno-science and capitalist consumerism.” He argues that critiques of esotericism as “regressive,” “anti-modern,” and “anti-scientific” are misguided. Although esotericism shares modernity’s…
“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.”…
You’ve got to admit, reason itself is quite mysterious. Might it not even be referred to as supernatural? The knowledge gained by the scientist, if true, cannot without contradiction be collapsed into nature. How is it that the rational scientist claims the universe entirely lacks purpose and intelligence? What of the scientist’s own intelligence? Is…
For Whitehead there’s something important at stake in the framing of human experience in terms of the bifurcation of nature that Stengers wants us to pay attention to; namely, the bifurcation of nature requires a certain kind of sacrifice on behalf of human experience that we may not wish to accept. Stengers describes this sacrifice,…
One of the deepest problems in biology is to explain development, the process by which organisms reliably grow into organisms of the right kind. Dogs give birth to puppies not snakes or cabbages. Preformationism, a solution to this problem often illustrated by quaint seventeenth century pictures of tiny babies squatting in the head of a…
Pete Holmes: That’s interesting because I think most of my comedian friends, specifically, are often worried that if they go to therapy–or if they work on themselves, or if they meditate, or if they have a spiritual practice or a discipline or something–that they’ll be less funny. A lot of them want to smoke cigarettes…
Passing judgment on the veracity of Whitehead’s new concept of nature requires first deploying it, experimenting with its effects in the world, establishing its relevance to the values of actual life. Materialist enemies of his philosophy tend to lack the negative capability required to pursue the consequences of Whitehead’s unbifurcated image of the universe; they…