Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“The actions of billiard players, people in general, nonhuman animals, and even plants when seen in the right time frame, are patently intentional, both in the more precise sense used by philosophers in the line of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, and in the more everyday sense referring to an act carried out for some purpose, something…
“Communotheism is a divine communalism. “Divine communalism is the position that the Divine is a community of gods who are fundamentally related to one another and ontologically equal while at the same time distinct from one another by their personhood and functions”. In communotheism, there is immanence in that there is radical relationality among the…
“It’s what I like to call ‘retrospective induction.’ Working backward from your experience all the way down in nature. So [the question is] can you find dimensions of your experience spread out through the natural world all the way down to the lowest level of things, whatever they are? […] And the answer is, yes,…
“The basic outline of Hartshorne’s aesthetic theory is the first task…The basic insight is that beauty is a mean among four intersecting poles of relation. On the x axis is the relation of depth, sublimity at one extreme and superficiality at the other, while on the y axis the relations of total unity and utter…
“The problem of precarious survival helps us see what is wrong. Precarity is a state of acknowledgment of our vulnerability to others. In order to survive, we need help, and help is always the service of another, with or without intent. When I sprain my ankle, a stout stick may help me walk, and I…
“Fungi are famous for changing shape in relation to their encounters and environments. Many are “potentially immortal,” meaning they die from disease, injury, or lack of resources, but not from old age. Even this little fact can alert us to how much our thoughts about knowledge and existence just assume determinate life form and old…
“Our species’ ability to understand and respond to the planetary ecological crisis may be aided by a truly ecological media ecology, that is, by the idea that there is not just an analogical resonance between natural ecologies and media ecologies but a cosmological community. Whitehead’s panexperientialist cosmology allows us to generalize media ecology’s focus on…
“Whitehead’s theme, begun in the first chapter and maintained throughout the book and, in our judgment, for the rest of his philosophy, is that mathematics begins in experience and as abstracted becomes separated from experience to become utterly general. “We see, and hear, and taste, and smell, and feel hot and cold, and push, and…
”Whitehead wanted to give some explanation for how it is that in a world of process we nonetheless are able to recognize and identify definite characters or entities. We are out at sea and glimpse a whale just before it dives under the surface. A moment later, it explodes into the air. “There it is…
“If the mind is flat then our mental lives must exist purely at the ‘mental surface.’ Our brain is an improviser, and it bases it’s current improvisations on previous improvisations: It creates new momentary thoughts and experiences by drawing not on a hidden inner world of knowledge, beliefs and motives but on memory traces of…