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The aim of this paper is to outline Dorothy Emmet's (1904–2000) account of perception in The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking (published in 1945). Emmet's account of perception is part of a wider attempt to rehabilitate metaphysics in the face of logical positivism and verificationism (of the kind espoused most famously by A. J. Ayer). It is thus part of an attempt to stem the tide of anti-metaphysical thought that had become widespread in British philosophy by the middle of the twentieth century. Emmet does not fit neatly into the traditional story of twentieth-century British philosophy. She draws on figures like A. N. Whitehead and Henri Bergson much more extensively than figures like Russell or Moore – and thus straddles the so-called 'analytic-continental divide.' My aim in this paper is to put Emmet on the map of twentieth-century British thought by outlining her philosophy of perception, highlighting her proposals for a way forward for metaphysics in a time of crisis, and identifying the ways she preempts movements in contemporary philosophy of perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the Buddha's philosophy of becoming in relation to that of Whitehead. It questions how we might begin to understand the spatial production of organization differently if we move beyond Western concepts of space and time. While Whitehead provides a way to comprehend a world in flux, his approach to spatial becoming tends to transform processes (verbs) into entities (nouns) by halting their becoming. In contrast, the Buddha's perspective on becoming is not limited by the noun/verb dichotomy and does not revert to notions of permanence. This paper posits that the Buddha conceptualizes becoming as a continuous stream, while Whitehead portrays it as a series of events. The study concludes that the Buddha's concept of the 'specious present'—a fusion of his doctrines of 'dependent origination' and 'dependently arisen'—provides novel insights into organizational space that can be of value in sharpening the conceptual underpinnings of the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I engage with the arguments of Andrew Davis's book Metaphysics of Exo-Life, which is a commentary on my previous work on cosmotheology. I applaud Davis's critique and deepening of my work in the context of Whitehead's process theology. I largely agree with his metaphysical deepening of the first three principles of my cosmotheology, dealing with the non-centrality of humanity in the universe and its metaphysical re-centering. But I diverge on his view of the last three principles dealing with the metaphysical necessity of God, the source of value in the universe, and the nature of human destiny. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the philosophical underpinnings of Nyamnjoh's social theory of incompleteness and conviviality and Whitehead's process ontology in the context of intellectual decoloniality. The theory of incompleteness and convivial scholarship is spearheaded by Francis Nyamnjoh as a strategy for intellectual decoloniality and a substitute for the rigid alternatives prevalent in the decoloniality clamour in Africa. This idea also finds expression in Whitehead's process and relational ontology. Although Whitehead's process ontology has been widely studied, one hardly comes across works studying in detail the profound ontological richness underpinning Nyamnjoh's social theory in conversation with Whitehead. In this essay, I examine the ontological assumptions underlying Nyamnjoh's theory of incompleteness, on the one hand, and the ethical assumptions underpinning his theory of convivial scholarship, on the other. These two analyses combined are expected to shed light on Nyamnjoh's social theory of epistemic decoloniality and help clarify some philosophical conundrums that underpin it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adopting numbering practices is central to 'business-like' public organising. These practices were primarily critiqued for their more-than-technical, normative character. This paper expands the critique of numbers in governance by considering numbers' epistemic consequences in public sector work. Drawing on Whitehead's philosophy of aesthetics and an ethnography of enumeration inside a public agency in England, the paper argues that enumeration techniques, when relying on accounting categories and used within a 'business-like' public sector, end up enacting knowledge objects that are aesthetic in kind. Numbered entities taken as performance evidence (metrics, rankings) end up (a) part of a project of enunciation, (b) opaque for conceptual interrogation, and (c) attuned to through bodily affect. Such characterisation makes two contributions. First, it conceptualises 'aesthetic enumerated entities' as a way of understanding instrumental knowledge in organising. Second, it extends our scope of engaging with the aesthetic by going beyond conceptualisations focused on art or beauty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper articulates and explores in some detail the main features of Whitehead's early temporal ontology. By 'early temporal ontology' I refer to the views Whitehead developed during his London years, more specifically in his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919) and the more approachable Concept of Nature (1920). These works are not usually read through a heavily ontological lens. It is often said that Whitehead developed his metaphysics later, when he moved to the United States, in 1924. I believe, however, that these earlier works should not merely be read as works in natural philosophy or merely as stepping stones to his later magnum opus Process and Reality (1929). Although Whitehead's stated goal in these works is not to provide a systematic ontology of time, such an ontology is present and is worth distilling and interpreting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the co-production of research as creative, speculative, and eventful rather than as research processes determined by equality, empowerment and social justice. There are persuasive critiques of participatory and co-produced methods. In response, the case is made for focusing instead on the complex processes through which ideas, affects and relational capacities emerge, are nurtured or obscured, and circulate as part of the complex processes of co-producing research. The argument is developed with reference to a recent research project on youth loneliness. Through process philosophy and speculative approaches, the co-productive imagination illuminates the necessary imaginative work of conceiving propositions, techniques of relation and methodological tactics that move us through creative advance to eventful realisations that something in our research matters! Through an ethics of the event the aim of research becomes collaboratively creating new potentials in a world in process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I build on the process philosophy of Whitehead and on enactive approachs to hermeneutics, to suggest that if we want to conceive of archaeological practice in terms of a process archaeology, then rather than characterizing it as 'digging up the past', it is better to think of it as digging up concrescences. From the perspective of enactive hermeneutics, no artifact (from past or present) is a completely determinate matter of fact; its meaning is enacted in an ecology of practices, and should be understood as part of a dynamical network (of uses and beliefs) that changes when viewed from different perspectives. To the extent that an artifact retains an affordance-related meaning, whether original or new, it remains a concrescence and is never reducible to a determinate matter of fact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops a series of speculative propositions for an immanent environmental ethics that is responsive to the challenges of the Anthropocene epoch. The article is framed within a new materialist approach to environmental education, and specifically works to re-imagine the notion of justice in terms of performative gestures, multiplicities, processes, and speculative thought experiments. Drawing on Whitehead's speculative philosophy in conjunction with recent new materialist thought, the article proposes the concept of 'doing little justices' as a way of enacting micropolitical interventions into everyday patterns of environmental thought, learning, sociality, and behaviour. The concept of 'little justices' is further elaborated through the analysis of vignettes that problematise issues of climate change, human exceptionalism, ecological sovereignty, and environmental justice with university students in the fields of education and the philosophy of law. The article concludes that an immanent ethics cannot be reduced to a set of predetermined values or prescriptions for environmental education, but should proceed through a speculative process of creative experimentation and negotiation in the pursuit of unforeseen openings and potentials for co-existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amid the wide variety of interpretations of quantum mechanics, the notion of a fully coherent ontological interpretation has seen a promising evolution over the last few decades. Despite this progress, however, the old dualistic categorical constraints of subjectivity and objectivity, correlate with the metrically restricted definition of local and global, have remained largely in place – a reflection of the broader, persistent inheritance of these comfortable strictures throughout the evolution of modern science. If one traces this inheritance back to its ancient roots in Plato and Aristotle, it is clear that the coherence, scientific utility, and historical durability of the various natural philosophies that followed have been directly proportional to their commitment, tacit or explicit, to object-oriented realism. As Simondon might put it, it is a commitment to the primacy of individuated substance over the process of individuation. For Whitehead, it is the misplaced assimilation of becoming to being, of potentiality to actuality. Quantum mechanics has challenged this commitment with a combined breadth and depth of force that far exceeds any other theory in the history of science. The theory's objectively demonstrable empirical application is manifest only by way of a fundamentally subjective, context-dependent mechanism of measurement. More compelling still, actual system states are always actualizations of locally contextualized yet globally conditioned potential system states, such that "globally objective" reality is no longer merely the object of local measurement, but also its product. Thus, any coherent, ontological interpretation of quantum theory must include a conceptual framework by which objectivity and subjectivity, actuality and potentiality, global and local, being and becoming, individuated fact and process of individuation, are no longer understood as merely epistemic, mutually exclusive category pairs descriptive of an already extant, closed reality – but rather as mutually implicative ontological categories explicative of an ontogenetic, open reality-in-process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops a media philosophical framework for addressing the intersection of epigenetics and complex dynamical systems in theoretical biology. In particular, it argues that the theoretical humanities (and especially media philosophy) need to think critically about the computability of epigenomic regulation (proposed by the complexity sciences), as well as speculatively about the possibility of an epigenomics beyond complexity. The fact that such a conceptual framework does not exist suggests not only a failure to engage with the mathematics of complexity, but also a failure to engage with its history. Both epigenetics and the application of complex dynamical systems to biology originate in the mid-twentieth-century work of Conrad Hal Waddington. The article demonstrates how this genealogy of epigenetic complexity (which passes through Waddington's epigenetic landscape, the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, molecular epigenetics, and the limitations of nonlinear differential equations for biological modeling) reveals the need for a speculative conception of epigenomic mediation beyond mathematical complexity. Using Whitehead's philosophy as a conceptual anchor, the "epimedial landscape" serves as a first pass at a media philosophical revision of the complex dynamical systems view of the epigenetic landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, Bernard Stiegler develops an account of the pedagogical responsibilities which follow from rhythmic intergenerational flows, involving the creation of milieus which care for and pay attention to the future, toward the creation of nootechnical milieus. Such milieus are defined by their objects of attention: intellectual life, spiritual life, and political life; taken together: noetic life. Such is the claim Alfred North Whitehead makes when arguing that the sole object of education is life and the creation of an art of life which is itself a rhythmic adventure. The purpose of this paper is three-fold. First, to clarify the importance of Stiegler's reading of Aristotle's notion of the noetic soul in our thinking about the role, purpose, and function of educational institutions in relation to intellective, spiritual, and political life. In this paper, I will fuse this discussion with a Whiteheadian approach to rhythm, developing what I call a 'rhythmic nootechnics' in the service of 'nootechnical evolution' as, I argue, Whitehead's approach to rhythm allows to clarify and enrich Stiegler's reading of Aristotle. Second, and as indicated, to explore the relationship between Whitehead and Stiegler, insofar as the former has become an increasing reference point for the latter, but this relationship remains unexplored in the literature. Third, to apply this concept of 'rhythmic nootechnics' to think about what transformations at the level of pedagogy and politics are necessary to reinvent the university from this Stieglerian and Whiteheadian perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the location of affect in human experience by situating the concept in relation to attention and to different degrees of propositional structuring. By bringing together extended mind theories, the affect philosophies of Spinoza and Deleuze, and Whitehead's theory of intensities, the article seeks to mediate between different strands of affect theory; especially between what has been termed 'non-representational' theories of affect and those that couple affective processes with intentional and perceptual contents. The article will end by discussing vagueness as an important empirical interface in both trajectories of theorizing affect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, various critics have noted how contemporary American writers are turning to popular genre forms in their work. However, few have adequately addressed how this turn affects the story of literary history. Through close readings of Jennifer Egan's metafictional gothic novel, The Keep, and Colson Whitehead's post-apocalyptic zombie horror novel, Zone One, this article argues that this recent trend reflects a longer process I am calling genrefication. I begin by analysing how The Keep updates the gothic to speak to contemporary concerns, specifically digital communications technology. Egan's text also thematises how the formal limits of genres enable affective experiences for the reader. It then turns to Whitehead's contrasting depiction of genre, one which complicates Egan's ideas somewhat. Drawing on the work of John Fiske, I contend that Zone One shows how popular forms develop in relation to power structures, and how the recent turn to genre can be seen as what Fiske calls a 'micropolitics' of resistance. Through readings of these two texts, I argue that genrefication not only accounts for the recent turn to popular genres but also serves as a productive framework to discuss the gradual encroachment of genre into literary criticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reviews Underworlds: Philosophies of the Unconscious from Psychoanalysis to Metaphysics by Jon Mills. Ancient Egyptian and Greek tales, depicting the eternal soul's journey through death's abyss to immortality, are followed by Aristotle's nondualistic conception of soul, dependent on embodiment, that consists of elements of the same substance—soma and psyche. From Aristotle's germ cell, the author's logical discourse unfolds, elucidating the most systematic and coherent accounts of Western unconscious ontologies over the last two-hundred years in chapters that feature Hegel, Freud, Heidegger and Sartre, Lacan, Jung, and Whitehead. The dialectical process underlies the rising of consciousness from a psychic abyss, not from a universal, supernatural one. Mills adeptly interprets and synthesizes diverse, complex theories. The author's revitalization of misunderstood concepts in the Freudian lexicon, such as der Todestrieb—the Death Drive—contains his greatest insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main aim of this article is to argue the case for understanding improvising as a real-time emergent process grounded in collaborative action, while noting that talking about improvisation, bluntly put, is not the same as improvising. The ways in which improvisers respond and adapt to changing circumstances in the moment and over time, it is argued, connect directly to the discipline of process philosophy and involve pattern recognition and creation skills as well as the ability to predict the actions of conspecifics. The conclusion considers some benefits and challenges in approaching improvisation from a process-based and systems-theoretical perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding and action are central themes in Hannah Arendt's thought and an idea that runs throughout her work is that whenever human beings act, they start processes. It is in this light that she saw education as a process whose aim is to make human beings feel at home in the world. Given the centrality of process in understanding action, early on in her work, Arendt reflected and drew upon the ideas of Alfred Whitehead, the philosopher of process. Education in his thought is an art and an adventure whose object should be to enable students to grasp the process of life itself and imagine different worlds. In this light, universities are crucial in creating conditions of possibility for imaginative learning and intellectual adventures. Taking action, process, imagination and adventure as my central ideas, in this paper, I make connections between Arendt and Whitehead in an attempt to think about education within and beyond ‘dark times’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Now resilience has become one of the decade's buzzwords, urban scholars cannot afford to renounce or abandon it; they should reclaim it for critical purposes. This piece offers one way of doing this, by moving away from socio-ecological systems thinking and reworking some concepts elaborated by Alfred North Whitehead. It proposes that resilience be seen as the capacity of a configuration of elements to endure through an intricate mixture of stability and change. This capacity emerges from this configuration's entanglements with its environment and from symbiosis, friction and contestation. The conceptualisation is subsequently utilised to caution against over-optimism about the post-automobile city. The continuing dominance of the privately owned internal combustion engine, the neutralising absorption of car sharing by the car industry and the current enthusiasm over autonomous cars are reinterpreted as manifestations of automobility's capacity to endure through adaptation and influence over its environment. The socio-spatial inequalities and injustices associated with automobility are likely to persist through change as well. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While there is a burgeoning literature on matter in social theory, there has been a surprising lack of interest amongst social theorists in the importance of the concept of energy in natural scientific accounts of matter. In this context, I examine how the work of Isabelle Stengers challenges social theorists to take thermodynamic accounts of energy, in particular, seriously. The paper develops three arguments: firstly, while social theorists have often wanted to add social relations to matter, in doing so they have ignored physical scientists’ own analyses of relations, including thermodynamics; secondly, that thermodynamics offers a different way of theorizing matter-energy than that suggested by vitalist approaches to political ecology; thirdly, that the thermodynamic concept of energy is necessarily linked to the practice and politics of measurement. At the same time, I argue that Stengers's account of thermodynamics both illuminates her understanding of politics, and points to its limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Panentheism has recently become a widely accepted and appreciated concept among scholars in the science-theology dialogue, and its theological repercussions have been discussed to great extent. Yet, there remains to be studied in more detail the notion of the philosophical foundations of the term. A prominent gap in our understanding of these foundations is the potential similarity between the metaphysics of Hegel and Whitehead, their understanding of the transcendence and immanence of God, and their respective versions of panentheism. In this article, I present a critical reflection on the possible resemblance between process thought and Hegelian metaphysics and philosophy of God. In the last section I refer to those who use panentheism within the science-theology dialogue. I try to specify which of the two versions of panentheism, that of Hegel or Whitehead, is more popular among those scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay provides a critical review of two recent books on evolution: Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth, and Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True, as well as a critique of mainstream evolutionary theory and of natural selection. I also suggest a generalization of sexual selection theory that acknowledges mind as pervasive in nature. Natural selection, as the primary theory of how biological change occurs, must be carefully framed to avoid the long-standing "tautology problem" and must also be modified to more explicitly include the role of mind in evolution. A propensity approach to natural selection, in which "expected fitness" is utilized rather than "fitness," can save natural selection from tautology. But to be a productive theory, natural selection theory should be placed alongside sexual selection – which is explicitly agentic/intentional—as a twin force, but also placed alongside purely endogenous factors such as genetic drift. This framing is contrary to the normal convention that often groups all of these factors under the rubric of "natural selection." I suggest some approaches for improving modern evolutionary theory, including a "generalized sexual selection," or "generalized agentic selection," a panpsychist extension of Darwin's theory of sexual selection that explicitly recognizes the role of mind at all levels of nature and which may play the part of a general theory of evolution better than natural selection theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article attempts to clarify the appeal to the Benedictine ideal that Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) makes in The Aims of Education and Other Essays as a way to renew the life of the spirit in education. In particular, the essay will consider St. Benedict's three central themes of Whitehead's philosophy: freedom and discipline, the teacher as artist and the art of life, and universities as workshops or homes of creative energy. The aim is to bring about a harmony of thought and action, the mind to the feelings of the heart, to subordinate scientific or critical pedagogy to aesthetic-spiritual instruction. This deserves our attention because today's educational theories and practices emphasize the technical, the critical, and the social sides to the neglect of the aesthetic-spiritual side. On both its practical and theoretical side, the educational theory of Whitehead falls within the Benedictine tradition of ora (meditative reading) and labora (work). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1996, John Polkinghorne published Scientists as Theologians: A Comparison of the Writings of Ian Barbour, Arthur Peacocke and John Polkinghorne. Responding to this book and his subsequent writing, I first summarize four topics on which we all agree: (1) critical realism; (2) holism, emergence, and levels of organization; (3) human nature; and (4) limitations in God's power. I then discuss our differences concerning: (1) classification schemes; (2) concepts of God; (3) laws of nature; (4) divine action; and (5) Christology. I then explore the contexts in which we were writing: our differing scientific disciplines, theological traditions, and academic institutions. Some concluding reflections concern our place in the interdisciplinary field of “science and religion.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 20th century philosophy of science began on a positivistic note. Its focal point was scientific explanation and the hypothetico-deductive (HD) framework of explanation was proposed as the standard of what is meant by “science.” HD framework, its inductive and statistical variants, and other logic-based approaches to modeling scientific explanation were developed long before the dawn of the information age. Since that time, the volume of observational data and power of high performance computing have increased by several orders of magnitude and reshaped the practice and concept of science, and indeed, the philosophy of science. A new observational-inductive (OI) framework for scientific research is emerging due to recent developments in sensors, data systems, computers, and knowledge discovery techniques. We examine the nature of these changes and their impact on the question of what is meant by “science” after discussing five examples of the OI framework, and conclude that the HD and OI frameworks are complementary and synergistic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of time is traced both in Philosophy and in Physics (Newtonian Mechanics, Relativity, Cosmology, Quantum Theory). Distinct temporalities emerge and time appears as the essential condition for the realization of being, in accordance with ideas and theories developed by Peirce, Whitehead, and Heidegger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]