Matthew Segall

Am 25. September 1924, nach einer erfolgreichen Karriere als mathematischer Logiker in Cambridge und London, hielt Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) seine erste Philosophieklasse an der Harvard University. Das Echo von William Jamesʼ Stimme hallte noch immer in der Emerson Hall wider und winkte Whiteheads bahnbrechende Konzeptualisierungen herbei. Vier Jahre später reiste er zurück über den Atlantik an die Universität von Edinburgh, um die verblüffend originellen Gifford-Vorlesungen zu halten, aus denen Process and Reality (1929) entstand. Was auch immer man über andere große philosophische Werke sagen mag, die in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts veröffentlicht wurden, Whiteheads Process and Reality hebt sich davon ab wie eine seltsame und schöne Blume auf einer einsamen urzeitlichen Lichtung. Obwohl er selbst zugibt, dass es sich bei seinen Gedanken um „Fußnoten zu Platon“ handelt und somit in der europäischen philosophischen Tradition stehen, soll sein Buch die Leser zu einer gewagten spekulativen Abkehr von althergebrachten Denkgewohnheiten anregen.

Following the famous 1956 Dartmouth Conference, where a team of computer scientists first coined the term “artificial intelligence,” philosophers have raised significant ontological and ethical questions regarding AI’s nature and its implications for human flourishing. More recently, the growing popularity of Large Language Models and so-called “deep fakes” has made the public more aware of the power of AI, thrusting profound existential dilemmas into our collective consciousness. This chapter attempts to address our current situation from a philosophical perspective by reflecting on basic questions, including: What are these technologies for? Whose interests do they serve? And perhaps most importantly, how are they changing our sense of conscious human agency? The aim is to better contextualize the transformation already underway in the hopes of avoiding false myths and unethical outcomes.

Alfred North Whitehead's first book as a professor of philosophy at Harvard University, Science and the Modern World, is not only a historical treatment of the rise and fall of scientific materialism. It also marks his turn to metaphysics in search of an alternative cosmological scheme that would replace matter in motion with organic process as that which is generic in Nature. Among the metaphysical innovations introduced in this book are the somewhat enigmatic “eternal objects.” The publication of the first and second volumes of Whitehead's Harvard Lectures on the philosophical presuppositions (HL1) and general metaphysical problems (HL2) of science provides students of his corpus with an opportunity to catch the thinker in the act of creating his concepts. In searching through student notes for glimpses of what Whitehead really meant, I have kept in mind his admonition that “no thinker thinks twice” (PR 29). Whitehead never ceased philosophizing, and surely he intended for us to continue thinking with but beyond the letter of his ideas. In this spirit and in light of HL1 and HL2, this article seeks to elucidate the role of eternal objects as a category of existence in Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism, with the goal not simply of textual exegesis, but of showing how the meaning of the fifth category of existence (as he refers to eternal objects in PR) is exemplified in the gradual ingression of the idea in Whitehead's imagination. My aim is to sustain the effort at constructive thought he began, making his speculative hypothesis as explicit as possible so as to better prepare it for critical improvement (PR xiv).

This paper begins by revisiting the intellectual collision between Bergson and Einstein. Their crucial misunderstanding almost a century ago did not create but has exacerbated the modern bifurcation between natural science and human experience. After trying to help Einstein and Bergson understand one another, the process-relational cosmology of Alfred North Whitehead is introduced in an effort to articulate an alternative approach to healing the split between physics and experience. While Whitehead affirmed much of Bergson’s critique of scientific materialism, he did not entirely share Bergson’s views on temporality and departed in critical respects from the Frenchman’s vitalism. Finally, Whitehead’s cosmology is compared with Carlo Rovelli’s Loop Quantum Gravity model of spacetime. Instead of attempting to philosophically explicate scientific formalisms or synthesize mathematics and ontology, I invite these thinkers into dialogue around a question-“What is time?” -that cannot be properly addressed by any one discipline, as it requires us to generate and inhabit an intermediary zone between physics, philosophy, and common sense.

This paper brings Alfred North Whiteheads Philosophy of Organism into conversation with the recent panpsychist turn in analytic philosophy of mind. Whiteheads unabashedly metaphysical project broadly aligns with recent critiques of reductive physicalism and the turn toward a conception of experience as basic to Nature. This paper thus examines physicalisms dominant strategies for explaining consciousness, including eliminativism, epiphenomenalism, and emergentism, and concludes that the panpsychist alternative is superior. However, Whiteheads process-relational panexperientialism diverges in crucial respects from the dominant substance-property variants of panpsychism. I argue that Whiteheads version avoids many of the conceptual difficulties plaguing the latter and that it thus represents a more formidable alternative to standard physicalism.

This article brings media ecology into conversation with Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy of organism in an effort to lure the former beyond its normally anthropocentric orientation. The article is divided into two parts. Part 1 spells out the way Whitehead's approach can aid media ecology in developing a less anthropocentric theory of communication. Part 2 engages more specifically with Mark B. N. Hansen's Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media. Hansen's work is an example of the exciting new directions opened up for media theory by Whitehead's panexperientialist ontology, but I argue that Hansen's attempt to "invert" Whitehead's theory of perception is based on a terminological confusion

The social and ecological crises of the twenty-first century represent a failure of the techno-industrial way of living and knowing. It has become apparent that we need both a new mythos and a new science. In this essay, I draw attention to the important epistemological and cosmological implications of enactivism, a still emerging paradigm within the life sciences. Guided by the insights of the enactive paradigm, I offer a new story of human origins and destiny in an attempt to contribute to a more livable future for our species and the rest of the community of life on Earth