>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.
[ Pause ]
>>It's a pleasure to welcome you here to the Library of Congress,
I am Carolyn Brown, I direct the Office of Scholarly Programs
and the John W. Kluge Center here at the library.
And before we proceed, the first thing I always request is
that you turn off all cellphones and other electronic equipment
which can bing and bonk and sing and interrupt the speaker
and perhaps also interfere with the recording.
This morning's symposium will consider the intellectual legacy
of Alfred North Whitehead, it's sponsored by the Manuscript Division
of the Library of Congress and the Office of Scholarly Programs
and happens to really coincide with the 150th anniversary
of Alfred North Whitehead's birth and a 100th anniversary,
more or less of the publication
of Principia Mathematica written with Bertrand Russell.
The particular occupation and motivation for the symposium,
however, lies in the very generous donation to the Manuscript Division
of a very rare 1936 letter by Alfred North Whitehead to his colleague
and research assistant, Henry Leonard in this letter
which we had an opportunity to see in the back of the room was donated
to the library by Dr. Leonard's son who's here with us this morning
and we'll hear from him in a moment.
Let me say a few words about the Kluge Center
and the Manuscript Division.
The Kluge Center was established through a generous donation
of John W. Kluge in the year 2000 and was given with the intent
of bringing together the world's best thinkers and the doers,
the scholars and the legislators and other public officials.
The idea was that the legislators, the doers need access to some
of the very best thought being generated.
The center supports the world's most accomplished senior scholars
and most promising, rising junior fellows.
We also promote small conferences and lectures such as this one.
For those of you who are local you can sign up for more information
about the center or if you're not local--
in our programs, you've got--
on the library's front page on the right hand side,
you'll see Kluge Center and you could follow the instructions.
And I should say, since we're sitting right here,
the Kluge Center is literally through those doors.
So, perhaps later if you'd like a tour, I can provide that.
Our partner in this enterprise though, and the real heroes
of the day is the Manuscript Division.
Manuscript Division is-- is the home of this very rare letter
which joins a distinguished collection
of 11,000 individual collections of papers that document all aspects
of American history and culture.
These include not only the papers of many US Presidents,
Cabinet Secretaries, members of the Supreme Court,
but also some of the nation's greatest manuscript treasures,
such as Jefferson's rough draft of The Declaration of Independence
which is a wonder to-- to behold.
Every student who's writing should see the drafts
with the lines crossed out and the letters and whatnot,
Lincoln's Gettysburg address, the paper tape
of the telegraphic message
and Alexander Graham Bells' first drawing for the telephone,
and lots of other treasures as well.
So we're really honored and privileged to have been chosen
as the recipients of this rare letter.
We invite everyone to take a look at in the book--
in the Principia Mathematica, a copy signed by Bertrand Russell,
and their copies of the letter in transcript's available.
I wanna thank particularly the Manuscript Division
for their excellent work making the symposium possible.
First to Jim Hutson who was very disappointed
that he couldn't be here, he was really the cause
of this you might say when he heard about the letter.
He said, "You know, people don't know enough about Whitehead,
we ought to do a lecture or symposium or something."
Also, I would like to thank Karen Stuart who's over there in--
in the back, a very special invaluable technical assistant
in the Manuscript Division.
And you'll notice the books are never left alone--
or that letters are left alone.
She's part of the guard here and then especially to Len Bruno,
who many of you have met in the back,
who is the manuscript specialist for Science and Technology who attended
to every detail of this event, the fact that things are
so well prepared and that you have handouts et cetera is thanks to Len.
I hope you picked up files of the speakers, we have a lot crammed
in this morning, so I'm not gonna do the usual introductions.
I think you can just read these.
I-- I told all the speakers that I would try to be generous
in my introduction then I would turn into a tyrant.
'Cause I am gonna keep people on time with my little warning minutes,
3 minutes, 1 minute left.
And I don't think I'll have the nerve to use this, but I have been
in conferences where people use an egg timer to keep people on track.
I don't think I'll do that, but we'll see.
Let me say something then more about the structure.
When we get to the ten-minute mark, I will-- or whatever the time is,
'cause our key note has 40 minutes, I will stand up
and it may seem crude, my mother would probably think it was rude
but anyway, we do need to sort of stay on-- on more or less on track.
And then the questions as you'll see will follow the block of speakers.
The restrooms, this is a wonderful building
but things can be hard to find.
The men's room is down McCarter and 1 flight down,
for the ladies you can go down McCarter
across the Great Hall behind the giant Bible of Mainz is
like a secret entrance to the ladies room.
But you'll see it when you'll see it when you get-- when you get close.
We'll take a break a break at 10:30 resume promptly at 10:45.
So, I'll be out trying to round people up trying to be sure you're--
you're back here, and because the 2nd panel is in 2 stages,
when the 1st 3 speakers finish I'll ask the others
to just get up and switch places.
I think that's all for the preliminaries, and oh,
I've been a little bit blessed than my 10 minutes,
so that's great we save a little time here.
I do at this point want to ask you to welcome Dr. Henry Leonard Jr.
to talk about his father and the Whitehead connection
and how the letter came to be at the library.
So, please Henry.
You can stay seated or stand whatever you prefer.
[ Applause ]   [ Pause ]
>> Good morning.
It's thrilling to be here in this beautiful room with all you people
to tell you a bit about my father, Henry S. Leonard
and Alfred North Whitehead and the letter from Whitehead.
My father was born in West Newton, Massachusetts in 1905 and took all
of his degrees at Harvard University, the PhD in 1931.
He was awarded the Boden Prize in Philosophy in 1929,
one of Harvard's most prestigious awards.
During the year 1929-'30, he was a travelling fellow from Harvard
at the University of Munich in Germany.
My parents were married in early October 1929 just before starting
the trip.
At Harvard, Henry Leonard studied mainly under C.I.
Lewis, H.M. Sheffer and A.N. Whitehead.
He taught at Harvard and Rochester during the depression
and in 1937 he went to Duke University for 12 years.
In 1949, he became professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy
at Michigan State University.
I think later the title head was changed, but that--
on those days it was Head.
And there he remained until his sudden death in July 1967.
At MSU he played an important part in the development
of the Philosophy Department and of the university as a whole.
He was appointed to one of the first special university professorships
in 1961.
From 1959 to 1961, Henry Leonard was a fellow of the Institute
for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
In 1936, the book Philosophical Essays was published in honor
of Alfred North Whitehead.
>> It consisted of essays written by some
of his former students including the essay Logical Positivism
and Speculative Philosophy written by my father.
Shortly after the book was published,
my father received a six-paged hand written letter from Whitehead.
To quote my father, "The letter opens with appreciative comments
on my contributions to the Whitehead's fast drift.
But Whitehead's uses these comments only as a stepping stone to remarks
of a more general import which perhaps throw some additional light
on Whitehead's intellectual stance, it is primarily for this reason
that I have decided to publish the letter here."
My father wrote these words about 1966 as part of a manuscript
that was intended to be a collection
with commentaries of some of his papers.
Unfortunately, the manuscript, while carefully planned
and outlined was left very incomplete
by his sudden untimely death.
I believe the letter from Whitehead was seldom far
from my father's thinking.
Apparently his essay in the fast drift, his comments about the essay,
the letter and comments about the letter would have constituted the
first chapter of his book.
My mother wrote a transcript of the letter because some
of the handwriting is difficult to read.
After my father's death, my mother kept the letter
in her safe deposit box at her bank.
When she died in 1980 it became my responsibility to place the letter--
the Whitehead letter in a suitable repository.
In May 2009, Ronald Phipps learned of my e-mail address
and we've been good-- have become good friends.
He had been my father's personal teaching
and research assistant from1961 until 1967.
Soon after Phipps contacted me, I sent him a copy
of Whitehead's letter and some related papers.
As one thing led to another,
the Library of Congress expressed an interest in the letter.
It became joyfully clear to me that here was a wonderful opportunity
to preserve the letter and to make it available
to interested scholars and to the public.
I am privilege to be here to participate in this meeting
to celebrate where I'd headed my father's association with him.
It is indeed gratifying to know that my father's work
and his relationship to Whitehead are important to scholars.
I look forward to this morning's talks.
[ Applause ]
>> Next, we're going to here from Dr. Ronan Farber
and this is our opportunity, and especially my opportunity,
I would say-- all of us to get a good overview
of Whitehead's thought and his legacy.
To really answer the question, why are we here
and why is this so important?   So please welcome, Dr. Farber.
[ Applause ]   >> Good morning!
I wanna thank Carolyn Brown for inviting us here
to this important event and I say this
for all the participants if I may.
And also her Manuscript Division for preparing everything, for this,
you know, conference and symposium.
So, in celebration of Whitehead's 150th birthday, and in conjunction
with this appearance and publication of a letter of Whitehead
to his assistant that the assistant of the assistant brought back
to light, so to say, I was asked to reflect
on Whitehead's work and its importance.
So please for the next 40 minutes sit back, fasten your seatbelts
and relax or pass out maybe at a certain point.
[Laughter] I will go like within 4 phases, the first phase it will be
like an overview, a kind of a vision.
Second one is about what's it worth.
The third phase will be about the future of Whitehead
and importance, the fourth one.
So, how to approach the phenomenon of Whitehead in 40 minutes?
And if you have kind of thought of Whitehead like for 15 years or so,
then that's really a problem to get everything back into 40 minutes.
How to unfold such a complex work, reaching from mathematics and logic
to philosophy and theology, and physics
Whatever our highlight will be overshadowed by a much greater cloud
of oblivion, so I should concede to the impossibility
of the impossible and just step down.
While pondering this calamity, it appears to me that the landscape
of Whitehead's universe itself structures this impossibility.
I call it Whitehead's Binocular View of Things, a polarity in all things.
Not only does it indicate the advantage of more
than one perspective, but it suggests
that reality is always incurably complex while turning
against our understanding through antagonisms of opposites.
My title already hints at such a polarity 300 years
of Whitehead halfway.
It is enough to review-- is it enough to review the past,
the genesis of Whitehead's thoughts, it's influence and currency?
As important as it may be, it should not be also envisioned the future
or it's potency.
Why did he intensely concern himself with the intellectual reconstruction
of the preceding 3 centuries, their inventions and revolutions of though
and social life while adamantly critiquing their shortcomings
and downfalls especially the newly arrived ideologists of positivism
and scientific materialism?
Yet Whitehead was also deeply engaged in matters of the future,
the latencies of society and structure of thought
that would avoid the pitfalls of the past,
and instead express the transformative processes his own
thinking was meant to initiate.
In 1940, he suggested in a conversation with Charles Lindberg
that despite the Great War underway, he believed that over the next 2
or 3 centuries humanity might be able to works
out its problems without undue suffering.
Whitehead obviously demonstrates a deep trust in the human ability
to always decide anew on a civilized world.
And his life's work can be understood to spell out this trust
with a virtually unending series of binocular perspectives.
From the twin perspectives of Mathematics and Philosophy
and the rejection of the bifurcation of nature into independent systems
of matter and mind, to the covalence of science and religion,
from the critique of abstractions if taken for the concrete and
yet the cherishing of abstractions as motor of evolutionary--
of the evolutionary process to an organic philosophy
in which both ideas and processes are reconciled, from the rhythms
of becoming and perishing, to the intersection of fact and value
and the meaningful oscillation between the world and God.
All oppositions, checks to positions
and double perspectives move neither [inaudible]
on abstract grounds not resting fused in a higher unity.
Whitehead found ultimate refuge in this dynamics itself
as it motivates all binaries to coalesce in forming contrasts
of differentiated complex moving cosmos comes alive,
neither dissolving into sameness nor breaking apart into mere opposites.
No wonder that Whitehead in his magnum Opposed Process
and Reality Claims, the ultimate ground of everything not
to be anything we can arrest, being or God, matter or mind,
but the creative process itself graciously countless.
Whitehead may well have been one of the first thinkers
to reference creativity in such ultimate metaphysical terms
yet this hub is another binocular mystery.
If you read Whitehead the first time and even if you become a specialist,
it is puzzling why this philosophy of creativity is enveloped
in the most complex conceptual system.
We may begin to grasp this paradox by recognizing that its aim is
to avoid the tendency to stabilize fluency instead of making us kings
of reality by mastering fixed abstractions,
its complex conceptual apparatus presents itself as a gift,
a method of unthinking if you will, forcing us always
to render the process of--
to reenter the process of thinking again.
>> Always anew to become seekers of new ideas and creators
of new realities in the pursuit of the art of life.
With creativity as ground and contrasting as method
in mind we can add two further characteristics
of Whitehead's binocular perspectivism, mutuality,
the mode of togetherness and the event, the place of its happening.
The first mutuality appears
in endless variation throughout Whitehead's work.
In his last public lecture Immortality given in 1941 Whitehead
in the strongest and most universal terms possible summarizes his view
in terms of the essential relevance of every factor
of the universe for the other.   Everything is a contrast of finitude
and infinity involving an indefinite array of perspectives.
No finer perspective can ever shake off the essential connection
with its infinite background.
However, since these mutually contrasting perspectives are in need
of a meeting place within the flux of things Whitehead envisions them
to convene in events momentarily unifications of differences becoming
from the complex multiplicities they gather, they add themselves
to a new multiplicity of perspectives issuing
into novel creative processes that generates the universe.
Yes, Whitehead was a pluralist.
Yet he filtered his pluralism through concrete events
in which past and future, abstract and concrete,
flux and permanence find themselves in mutual enjoyment.
In a momentary suspension of inherent conflicts,
their contrasted opposites avoid the impasse of a motionless coagulation
and instead generate a creative passage into the unprecedented.
Because of the enjoyment of togetherness,
the contrasting perspectives convene in events of experience
and the universe exhibits the convergence of diverse perspectives
in the mutual immanence of experiences of events.
In his rhythms of synthesis, Whitehead finds a sign
of eternal greatness already incarnate in the passage
of temporal fact as he says.
Beyond all technicalities, this may explain Whitehead's trust
in the future.
Diffused through its intricate modes of flux the world process
yet displays essential rightness of things.
Well not the means for preservation, it reveals itself as harbinger
of the ever renewed potential to create a world
and since the creation of the world strolls in the mutuality
of perspectives it [inaudible] the victory of persuasion over force.
It is not dominated by the iron necessity of a harmonic of logic.
Instead it is vivified as what it says by an aesthetic harmonics
that stands before it as a living ideal.
Its promise is beyond our grasp.
It always-- but it always steers the channel of flux
in its broken progress towards finer, subtler issues.
So what does this first sketch of Whitehead's thoughts reveal
if not a polyglot thinker inviting us to embark on the adventure
of a cosmos that in its very texture manifests one vast aesthetic whole.
This process even patiently awaits the appearance
of human civilization.
While refining itself through the intensities of art,
ethics and religion, it also invites instigation
into its nature revealing its mathematical, physical,
But how did Whitehead's universe become?
The furthest way to circumscribe the career that created it is
to recall its inception at the Trinity College in Cambridge,
England and its summit at Harvard University
in Cambridge, New England.
While the roles with mathematics and the tradition of Plato,
it transmuted into metaphysics in the tradition of Plato.
In fact, both mathematics and philosophy were already confluent
in Plato of whom Whitehead henceforth thought
that the western philosophic tradition only adds itself
as a series of extended footnotes.   But Whitehead was not a Platonist.
He admired the depth of Plato's thought and his biological methods,
never fixing on anything.
It always uncovers missed alternatives
in any crystallization of thought.   Depth can never be systematized.
Its truth can only be approximated with utmost sensitivity
to the vastness of the universe
and humility before its never seizing becoming.
If we are meant to find rhythms in it mathematical, physical,
metaphysical then it is because of the relation
of the cosmic ingredients rather than any prefabricated
or they're simply there to be discovered.
We can divide Whitehead's work into 3 phases roughly coinciding
with the positions he held in Cambridge in London and Harvard.
Although Whitehead, early on already explored many areas history,
philosophy, theology, politics, women's emancipation, education,
his professional focus at Cambridge was mathematics
or more precisely its interface with the physical universe
in terms of topology and logics.
The major works of these periods such as Universal Algebra,
Mathematical Concepts of the Material World
or the Principia Mathematica circumscribe his interest
to explore the relations between the fundamental units
of the physical world and their conceptualization.
His quest has a distinctive flavor as it favors expansive concreteness,
reality cannot be restruc--
reconstructed by mere abstractions built
up from dimensionless points arrested by exact measurement
or captured in lifeless logical concepts.
Instead, since reality is fundamentally relational becoming
connections extend of space and time
and reasoning employs fluent symbolisms rather
than fixed formulae.
With Whitehead's move to London the [inaudible] philosophical
presuppositions of mathematic,
logic and scientific reasoning become prominent
and a new element appears.
By conceptualizing nature from its perception,
Whitehead defines his task against the prevailing bifurcation
of external and internal reality Without
yet addressing the philosophical discussion in Hume, Locke, Descartes
and Kant he asserts that any knowledge of nature
that includes its very perception already undercuts the dualistic
isolation of natural objects from human experience.
The works of this period, Principles of Natural Knowledge,
The Concept of Nature and The Principle
of Relativity refine Whitehead's earlier proposal
that reality is expansive and that measurement is secondary
and contingent on the rules of the concrete universe
which in turn are contingent too.
His method of expanse-- extensive abstraction only demonstrates his
philosophical agenda of redefining concrete reality as events
that in their interaction form relatively persistent characters
in a web of threads of space time.
He now famously interprets natural universe by a series
of mutually interacting polarities, events and objects, expansion
and process, abstract persistence and creative passage.
This was revolutionary indeed.
If the stuff of the world itself consists impulses of fleeting events
of which objects are iterations than scientific
and more broadly conceptual knowledge are far
from capturing nature as the Tractatus
of the early Wittgenstein has made us believe.
But it is more a far cry of its creative passage.
Its abstractions are but snapshots of a life
that if it were substantialized into merely external particles
of matter invokes the image
of a funeral service mourning the ghosts of disappeared souls.
Therefore, Whitehead also objects to the philosophical underpinning
of Einstein's general relativity, a very tricky issue.
Not relativity per se to be sure,
rather Whitehead attacks the implication
that it's topology be bound by the very particles matter, their mass
and gravity that are mere abstractions from the continuum
of events in production of a general geometry.
Third phase, this coincides with Whitehead's move to America.
Since it is known as a metaphysical phase,
one may wonder whether it constitutes a break
with the earlier development.
All the readers of Whitehead who at the time may have mistaken him
for a mere mathematician, logician, or philosopher
of science were indeed as found by his metaphysical turn.
>> They may have expected a different trajectory
because of what they believe to be the true potential
of Whitehead's work such as being explorations into logical positivism
or analytical philosophy or to simply stop reading Whitehead.
From today's perspective however,
we can better understand this conversion
as a fairly logical conclusion of Whitehead's earlier thoughts.
With his philosophical reconfigurations in place,
creative advance, extended events, abstract objects and the relation
between causality and perception, the philosophical synthesis
as critic of abstractions seems almost inevitable.
The major works of this period, Science and the Modern World,
Process and Reality, and Adventures of Ideas
like the holy triads speaks not only
to the new metaphysical method they employ and the inherent will
to create a comprehensive cosmological system
but they also precisely therefore answer the lingering metaphysical
problem inherent in the rise of modern science and philosophy
of the previous 300 hundred years.   Now Whitehead directly attacks
and systematically deconstructs the lingering scientific materialism
that was still underpinning the new physics of relativity
and was only slowly loosening its grip
on the revolutionary concepts of quantum physics.
Since this materialism interacted with modern philosophy
by isolating human subjectivity from physical reality,
its mechanism also led to the dismissal
of value creating life leaving us
with a meaningless and dull universe.
This is I think the intellectual problem to which Whitehead's letter
to Leonard that this symposium is gathered to evaluate reacts.
Whitehead's new metaphysics is a grand proposal,
a proposal that inverts the hardened oppositions
and oppressive abstractions that motivated no less than the wars
of the last centuries intellectually and socially.
Its new organic paradigm establishes itself as a series of alternatives.
Instead of invoking a ground of being,
Whitehead posits the immanence of creativity as the driving force
of the becoming of the universe.
Instead of Descartes' disconnection of extension of mind
or Spinoza's assumption of the both under a divine substance,
Whitehead proposes an open universe comprised of myriads of events
in their organizationally diverse nexuses.
Instead of adopting Leibniz's view of a preexistent
or pre-established order of this multiplicity in the mind of God,
Whitehead delegates order to the interplay of all actualities
as their decisions to realize their potentials even
if they were offered by the mind of God.
Instead of Plato's system of ideas flowing
from an essentialized structure, Whitehead insists on grounding ideas
in their relative inherence in the actual process of the cosmos
against Aristotle's isolated substances,
Hume's dreams of impressions and Leibniz's hermeticism of mentality
and physicality, Whitehead fuses all fears--
spheres in the growing together of physical and creative events.
In their momentary synthesis, the whole universe convergence
and in their surrender, it effectively releases itself again
to a transcended future beyond itself.
These alternatives again affected reversals
of the philosophical tradition while the substantialists' scheme
of the past was hounded by the division of active form
and passive matter Whitehead reverses this association, forms,
structures, patterns, characters and laws of nature are not the origin
of activity but sedimentations of the possible.
Events of becoming are not the mere realization of given forms
but the harmonization of actualities and their associated possibilities.
Potentials which Whitehead calls eternal objects are not possible
actual realities as yet unrealized or realized in an alternative world
but a vocations and invitations for creative actualization.
While Kant could not overcome the isolation of subjectivity
from physical reality Whitehead reverses the generative relations.
If subjects are effects of real objects
from which they gather themselves they become not only all relative
to the reality they gather in their process of concretization
or concrescence but also to a reality beyond themselves
in which they affect new synthesis of becoming.
In reversing the western preference of being over becoming,
Whitehead upsets also the undisputed primacy of the higher capacities
of intellect and consciousness as inherited by Descartes, Hume, Kant,
Hegel, [inaudible] and Heidegger.
With the cosmic primordiality of each event feeling its actual past
and desiring its relative possibilities intellect
in consciousness are only complex modes if they're contrasting.
T his again inverses the status of humanity in the universe instead
of disconnecting humanity from evolution
and nature Whitehead articulates its ecological trend,
a last observation.
In a quartet of books accompanying the metaphysical phase,
religion in the making, symbolism, the function of reason and modes
of thoughts, Whitehead emerges as a thinker on civilization.
He has already made his metaphysical case for the mutuality of fact
and value in all cosmic processes without any anthropocentric bias.
In these works however he demonstrates
that the factors driving the development of human existence,
aesthetics, symbolism, art, religion,
reason and social organization emerge from cosmic forces
that suggest a civilized universe as he says.
They are the excess of the creative process but must be refined in order
to contribute to the delicate aim Whitehead attributes
to the universal process as a whole, the appearance of intensifications
and harmonization within cosmic organizations.
Surveying the development of Whitehead's thought
over these 4 phases leads me to a conclusion that it was driven
by a polarity, an expansive move towards utmost metaphysical
magnitude and an inversive move toward a humble relativity
of all universal insights in the arousal of its aesthetic aim.
To estimate Whitehead's importance is an extremely delicate matter
for 3 reasons.
First, since the breadth of his vision is in--
is a comprehensive reversal of the intellectual sedimentations
of the last 300 years we may not
yet have found an excess reality to its significance.
Second, since the depth of its intuition develops considerably
over his own lifetime, any appraisal of his work is crucially limited
by the perspective from which it starts
or the phase in which it is anchored.
Third, if Whitehead's universe of thought is itself untimely,
it remains at some tension with the orthodox
as it questions the prevalent paradigms
by which it is scrutinized.
While Whitehead undertook the reshaping
of the conceptual conditions under which the scientific revolutions
of the early 20th century departed from past paradigms,
his new philosophical prospect may well be ahead of their limitations.
As Whitehead in a prophetic passage in Adventures of Ideas foresees
when one introduces relevant alternatives excluded
from physical realization one may not be appreciated.
In other words, when the virus
of novelty strikes an established organism may initiate defensive
counter measures to immunize its old ways of life.
Consider that cohabitation of mathematics
and philosophy in Whitehead's work.
Does the metaphysical phase subsume the mathematical critically
resituated or even at least partly append on its earlier preconditions.
Does the critic of the scientific, philosophical,
and religious traditions isolate it outside their sphere
or instigate a new contrast with ignored alternatives?
Does it secularize cosmological function
of God make Whitehead a dead man walking?
Given the magnitude natures declaration of the death
of God has had on the intellectual climate of the 20th century
with its two all encompassing wars
or does it harbor a viable alternative whose relevance we have
hardly understood yet?
And finally, is Whitehead's organic paradigm that finds a place
for purpose in all realms of the universe a dream of a lost time
which meaningful science and philosophy must resist
or is it the stroke of a genius that will be part
of any satisfying understanding
of the equal cosmic continuum in the future?
A certain air of surprise remains in all of its moves irrespective
of the subtle continuity found from a later standpoint
and the harvest remains ambivalent.
>> Was the principia arguably one of the most impressive works
of 20th century mathematics and logic dethroned
or its logocentrism abandoned by Whitehead's own metaphysics or not?
Is Whitehead's alternative relativity theory although it had
some currency at the time of its inception date in light
of the predictive power of Einstein's version
or is its underlying logical approach still a future project?
Was Whitehead's metaphysical term the last rearing
of a dinosaur helplessly out of sync with the pulse of post-modern times?
Or is it a subversive spark we have yet to fully grasp?
The last judgment has not yet arrived.
Whitehead's philosophy also leaves us
with a fascinating picture [inaudible] and Heidegger are taught
at the same time as Whitehead was leaving for Harvard.
Existentialism and phenomenology attacked metaphysics
as logical positivists like Karl Marx, [inaudible], Whitehead writes
when he turns to metaphysics.   Wittgenstein himself, a student
of Whitehead's colleague Russell changed the philosophic outlook
yet again just as Whitehead has found his cosmological voice.
All sides it seems of the philosophical empire took turns
in directions counter to Whitehead's intuition in turn diminishing
as a perceptivity and relativity for the case.
Alternatives of credibility, such as American pragmatism were marked
by James, Dewey, and Bergson rather that Whitehead.
Why? Because of the paradoxical nature
of his philosophical contrasts concerning this,
[inaudible] denigrated as a realm of rationalism
or alternatively unbridled fantasy Whitehead's metaphysical emphasis--
emphasizes, metaphysics emphasizes empirical endeavor like pragmatism,
interpretation like hermeneutics, decision like existentialism,
experience like phenomenology,
coherence like the analytic tradition,
symbolism like language philosophy.
Yet Whitehead subversively counters them
with equally disturbing contrasts while empirical metaphysics remain
stubbornly speculative.
While hermeneutical it remains stubbornly systematic.
While close to phenomena it resists the primacy of consciousness.
While coherent, it prioritizes life's chaotic character
over the limited instrumental usefulness of logics.
While deeply engaged with matters of language,
it insists on pre-symbolic reality.
Nevertheless, these paradoxes may prove vital embedding mathematics
and logics in the actual life of the cosmos may add an interesting voice
through the current discussion of their foundations.
Emphasizing topology may hold hidden treasures given the neutral
inconsistencies of current philosophic--
physical theories that still await a revolution
of understanding including aesthetic purpose,
my proof quite visionary given the current research
within life sciences
and ecologically imperative of our times.
Envisioning a cosmos of infinite rhythmic cycles fits well
with current concepts of eternal inflation but remains attractive
because of its impulse towards novelty.
Finally, including the sacred may prove superior
to both religious fanaticism and irreligious indifference
for a future civilization
that neglects spiritual dimension only at its own risk.
It is hard to estimate Whitehead's influence
and time forbids name dropping.
I will only allude to some examples with the flavor of the unexpected.
Who else would enjoy long walks with Whitehead than Gertrude Stein?
Who else would appear in an essay on creativity of [inaudible]?
Who could write poems on him other than Charles Olson?
Who could be spoken through the dialogue of both a dragon
and a blind priest as in John Grendel-- John Gardner's Grendel?
Whom else could Aldous Huxley have quoted in support of his hopes
for a more liberated society?
And who would we not expect to appear in the science fiction vision
of a future universe
of interconnected organisms from van Vogt's pen?
Let me in the final section risk a look into the future.
Today, Whitehead's voice is alive and it is being heard.
His work is being taken up by fellow travelers
who themselves are often visionaries creatively transforming it
in their own field or using it
to establish connections beyond classical boundaries.
Over decades Whitehead's legacy was persistently upheld
by process philosophy and process theology.
Yet it was never removed from innovative movements in education,
psychology, sociology, economics and ecology.
Its current proliferation in China in which there have been established
around 20 centers for process studies as mostly seen
by Joseph Needham in the 1950s and Whitehead's own suggestion
that his philosophy is in many regards more genuine
to Indian and Chinese thoughts.
The east-west and north-south dialogue are ingrained
in his very outlook and a fundamentally equal logical instead
of a merely logical character of his cosmology is recognized today.
Several longstanding initiatives such as the Center
for Process Studies at Claremont,
the International Whitehead Conferences held in many parts
of the world or the International Process Network facilitate
such developments.
The recent work of European Whitehead scholars has produced new
lines of research as has the Whitehead Research Project
with its international conferences and books,
its contemporary Whitehead theories and most recently
by gaining the permission of the Whitehead estate
to create the first critical edition of Whitehead's works ever.
These initiatives have again inspired interest far beyond the
sphere of just insiders.
Probably the most important event in the newer history of philosophy--
of Whitehead's philosophical reception was the untimely
and rather unexpected influence of his work
on the now famous French philosopher Gilles Deleuze.
Not only did he name process and reality,
one of the most important works in philosophy
but he united the universe with James Joyce term "chaosmos".
Such a fresh look counters a tradition that has labeled
and filed away Whitehead maybe far too early.
Even with the arrival of new philosophy
such as Bruno Latour's philosophy of cosmic communities,
the objective realism of Graham Harman
or Judith Butler's recent more ecological work the profound
paradigm shift Whitehead initiated is no longer overlooked,
rather it is recognized as part of the heritage from which they depart.
This is a new situation and indeed it can be expected
to continue to unfold.
In looking forward, what makes Whitehead's cosmology attractive
today is its vision of the future of humanity and the planet.
I will only hint at 3 perspectives.
First, it embraces the very small, the grain of reality,
and the very large, an infinite universe with organic processes
that initiate all kind of ecological rhythms at large.
This chaosmos comes forth from unimaginable pasts and ventures
into unimaginable futures.
Gathered from its becoming, we are no strangers to it but children.
Second, pervading the simplest path of the--
of empty space and the biophysical organisms building up planets
and once they harbor on their crust
like fragile form Whitehead finds an inherent eros of adventure.
Every creature is in its peculiar way responsible for its enactment.
What if the majestic laws of nature
where neither mechanical devices nor external of divine decrease,
but communal effects of a myriad of creatures,
a metrics of their passionate feeling of causality and novelty?
For Whitehead their passion expresses the presence
of an eternal tone that always incarnates itself anew
in all events and [inaudible].
This is a meaningful universe, a meaningful awe.
Its ecological depth makes us earthbound
yet its spirit opens never seizing niches of life in the midst
of all the tragedies of its perpetual perishing.
Third, invite this paradigm of experience,
all abstract opposites needs to conspire in creative becoming,
instead of seeking a world formula ala--
let's say Stephen Hawking Whitehead thoughts balances all polarities
on the pivot of poetics sharing patterning with mathematics
and also inviting our coordination of depth alongside philosophy.
>> Where both mathematics and philosophy may cling to the wonders
of their abstractions and what they can reveal,
discovering order upon order.
Poetics reminds them of the racked beauty of the multiplicity
of experiences upon experiences in which those structures are steeped.
For Whitehead, this poetics is divine and it vivifies, as he says,
the good sense which we term civilization.
Herein, I suggest lies the very reason for Whitehead's juxtaposition
of positivism and speculative metaphysics when in his letter
to Leonard, he seems distressed, even annoyed, by the very inception
of positivism, so because of the lack of imagination
and the muted sense of depth and future.
If reason becomes reduced to an is and the is to a method
of the imitation of a dreamless universe
of material particles we are left
with the lifeless logic of their mapping.
Conversely, Whitehead's end-- Whitehead ends his last book,
Modes of Thought with a very different imperative.
Only a philosophy that is sensitive to depths as
yet unspoken will allow us to maintain a social--
a novelty of fundamental ideas illuminating the social process.
No wonder then that trusty metaphysics however slight,
superficial and incomplete its insights may be is the one
presupposition for Whitehead without which there can be no civilization
because it harbors that which guides its imagination
The evil of the future, Whitehead says, is the suppression
of aesthetic creativeness.
He once confessed that he owes this insight
to the vivid life of his wife Evelyn.
This insight that as Whitehead says,
"Aesthetics is the aim of existence."
And kindness, love, and artistic satisfaction are among its molds
of attainment must be considered the very motif of Whitehead's work
and the impulse it hopes to release.
In his conversation with Charles Lindbergh, Whitehead confirms
that in the midst of the most devastating war that the very force
that alone is meant to withstand the violence or destruction
and the decline of civilized worlds is gentleness,
as it is the very force that slowly and in quietness operates
at the heart of the universe, may we nourish it.
Thank you.   [ Applause ]
[ Pause ]
>> Yeah. Thank you so very, very much.
Before we have questions and answers,
we're going to invite another speaker forward,
Dr. AbdolKarim Soroush, who will give us a--
I think I'm gonna call it a footnote, on the influence
of Whitehead and in other parts of the world.
Dr. Soroush is a well-known Iranian scholar and you have his file.
[ Pause ]
>> Okay. Good morning everybody and thank you for giving me the chance
to take you thousands of kilometers from here to Iran
and to tell you something about what's going
on in Iran nowadays about Whitehead.
I tell you my personal story which is exemplary.
I did science before I did philosophy
and when I first encountered with Whitehead was
with the Harvard Whitehead rather than the London Whitehead
as Mr. Faber actually mentioned.
Whitehead made his way into Iran through his book Adventures
and Ideas and that was the first book by him well known
and then translated with some very heavy footnotes
by one of the clerics in Iran.
And I mentioned especially clerics because he was liked and admired
by clerics because of his religious philosophy and because
of the divine spirituality which you can find in his writings.
I remember that especially I liked and others also like the phrase,
the remark by Whitehead in Adventures and Ideas
that in the modern times professors have replaced prophets.
So this dichotomy or perhaps the contrast between prophets
and professors was very illuminating of the idea and the thoughts
of Whitehead, and also mentions and explains why he was so admired
by some of members of the clerical establishment
and also some of the general readers.
Now, that was perhaps my first encounter then
when I did some philosophy of science, of course,
I came to appreciate much more Whitehead especially
when I did read his theory of relativity and his perhaps criticism
of Einstein, and of course, his anti-Wittgenstein stand,
his anti-positivism stands, and all these things are quite,
quite telling and worth reading and contemplating.
Now, I am one of the translators of Whitehead in Iran, into Persian.
I would say one of rare translators
because actually there are only people
who have translated Whitehead.
One of them is this modest gentleman here and the other one is no longer
in the world and so he lives with his God.
Now, I came across his book Science in the Modern World.
I liked it because, at that time, I was doing my philosophy-- sorry--
philosophy of science so Whitehead did give me some very creative
and imaginative ideas about science, especially what he said
about the current materialism in science and especially, I liked,
again, let us say, his discovery,
the fallacy of misplaced concreteness
which I had a hard time translating it into Persian.
And I mean, eventually, I came across a very apt, I think,
phrase in order to render it into Persian and now it is--
I am glad that it is in wide use.
And now, everybody understands what he meant by the fallacy
of misplaced concreteness and this is the fallacy
which is always committed by materialist scientists
who misplace the concreteness and who do not know
where the concreteness lies and resides.
So that was-- and then I translated one of the chapters of the Science
in the Modern World and that was the last chapter of the book
under the title Science and Religion.
Actually, I included this chapter in one of my books
which has got the same title, actually, Science and Religion,
so I though that it was most relevant to include that.
It was, again, a very, you know,
good and I would say educating addition to my book
because there actually, he mentioned that the conflict,
the conflict of science and religion is not a threat but a chance
so we have to, you know, appreciate it and to work on it,
and perhaps to forge a real relationship
and connection between-- friendly connection between science
and religion where science gives you the small picture,
religion gives you the grand picture of the universe.
And through this, you can come perhaps, to the conclusion
where to locate science within religion or side by side religion.
That was a really good vision by Mr. Whitehead which I used it
and found it quite interesting and useful, then, of course,
I did not forsake Whitehead so I continued.
And when I was in London, I came across a very good book written
by an American, Ian Barbour.   Perhaps some of you might know him.
He is a man who works and his main expertise, of course,
he's a physicist but his main expertise is on the relationship
between science and religion.
>> He has produced volumes upon volumes on the same subject
and he shows that it's quite, quite familiar with the ideas
in philosophy of science and of course in science and so on.
One of his earlier books is Issues in Science and Religion and that's--
I took it with me to Iran.
That was in 1980, roughly, yes, 1980.
And I found a very good translator.
And the book was translated into Persian,
one of the best translations, a very good chapter
on Whitehead you can find in this book under the title
of Process Philosophy or Process Spirituality, something.
So there you find, you know, a very good exposition
of the process philosophy of Whitehead together with the ideas
of Ian Barbour and some Whiteheadians,
of course, here in America.
So that was a very good introduction,
much better than the previous works on Whitehead in Iran,
and I think now through this book people come to realize
and to appreciate more and more the ideas of Whitehead.
Again, I did some other things and that was then I, again,
found the book by Arthur Bert [phonetic], one of the professors
on history of philosophy in Colorado University.
The book is written in 1930s and the author is a rather obscure one,
but the book is one of the classics on the history
of philosophy of science.
The book's title is Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science.
There actually he mentions Whitehead.
In actually two different context--
in the first context is that Whitehead does not take history
of science seriously and because of that, there are flaws
in his philosophy when he speaks about science, and then he goes
on and, of course, after a while he corrects himself and says "Now,
Mr. Whitehead is taking history of science into account
and that makes his philosophy more complete
and more serious according to him.
Because Arthur Bert, actually, you know,
he thinks that Newton is the Aristotle of the modern time
and so unless you know and you understand Newton and his place
in history of science, you will not be able
to understand neither the modern science nor the modern philosophy.
Therefore, in order to understand it, you have to go, you know,
deeply in the history of science and he thinks
that Whitehead's philosophy is a philosophy which is blind
to history, and being blind to history is a deep, deep,
flaw and a shortcoming and which is quite, quite right.
And then, as I said, he said that now, Whitehead is coming
to be analyze and to understand the value of history
and then his philosophy now is becoming better and better.
Actually, that was the last thing I did
on Whitehead translating the book by Arthur Bert
and on the process philosophy, but I must admit, you know,
these are my last remarks that I found Whitehead a very hard thinker
and especially his language is impenetrable.
If you, I mean, read his Gifford lectures.
It's virtually incomprehensible.
I personally cannot, you know, make much from what he says.
His Adventures of Ideas is for the general reader,
his Science in the Modern World is for the general reader,
let alone his Principia Mathematica and so on which no longer--
nobody, I think, reads it except the historians of logic,
historians of mathematics.
And I would say that Bertrand Russell,
the co-author of the Principia Mathematica is much,
much more invoked in Iran and in whole Islamic world,
not because of his important ideas but because of his heretical ideas,
and his heresies are so dear to the heart of the Muslims
and the religious people who would like to see the ideas of others,
of the outsiders, let us say, and especially the irritating language
of Bertrand Russell when he speaks about religion, about God,
about why he was not a Christian and so on, and so forth.
So his books makes it, you know, a better reading than Whitehead who is
so concise and even-- you see, in the letter he has written
to Leonard that, you know, he makes use of expressions and remarks
which you have to have a deep knowledge of his philosophy in order
to understand what he says in such a short letter.
So may God bless his soul and God bless you, and thank you all.
Thank you for everything.   [ Applause ]
[ Inaudible Remarks ]
>> The floor is open for questions and comments.
Yes sir?   [ Inaudible Remark ]
>> Oh, I'm sorry.
I should have asked you to wait for the microphone.
Oh okay. We have multiple helpers now.
Over here.   >> Oh, here.
[ Laughter ]   >> Oh, here.
[ Laughter ]   >> My question is for you 2.
You made a passing remark about Whitehead and Einstein.
I'm just asking for an elaboration of Whitehead's critique of Einstein.
>> Well, is that working or--   [ Inaudible Remark ]
>> Okay. So I guess, basically, Whitehead was very much concerned
with relativity theory and early quantum physics,
and this is a matter of research how far
that really goes whether he left off later on or not on that matter.
But from-- so he was always kind of--
there was almost this differentiation between the kind
of scientific approach or the formulization of things
and the philosophic conditions under which they are done.
And his kind of criticism was that we have--
so his criticism of history, I in this sense do not agree that--
I don't know at which point Whitehead was interested in history,
he was meticulously interested in history at least
in his later works they are all historical working through history
in this sense if that was the context?
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah. That the revolutions of modern science and in particular,
relativity theory, were kind
of overcoming the early philosophical conditions of Newton
and other ones under which they have formulated the understanding
of the cosmos, right?
As the basic concept of meta particles and other things,
how the universe works together and how it can be abstracted
in mathematical formula and so on.
And he found that modern science was actually giving us a way
for philosophy to catch up, so to say, in a certain way if we could,
at the same time, also criticize the conditions
under which itself still was bound to the old philosophical concepts
so there was something new but it was still underpinned
by old philosophical concepts, and I guess this was more
or less the point where he criticized Whitehead's relativity
theory to be still in a certain--
with preconditions which are not fitting the new situation
that it actually opens up.
It's the relativity that it opens actually up.
So in concrete-- I mean there are a lot of discussions around how
that is actually working out.
His formula he came up with on relativity was quite similar
and there were early tests that kind of seemed
to say the classical tests are passing so it's like--
it gets the same expressions,
but he wants to say I can make it much more easier,
the formula is actually easier, it makes a more concrete way
to articulate what Einstein made complicated which is mathematics.
>> And later on, there were other tests which showed
that there are actually not-- certain tests would not be--
modern test would not possible between--
after the classical tests were passed.
And so there is a kind of division whether
in what sense Whitehead's formula actually mathematically
and physically can be tested and hold up, and this is an--
I would say on the one hand a closed discussion
but on the other hand we do find, you know, restatements of that.
Now the-- one or two of the basic kind of visions that Whitehead had,
why he thought that was complicated or problematic in Einstein,
was that he thought that the mathematics that formulates itself
from mathematical points can-- is actually already an abstraction
of a concrete universe that is always extended,
and this extension produces a geometry that is so to say
in a cosmos-- in a cosmos because he knows there are, you know,
there could be different cosmic [inaudible] or different universes,
formulates a very basic geometry.
And how can it be that particles of matter with their mass
and so on can curve space time?
So the geometry, if the geometry is more basic than these particles
of matter, this was one of the unsolved problems that he saw,
that the abstract can actually create the concrete.
That's his basic problem so to say.   [ Pause ]
>> So with these wonderful representations,
we've heard a couple of examples from each of the speakers one
by Professor Faber about China
and you said there is a Process Studies there and Professor Soroush
of the Iranian connection.
So there are these possible bridges between cultures or examples
of them, I'd like perhaps each of the speakers to comment
on the potential of Whiteheadian thought
>> Well, as far as I can gather,
I mean Whitehead also although was somehow influential in the past
in the-- I mean before the Islamic revolution in Iran.
After the revolution, I think he has fallen into oblivion, if you like,
although as I said, I mean some clerics are more interested
in his works, some of the religious people rather than scientists.
So among scientists perhaps he doesn't have a reputation
or rather a good reputation and even then you, you know,
you do philosophy of logic seldom I have heard anybody mentioned name
of Whitehead and his contribution to Principia Mathematica.
And Frege for example is invoked and is in very good reputation
and even sometimes Bertrand Russell, and most of his books are translated
into Persian, the heretical ones, the scientistic ones,
the philosophical ones and so on.   But Whitehead apart from the bits
and pieces I mentioned here is no longer there.
Actually, before this I mentioned to Carolyn
that these meetings now encourages me to suggest to some
of my Iranian colleagues, perhaps to hold a seminar on Whitehead
and perhaps to bring to the attention of especially the students
who do not know much of him to, you know, have an idea and perhaps
to go back to his books and now that I hear the good news
that the whole series of his work is being reedited, you know so,
and this makes available his thoughts.
Unfortunately, I have not been able to find any traces of Whitehead
in the Islamic world worldwide, you know?
I am not sure how much and how he has been received
by other Muslim countries
and how much his philosophy has been influential among others.
Perhaps that might be a subject of another study which I have to do
and perhaps I have-- perhaps I reported
in the next meeting here or elsewhere.
But his understanding of God, you know, which is an evolving god
which flies into the face of the traditional god
which is not an evolving god, it's a constant god, a fixed god,
if you like a god which does not change,
a god which is absolutely perfect and there is no more perfection
to be gained by God, so this is a matter of concern for Muslims,
for perhaps Christians, for Jews and so on.
So His divinity is a special divinity and reconciling His divine
with the Islamic divine
or with Christian divine is a little bit different--
difficult, and Mr. Ian Barbour who tried to, you know,
invoke the Whiteheadian god, you know, has taken, you know,
a very difficult job and that is out of the necessity of bringing
in science and in order to have science and evolution together
with God so he could not do with the constant god therefore he actually
had to bring in a god which is evolving all the time
and does not have all perfections at hand so he is no--
making himself more perfect.   So this is as far as I can say.
>> There's a Pakistani, very famous philosopher--
[ Inaudible Remark ]   >> Akbar, who was kind of a--
>> A little--   [ Inaudible Remark ]
>> More on the Bergson influence than Whitehead but,
yes, he mentions Whitehead.
>> I do have some Islamic students and we have some especially
from Turkey who are trying to engage with Whitehead even
in his theological thinking in relation to Islam actually.
So where probably there's a connection for them is
that it is quite easy from Sufi-influenced metaphysics to talk
about the becoming universe that--
that is the connection less than the god problem.
[ Inaudible Remark ]   >> Yeah, yes, yes, yeah.
So I guess really one of the basic problems is the question
of reading Whitehead for how they make an impact
in a certain culture or not.
You see, as originally and with my mother tongue speaking German I
should say to retackle and [inaudible] should be easier for me
than for you to do it English but I can tell you to read them
in English is easier than to read them in German.
So sometimes reading the translations are helping
to reduce the heavy loads, it's a filter, right?
So it's even easier maybe to read them
in other languages at first, right?
If you get to the original text then they become extremely complicated
because all the feelings of what their language means
and how they formulate that bring concepts together is much
more complicated.
So mostly it begins with the translation of Whitehead somewhere
and it's interesting that there are still ongoing translation projects
so we have at least two sets of translations in China
and every translator says about the other has a bad translation,
which is good so you get differences and read all of them, kind of.
We do have specially research and since you want true translations
in Eastern Europe, in Poland and Hungary for many, you know,
10 to 15 years already and Romania and other countries
which is quite interesting.
There was a long tradition of Whitehead
and the text were always available in the German-speaking world
and so there was a thorough going tradition from the late '50s
in philosophy with a small group that was still--
was present all the time.
There was an established Whitehead tradition that's different
from the American one.
It was not influenced by [inaudible] thinking for instance
or free of it, kind of thing.
And that is again coming back today with, I think, major interest
so Whitehead was included also in conferences,
in Berlin for instance several years ago.
Creativity there was not really to Whitehead at all but they said, "Ah,
Whitehead creativity, that's an important thing."
So there is a kind of virus.   It is different in French language.
It was a long, long time that Whitehead was not translated
in France so people had to read it in the original
and I can imagine Gilles Deleuze reading it in English
and then he didn't probably like to do it at all,
because it was not present so it is still ongoing
that you get all the texts there.
Much-- so today this is the most lively, I guess in Europe,
is the French speaking area right now.
>> But in Spanish today or even
in Portuguese you find virtually nothing and/or it's kind
of there's-- it's gone.
In a sense there were translations, the same is true
for Southern America, it has to be reinvigorated by translators, right?
So they have to either republish old translations
or become translators again or they like English, right?
It's the easiest way to get to it as in certain areas of Africa,
Central Africa where Whitehead is present in universities
where they read English and not French for instance,
right or speak in the sense?
I think one of the-- to mention China again the more interesting
thing is not science, Whitehead and science
but it's Whitehead and education.
So he kind of has taken over certain educational issues
since his early days in Cambridge especially
for instance you will think women's education
that they get the same rights at the university was really a problem.
He was sitting up on such panels fighting for that
and he was mentioning that it was not only once that he got oranges
and eggs thrown at him for things like this.
So he had a political stance and education became important in London
where he took over a post as a dean and was engaged in education
for London, the greater London and so on and wrote
about education a lot and so China kind of develops--
asks the questions of how can we resituate
for a new ecological future?
And Whitehead comes to mind and has a certain currency right there.
And they come here too to Claremont for instance in regular conferences,
public official of states, all of the government to kind
of learn something about that.   So there's an interesting kind of--
it's neither philosophical nor theological it's nothing nor
scientific but it's more about how do we figure
out a new ecological civilization.   [ Inaudible Remark ]
>> I see no immediate question, I'm gonna ask a question of my own.
It has always seemed to me that Chinese civilization
from its earliest periods, and I'm thinking I guess especially
of Daoism and not the Confucian strand
but the Daoist strand has premised becoming as opposed to being.
And if you just think of the very familiar Daoist notion of Yin Yang
and turning into one another.
It's a little different from what you're talking about
but there's a fundamental notion of becoming as primary and I think
when you get to Neo-Confucianism which then begins to incorporate--
figure out how to incorporate the Daoist perspective
and then the impact to Buddhism, that notion of becoming becomes--
is extended into the human realm I think,
tell me if I've got this right.   But my-- I was guessing from that.
Oh and then, another little small connection, it's my understanding
that some of the Chinese thinking about process as fundamental entered
into Europe through Leibniz coming from Jesuits in Beijing.
So I'm wondering even though as you said in China the interest
in Whitehead seems to be focused in arenas of education
and ecological understanding of the world,
if there isn't a fundamental compatibility that's built
into the very-- may be unspoken premises of least strong strands
of Chinese thinking and if you-- what do make of that?
Or any-- well [laughs], does anyone make anything of it?
[ Laughter ]   >> Well--
>> Oh, good.
>> Shall I say-- I mean just a few things.
You know, there is a very well known philosopher
in Iran whose name is Shirazi and he lived about 400 years ago
under this-- in the Safavid period and he is, I mean by far,
perhaps the most prominent philosopher in Iran and perhaps
in all Islamic world compared to Ibn Sina, Avicenna and others.
Now, one of his main perhaps discoveries in philosophy,
I have written a whole book on this particular discovery,
is the philosophy of substantial change and, you know,
my book title is The Restless Nature of Universe.
So this actually tells you a lot about the nature and the spirit
of his philosophy, The Restless Nature of Universe.
There, actually, he mentions I mean in, you know, and he argues,
you know, in metaphysical and philosophical terms
about the restless nature and the becoming which is inherent in being.
So from that point of view it makes it somehow, you know,
a cousin of Chinese philosophy and to some extent, you know,
I think is closed to Whiteheadian process philosophy,
although Whitehead did not perhaps like his metaphysics,
I mean metaphysics of Shirazi,
because his metaphysics is very Aristotelian rather than Platonic.
And as Faber actually mentioned that he was fond
of Plato, I mean that's Whitehead.   >> Right, Ron?
[ Inaudible Remark ]   >> Yeah. Would you wait for the mic?
Here comes [inaudible] with the mic.   >> Thank you.
I'd like to make a little comment in respect to Carolyn's question.
The Chinese I can tell you right now are translating Professor Chen Gong
from the Beijing University of Science
and Technology is translating this letter from Whitehead
to Professor Leonard's father and publications will occur.
I spoke about this letter in a seminar in November that went
into theoretical physics not just theory of education or ecology.
I also have some friends from the Chinese Academy of Particle Physics,
high-energy physicists, and low-energy physicists who worked
at Brookhaven, who worked in Brookhaven National Laboratory,
who worked in MIT with Professor Ting,
a Nobel Prize winning particle physicist
and also spent the decade in CERN.
The interesting thing when I described the implications
of Whitehead's philosophy to a theoretical physics
and particle physics, I remember Professor saying this is exactly the
way I've been thinking.
So the resonance of Whitehead's thought to traditional mode
of Chinese thinking and especially if you correctly say Carolyn,
Daoism with the sense of integration [inaudible] is a kinship that's felt
in theoretical physics in the center for--
the International Center for Process Science, Philosophy
and Education we have members who are Chinese physicists.
And so I think this point that you make is very valid,
it comes from Whitehead's own intuition but it's extending
into the realm of pure science
and I believe cosmology as well as ontology.
>> Second part of the morning's program is to--
I think you're in middle there, to have several scholars reflect
on different aspects of Whitehead's thought and legacy.
To take the conversation a little deeper
in certain particular areas both scholarly and in some cases personal
and each speaker will speak
for 10 minutes then the second three will come forward.
There wasn't enough room to have everybody
up here all at the same time.
And then we will do questions and answers after that.
>> And I do want to thank our two photographers,
Jim Piper a secret Whitehead scholar, we didn't--
I didn't know about 'til recently and then Abby Brack
from the Public Affairs Office.
So, our first-- I didn't bring my crib sheet
but the first speaker knows who he is, so if you would-- George, okay.
>> Good Morning.   [ Pause ]
>> Alright, I'll do this from the podium.
Thanks. And, put a watch where I could see it so I don't go over,
Carolyn made it very clear that we would be dispatched summarily
in good military fashion, pushed off the sea wall,
hung from the yard arms, or shot to death
if we went over our 10 minutes.
I'm supposed to speak on the Whitehead and Wittgenstein
and I really wanna offer a few informal comments
that a really mostly personal.
It says something there also about ethics
and I won't say anything about ethics.
That's my vocation now.
I teach ethics, I have a chair in what is called the Stockdale Center
at the Naval Academy as well as ethics in public policy
at the Naval Post Graduate School at Monterey.
And I mentioned that only because sadly the opportunity to talk
about Whitehead, think about process philosophy is more of an avocation
in those situations than a vocation so it's a great privileged even
to be included in this very distinguished group
at this very special occasion.
And I'll try not to rain on the parade.
I don't want you to think that Carolyn and Tim ended
up inviting the Grinch or Eeyore to come and speak
but after the beautiful eloquent opening address by Roland Faber
on Whitehead's importance, his significance, the discussion of him
as a cultural bridge connecting not only cultures
but different faiths I tend or where others are exuberant
about these things, to be melancholy.
And when others look the tremendous influence that Whitehead has,
I lament in good Eeyorean fashion.
The decline of disappearance of Whitehead among the communities
of scholars in whom he was most interested and engaged himself.
Of that decline, I'd sight two disturbing examples
that I deeply regret and present very much,
first there's only one graduate program,
a PhD program in philosophy left in the country where someone can go
and study Whitehead that is PhD philosophy program and that is due
to the presence of my former graduate student,
Judith Jones at Fordham University, a shadow of its former self
and it was there at Fordham that she herself mentored a student,
a young colleague, Bryan Penning who together with Roland
that their efforts have brought
about this Whitehead research project and the collected edition
of Whitehead's works that Roland mentioned towards the end
of his talk and that's wonderful but that's not enough.
It's hardly the critical mass we need and when you look
at the other great programs in the past, Harvard, Yale, Emery, Chicago,
Texas, they no longer have Whitehead scholars nor did they have any
intentions as far as I know to replace them.
Even more poignant for me working as I do with naval personnel
who are deeply enamored of the legacy
of Vice Admiral James B. Stockdale the Navy's main philosopher.
Where are the Phil Rhinelanders?
Phil Rhinelander was a very eminent interpreter
of Whitehead at Stanford University.
He is also a Dean of the graduate program, the graduate studies the
and it was he who mentored the young Lieutenant Commander Stockdale
when he came to take his degree in international relations and ended
up doing independent studies and philosophy with Phil Rhinelander,
where are we going to get people like that now who have
such a tremendous influence far outside the fields
of philosophy alone?
So, I tend in my old age to look at these things and lament them rather
than celebrate them and wonder, you know, what will become of us.
Another example, some years ago, I did an accreditation site visit
from a Department of Education licensed accrediting institution
to the University of London's external program.
It's a very eminent program.
Nelson Mandela got his degree while in prison in South Africa.
He got a lot of degree from the external program
at the University of London.
Mohandas Gandhi is an alumnus or was an alumnus.
It's a pretty good program and it has this interesting legacy
of bringing together all the campuses at the University of London
who otherwise had very little to do with one another,
deeply proud of their own traditions and, you know,
disdainful of their colleagues in the other campuses as I said
in my report to the department, the University of London is a hole
which is considerably less than the sum of its parts.
One of those very eminent parts along with London School
of Economics and Jeremy Bentham's University College is the Imperial
College of Science and Technology and indeed I took this task on,
kind of thankless accreditation task because it would give me chance
to go to this place that Whitehead served as dean for most
of the useful years of his career.
Most of the-- what have been sort of most productive years
in any ordinary person's career were spent at--
as their first dean taking what had been really founded to serve
as a grimy, grubby, urban polytechnic institute
to teach vocational studies to the lesser classes and lifting it up to
that vision of education that we find so eloquently portrayed
in his essay on the aims of education much later.
That vision of liberal education that transforms the vocations
from merely the grimy, grubby, pursuit of technique
into ennobling professions in their own right, we know from the letters
that we did have, the few from Whitehead during this time,
that this was a very difficult task for him and it took a lot of energy
and time, burdens of administrative duties while trying to carry
on a useful program of scholarship, some of the highlights of which,
again Professor Faber mentioned in his eloquent address.
But those all came at a terrible personal price and it was
for that reason that Whitehead was so eager essentially
to shake the dust from his feet and turn his back on his native land
at the relatively advanced stage of 63, I say as I approach
that age myself, and leave his native land and come
to United States and accept this position at Harvard
which had last gave him the opportunity to indulged
in his scholarly interest unfettered
by the crushing administrative burdens
that he had faced at the Imperial College.
Well, that piece of the history is probably well known
to you though perhaps not portrayed in so grim a fashion as I just have,
what I think is disappointing is to go back there
and find there is no portrait, there is no bust, there is no sense
of the legacy of this man who built the college into one
of the premiere scientific
and technological institutions in the world today.
I think Whitehead deserves a great deal of credit for that
but no credit to my knowledge is given to him
in his native land or in this place.
There is a library dedicated to his friend, Lord Haldane in which some
of Whitehead's books are to be found but there is no--
at least I was unable to find in my visit there any mention
of the history of the school that mentioned Alfred North Whitehead
and his pioneering work to build the institution that it is today.
Well, I could go on and I can't go on or Carolyn is gonna do me in.
I'm supposed to talk about Wittgenstein and the donation
of this letter and Professor Henry's own comments about his father's work
on Whitehead on logical positivism.
I remember looking at that when I was interested in Wittgenstein,
a logical positivist myself.
And I'm embarrassed to say, I can't remember the thrust and the details
of the paper and I had no idea who it was or who I was reading.
It was just some other author
who have thought deeply about these questions.
But I think I recall either the phrase or at least the though
that this relentlessly narrow and destructive dialectic
of logical positivism would end up obscuring the very real
and important areas of common interest problems of common concern
that Whitehead shared with his predecessor and colleagues
in that field including Wittgenstein and would end
up marginalizing the broader and more profound interest
of Whitehead the philosopher
and I fear that's exactly what come to pass.
In my own work on Whitehead and Wittgenstein subsequently, you know,
Wittgenstein Congress outside of Vienna in 1994, I was invited only
because I had written on Whitehead, Hegel, analytic philosophy
and the history of process thought and ways that seemed useful
to the conference organizers, [inaudible] and others
who were interested in Wittgenstein and the legacy
of 20th century British philosophy.
>> Well I pointed out there that Whitehead, Whitehead's process
and reality in particular had appeared
at a time roughly equivalent to the appearance of being in time
and Wittgenstein's Tractatus so we had Heidegger, Wittgenstein,
and Whitehead all sort of a triumvirate.
I didn't include Husserl as Professor Faber did today.
I still haven't made up my mind where he belongs in this
but that was a useful triumvirate because the other two,
one representing continental thinking,
the other British analytic tradition even though carried
up by an Austrian engineer had turned their backs on the sort
of thing that Whitehead was doing and so it was interesting
to consider whether theirs was the harbinger of the age and the future
or whether this legacy that Whitehead represented,
the grand tradition of philosophical speculative thought would emerge one
day again as carrying that tradition forward for the future.
The other historical observation I made since there was very little
to work with other than the fact that Wittgenstein had dinner
at the Whitehead's a couple of times and certainly commented
on the principia from time to time.
He really didn't have much to do with or have much in the way
of influence of Whitehead so what was one to do
at a conference like this?
Well I'll talk about what had happened subsequently
to Wittgenstein as well as to Russell
and more alongside Whitehead.
All four of them were the great founding figures of what came
to be known as the 20th century tradition of analytic philosophy
and interestingly enough that was a tradition that in the subtitle
of my talk which was the critique of enlightenment
and the question concerning metaphysics.
That was an enlightenment project.
It carried on that grand tradition of looking for perfection
and progress in the form in the 20th century of looking for precision,
exactness, and lack of ambiguity.
To think not only of the Tractatus but also of the search
for protocol language and the pricipia itself,
all of these were projects designed to try and delve and plum the depths
of things and bring analytic rigor to them,
that here to for have been lacking and remove questions
of ambiguity and unclarity.
And all of those thinkers in various ways turned their backs
on that project over the course of their careers.
Wittgenstein followed more retreating
into the ambiguities and--
of ordinary language and turned his back
on the project of the Tractatus.
Whitehead of course, we know attributed most of that work,
I think falsely to Russell but he himself later said the exactness
of logic is a fake and it is more interesting that--
it is more important
that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.
And it's very hard to understand utterances of a person
who had the kind of background Whitehead had an influence he had
unless one sees all of these figures as subsequently
as they did Russell the last of them and took him and told
to the 1940s before he gave up on his project and his anger
at Wittgenstein is well known over this.
Mr. Wittgenstein has coming to think that the utterances
of everyone are meaningful except philosophers.
It was one of his famous quotes denouncing the sub--
the later Wittgenstein's work with language.
And yet, one wonders why did they do that?
What was it that led them back?
Led I say by Whitehead in the end and at the very tale had Russell
who finally turns to a kind of having made fun of James as well.
William James most of his life and James in neutral monism
as a metaphysical position that he thinks most in keeping
with that picture of the world that Whitehead was trying to sketch
so difficultly and-- at such difficulty in process in reality.
Russell himself comes to that view and-- but only much later.
I think there is something to be said
for understanding the continuity and the conversation
that Whitehead was involved in and carried
on with his colleagues in contemporaries.
And the way in which that concept-- sorry, that conversation evolved,
if we were to understand what are otherwise lamentably obscure words
like process reality and understand what the project was Whitehead was
trying to carry out to give a sketch,
a picture in this famous distinction that Wittgenstein makes
between what can be said and what can only be shown to show
in words what can only be shown in process and reality,
what the world must be like, what the entities in that world must be
like if all we know from our understanding relativity physics,
quantum mechanics, and evolution are true.
I think it's a brilliant achievement and we haven't fully understood yet
or grasped its significance and I hope that day will come when we do.
Thank You.   [ Applause ]
>> I just noticed that my attempt to opposed being
on a flexibility universe,
I've mixed up the panel members a little bit and we're
in the wrong order but why don't we proceed and just know that the flux
of the universe has had the last laugh, so Derek.
[ Pause ]
>> But I have a couple of pieces of good news for George
that may lift his spirits.
There is a new PhD program in process though
at the Claremont School of Theology PhD in Process Thought.
So that's happy and I actually participated in October
in a symposium at the University of Chicago on process political theory.
So, some green shoots perhaps.
I've been asked to speak about the relationship
between Whitehead's thought and that
of the great [inaudible] philosopher Immanuel Kant.
And this topic seems to me to be especially appropriate in relation
to the Leonard letter because the problematic intellectual negations
of logical positivism have as their--
as one as their key intellectual antecedents Kant's central theoretic
notion of the noumenon, that is the concept of the unknowable
which Kant associates with the objects
of traditional metaphysical analysis.
Yet for Kant, this is a negation that is made as a gesture
of humility, epistemic humility.
Whereas as Whitehead indicates in the Leonard letter,
the logical positivist come eventually to wield this negation
as an arrogant dismissal of all other approaches to philosophy
and the analysis of human experience,
Wittgenstein annoys me intensely to I have to say.
Moreover, Whitehead viewed logical positivism's rejection
of metaphysical inquiry as a covert form of anti-rationalism and so far
as it entails the denial
of inescapable practical presuppositions of human experience
and it is worth noting that Whitehead's insistence
that philosophy take seriously
such inescapable practical presuppositions, aligns in a way
with Kant's use of practical reason.
Yet, Kant employs this notion of that which we inevitably
and inescapably presuppose in our living as a way
around his own prohibition against inquiry into the true nature
of things and thereby introduces an irrationalism into his own theory,
a tension in fact between the theoretical and the practical.
Whereas Whitehead seeks to resolve such tension by using the criterion
of practical necessity to cleanse philosophy of those abstractions
and sensibilities that had grown up over the preceding 300 years
that had divorced intellectual analysis from intuition and feeling.
Whitehead I believe considered Kant one
of his most important historical interlocutors.
At the end of the chapter in process and reality titled from Descartes
to Kant, Whitehead invokes Kant's recognition of the relationship
between the epistemic constitution, the constitution as a knower
and a believer and as an experience right,
more fundamentally for Whitehead.
An epistemic constitution of the subject and the ordering
of the external world in a deeply appreciative way in summing
up the trajectory of thought that culminates
in Kant's transcendental idealism
and framing Whitehead's own crucial discussion
of what he calls the subjectivist principle in the following chapter.
Whitehead writes "We have now come to Kant, the great philosopher
who first fully and explicitly introduced
into philosophy the conception of an active experience
as constructive functioning, transforming subjectivity
into objectivity and objectivity into subjectivity.
The order is immaterial in comparison with the general idea."
Of course, Kant presupposes and by the way I should say,
forgive me in 10 minutes to say anything about two figures as dense
and obscure as Kant and Whitehead is difficult, I may be dense
and obscure myself a bit in the next paragraph or so
but I'll unpack it later if you ask questions.
Kant presupposes the long-standing Aristotelian ontology
of enduring substances.
In his account of subjectivity, things never change
through time really they just sort of undergo appearances of change
for Kant whereas Whitehead shifts to a serially-ordered ontology,
and therefore conception of personhood.
For Kant ontologically speaking, the self is a static thing
that endures unchanging through time
and time itself is ultimately unreal for Kant.
>> For Whitehead-- at least in our empirical observation,
for Whitehead each moment
of the self's existence is in effect a new self.
A sui generis self-created entity related to its personal antecedents
and descendants that is its past and future instances of itself.
By threads of shared character with temporality understood
as a fundamental element of reality as such Whitehead's understanding
of the metaphysically basic character of subjective freedom
that is the expression of creativity in the formation
of the actual occasion's subjective aim.
That is its goal for itself
as it becomes is substantive rather than merely formal.
Indeed, creativity is and Whitehead put's this in a discussion
of Aristotle at the beginning of process and reality.
Creativity is the ontological substance of the becoming event.
He put this in replacement of Aristotle's Prima Materia.
For Whitehead agrees with Plato and Locke
that to be an actual individual is to exercise power.
There can be no merely passive or purely receptive actuality
and for Whitehead this point further implies that to choose is
to exert an influence on the character
and constitution of one's environment.
It is to do real work in the world, to reshape in accordance
with one's choice and in proportion to the efficacy
of that choice the conditions of reality as related to the context
and scope of the choice at hand.
Certainly, receptivity is involved in the process of choosing,
the agent, the self, must chose from some given set
of possible alternatives for it
and on Whitehead's account these alternatives are apprehended
by the becoming subject as elements in the many which are the received--
what he call superjective environmental conditions
that are presented to the emergent subject
through the efficient causal efficacy
of the past agents whose own choices have defined the environmental
context of the congressing subjects alternatives for self realization.
But even this receptive aspect
of the subjects becoming is not wholly passive,
for the subject actively represents to itself this many as a function
of its very subjectivity which is emergent from
but definitively not identical to the objectivity
of its antecedent causal circumstances.
There is no determinism here for Whitehead, right?
The changes that happened temporarily are real.
To be clear, this is not representation
in the sense developed in the work of Descartes,
Locke and other pre Kantian representational lists
who Kant takes to task in Critique of Pure Reason
but rather representation in the sense that one finds under the label
of synthesis in Kant's treatment of the spontaneous unity
of transcendental apperception
in his great work The Critique of Pure Reason.
As a function that is this synthesis is a function of the activity
of the faculty of understanding and the constitution
of the individual's experience
and in an important sense therefore is the constitutive faculty
of the individual's personhood as such to have or rather to be a self,
Kant tells us, is to actively synthesize, that is to represent
to oneself the data of one's experience.
The data floods in but you have to make it your own, right?
You have to put your own perspective to it for it to be the data
of yourself, of your personal experience.
The first thing to observe is that for Kant and Whitehead this activity
of synthesis or Kant presents that constitutes the emerging unity
of personal experience
for the subject is [inaudible] the intersection of ontological
and epistemic conditions of selfhood
at which personal freedom is located.
For Kant the transcendental synthesis affected
by the understanding necessarily functions in accordance
with the universal and deterministic laws
of empirical advance as he calls them.
However, as a transcendental function
of human subjectivity this synthesis is also by definition an activity
of noumenal self, the soul
as the transcendental object grounding the possibility
of subjectivity which again by definition cannot be conceived
of in terms of any dependence upon the laws
that regulate merely apparent that is empirical, temporal objects.
In other words, there is bifurcation in Kant between the noumenal
and the empirical self and it's at this bifurcated point
that personal freedom is introduced in coherently.
Indeed, it seems to me that Kant is somewhat unreflectively developing
the fundamental underpinnings for the ontology
of serial awarded selfhood, the probable course that he fails
to perceive the full implications this potentially epic making shift
and therefore attempts to graft it on to and--
graph this revolutionary insight
about the self-constructive character of each moment
of subjectivity onto a traditional and enduring substance conception
of the noumenal self and thus his system lapses into incoherence.
So Whitehead-- so Kant gives us a serially ordered phenomenology
with an enduring substance ontology and it remained therefore
for Whitehead to recognize and develop the full implications
of Kant's insight in process and reality.
Whiteheads saw clearly that freedom or more precisely creativity
as he terms it must be eminent within rather than transcended
of the temporal order of subjective experience.
This is why Whitehead's insistence on the substantive character
of the act of creativity as constitutive of the actuality
of the concresent subject as that which is required
to manifest an abstract determinant possibility for the self
in the concrete superjective determination that it makes
as itself creates that is why this is so crucial
to the ultimate coherence of the account of creaturely freedom
that Whitehead develops and here I think lies the primary resource
that Whitehead offers to contemporary theology going back
to the problems that were mentioned in the first panel.
The incoherence of the notion of divine omnipotence
and omnicausality is it's worked
out in traditional Abrahamic monotheism, I think is insoluble.
Whitehead saw that clearly and he revised his understanding of God
and of the self precisely in order to rescue the notion
that the self is a free independent locus of power related to God
but not deterministically ruled over by God as despot.
Thanks.   [ Applause ]
>> Well, first I want to say that George's comment,
I think strikes all of us with its truth because no one
who have been steered by Whitehead's adventure
in speculative philosophy can
in Whitehead's terminology perceive these objective antecedent events
without the form, the subjective form of lamentation.
But I also will add when we had the first conference on Whitehead
in China in the third millennium I wrote a poem, Cosmology.
And within that poem there's a stanza, "To wait for but a century
as Buck did, what is that to truth and beauty?"
So, let me begin on my remarks please.
I also want to thank Professor Leonard for his donation
of this rare and historically significant letter
from the great mathematician, mathematical logician,
and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, to his father--
to who he his father Henry F. Leonard who had the unique privilege
of serving as Whiteheads personal assistant during the period
in which Whitehead's philosophy found its most mature
and comprehensive expression culminating
in the magnum opus process in reality and other signature work
such as Adventures of Ideas.
As Victor Lowe, Whitehead's biographer
and Professor Leonard Sr. classmate at Harvard knew it was to Henry
to whom Whitehead would most openly and explicitly express his appraisal
of the tendencies in philosophy which ran contrary
to Whitehead's endeavors [inaudible] to philosophy.
>> Lowe sort to obtain this letter from Professor Richard Redner,
Chairman of the Philosophy Department of Washington University
who for a time held the letter and he also sought it
from Priscilla Leonard, Professor Leonard's wife.
While Priscilla could not put her hands on the letter she recall
to Lowe that the charm and the wit
with which Whitehead described contending schools
of thought made Henry laugh whenever he reread the letter.
The letter has a rare fusion of caustic tone and witty charm.
This was so atypical of Whitehead whose kind
and gentle soul touched so many people.
But it manifested the intensity of Whitehead's perception
of the sterilizing consequences of those modes of thought
which suppressed inquiry wonder and the spirit of adventure.
Whitehead found in Henry S. Leonard more
than in any other eminent student in Cambridge, London or Harvard,
a kindred spirit who integrated a love
of mathematical, logic, and metaphysics.
It is worthy to know that Whitehead and Leonard served as presidents
of the American Philosophical Association.
Leonard is also regarded as father of the mathematical field
of Mariology through his work with Nelson Goodman on The Calculus
of Individuals that work represents a development of Whitehead's method
of extensive abstraction and its relation--
in its study of the relation between wholes and parts
and the relations of parts within wholes.
During his 10 year at Harvard, Leonard was Whitehead's student
and then his personal assistant.
Leonard was also a student and later a friend
of the modal logician CI Lewis.
At the Princeton Institute of Advance Studies,
Leonard spent two years working
with the Austrian mathematical logician Kurt Godel.
During that period, Leonard developed Wide Language W [phonetic]
which is a synthesis of propositional and modal logic
which provides the most accurate and deepest logical system
for understanding the logic which underlies the axiomatic system
within process and reality, Wide Language W more
than Principia Mathematica itself reflects the underlying logic
to the ontology and cosmology or process in reality in which the role
of possibilities and potentialities play such a crucial role,
Henry has given me the unpublished manuscript for Wide Language W
which manuscript I look forward to sharing with other scholars.
After Leonard left the Princeton Institute of Advanced Studies,
I became his personal assistant
and at Washington University Leonard presented this important work.
While his presidential address touched on this,
a further exposition and development of Wide Language W is part
of Leonard's legacy that awaits its maturation.
In process and reality Whitehead develops great attention
to contrasting his philosophy of science and organism
with a broad sweep of western philosophical traditions originating
in the spectacular genius of grief antiquity and running
through British and continental philosophical traditions.
He also cryptically remarks that the modes of thought of process
and reality are more akin to ancient Easton mode of thoughts
and intuition than they are to the atomism, mechanical, materialism,
and reductionism that had prevailed in western philosophy
and western science for over two and a half millennium.
What Whitehead did not do is publicly address how his philosophy
contrasted with the philosophical tendencies
that were emerging concurrent with his own speculative philosophy.
These tendencies would grip 20th century philosophy
in a protracted period of what we may call anti-philosophy.
Seventy-five years ago, in response to the volume Philosophical Essays:
Celebrating Whitehead's 75th Birthday, Henry Leonard along
with other of Whitehead's eminent students
at Harvard composed a meticulously argued essay entitled Logical
Positivism and Speculative Philosophy.
It was Leonard's essay which elicited this six-paged letter
from today with what is today formally [inaudible]
in the magnificent Library of Congress.
I believe Tim has obtained a copy of Philosophical Essays.
In this letter, Whitehead writes, every mathematician
and symbolic logician is in its habit
of thought a logical positivist.
Yet, to some of the expositions I find myself
in violent opposition especially to the very habit
of dismissing questions as unmeaning that is unable
to be expressed in existing symbolism.
Wittgenstein annoys me intensely.
He is a complete example of the saying I am master of this college,
what I know not is not knowledge.   Logical positivism in this mode,
its early mode will produced a timid shut in an enterprising state
of mind engaged in the elaboration of details.
I always test these general rules by trying
to imagine their sterilizing effect of such as state of mind
if perceived in any time--
if prevalent at any time in the last 10,000 years.
It's interesting because the Chinese think
of units an eon of 10,000 years.   The fact is that thought
in the previous two centuries has been engaged in disengaging itself
from the shackles of dogmatic divinity thus it unconsciously seeks
[inaudible] namely anything offensive to the pope of Rome.
But I see not, I see no reason to believe that the stretch
of Bertrand Russell's mind or of Wittgenstein's mind
or of [inaudible] mind has attained the limits of insight
or expression possible in the evolution of intelligent beings.
They are bright boys, expressive of a stage
of rationalism but nothing more.
Three decades later after restive of the letter,
Professor Leonard prepared formal comments which were a company
and publication of this letter.
Unfortunately, as his son indicated, he suddenly died during a trip
to Germany and the letter and his comments eluded for all
of these decades the light of public recognition.
>> Leonard revealed his change of perception of the relation
of logical positivism and analytical philosophy
to the traditional metaphysical task of philosophy from Leonard I quote.
"As I reread the essay today, I find myself tempted to say
that there's practically nothing in it
that I would change were I writing today, except the whole thing.
Finally, they [inaudible] so philosophy is nothing more
than analysis, an inquiry into the logic, the syntax of language
of science whereas I have seen man and even
to a greater extent now see philosophy
as an enterprise including speculative analysis,
but as also including legitimate speculative inquiry
which incorporates both a critique of current scientific speculation
and a venturing beyond them."
Okay, Carolyn encouraged me to finish.
So, let me just speak a minute or two extemporaneously, what Whitehead
and Leonard came to see was that philosophy required an integration
of synthetic and analytic modes of thought.
Whitehead was one of the world's greatest analytic thinkers
if not the precision and meaning
of Principia Mathematica never would have emerged to shock the world
of mathematics and to elicit the great German mathematician David
Hilbert's reply-- comment
that Principia is the greatest axiomatic system
in the human history.   And Whitehead deduced most of that.
But the proclivity for precision of thought was not adequate
from Whitehead's point of view and logical positivism in its rigidity,
in its formality, the same as analytic philosophy in its acuity
when it's divorced from synthetic integrating
in speculative modes of thought.
And common language philosophy in its utter banality
as expressed in Wittgenstein's work.
Those three tendencies that grip 20th century philosophy so firmly,
so relentlessly those really would if they prevailed as they did bring
in the death of philosophy, Steven Hawking in 2010
in his book Grand Design, once again declares philosophy is dead.
Whitehead's letter to Leonard really foreshadows us that very fate
because philosophy is dead if it's divorced of wonder, intuition,
adventures of ideas, et cetera.
I have a larger formal essay on the background and significance
of this letter if people are interested in,
it's gonna be published shortly but I have a copy with me,
I'll be glad to show it and I try
to illustrate the revolutionary implications
of Whitehead's metaphysics to philosophy
and to theoretical physics and maybe this event today
in the magnificent Library of Congress, we can look upon
as the resurrection of the great adventure
that Whitehead's philosophy offers humanity.
[ Applause ]   [ Pause ]
>> Principia Mathematica is a continental divide
in the Whitehead continent.
In one hand it's a peak in the development
of the philosophical language, a search that goes back
to Ramon Lowe [phonetic] and Bruno and Leibnitz and the law's
of thought of whole and on the other hand,
it's not the wave of the future.
If I criticize it I'll try to be gentler than Whitehead would be.
Whitehead was not only a philosopher of process, he was a philosopher
in process and first some words about Principia,
it begins with the most finite basic experience of attraction,
the typical page that looks like a cross between a Cherokee syllabary
and the Glacolithic alphabet.
The dominant symbol is the horseshoe which can appear either as a cup
or cap or on its side with various meanings.
And the underlying algebra is not exactly
that of Boole it's rather what's called Boolean algebra.
Two at-- Boolean algebra is a great bleacher or preposition or classes
with the same room of elements are the same in Boolean algebra.
The group is the permutation group of end things,
as it's sort of the constant.
Complexity arises from the process of extraction which is represented
in Principia primarily by the letter iota,
if X is anything iota X is the unit class whose only element is X.
And by applying iota infinitely often you get all the real numbers.
First of all the integers and then from then
on the construction follows [inaudible]
in one sense Principia satisfies or was intended to satisfy the urge
to have a language through which you could put in any question
and get an answer in which you could be confident.
A language which had a vocabulary rich enough to describe anything
and a logic enabled to decide the important question.
In fact, however, the language of Principia is added only
for the world of mathematics.
Before Principia I think there was some doubt
about what mathematics was about.
It seemed to be a world of many different countries
which hardly speak to each other and now everybody knows mathematics is
about set theory and Principia made the transformation from a scattered
to an integrated mathematics.
The story isn't over, modern category theorists are tempted
to expand this notion but always it turns
out that it's just another version of set theory written different.
Of course the story has a tragic ending.
The book had hardly published.
Perhaps it was in the process of publication.
When Russell discovered that it was not self consistent,
you couldn't rely on it for any arguments and you remember
that Russell paradox of the non self-containing set.
Does it-- is it self-containing itself?
And you can prove yes and you can prove no
and the concept is completely within the rules of syntax of Principia
to deal with this also propose a theory of types
of [inaudible] simplified the resolution considerably
and today Principia lives on in a couple of forms.
But perhaps the greatest blow to the idea that one had a language
that you could trust to decide any question is the result of girdle
which flowed out of the paradox of Russell namely the consistency
of set theory is not a theorem of set theory.
>> And it turns out that one can either add the set theory,
the statement that it's consistent or that it's inconsistent.
Probably didn't say that exactly right,
but my time is a little limited.
The-- I'm pretty sure that when Whitehead was doing Principia,
he thought of it as a world of mathematics but he also thought
of the world of mathematics as imaging nature.
He thought himself as creating a language
that could be used for physics.
And indeed all mathematical physics is expressed in the language
of Principia if you push the rigor hard enough.
But the actual direction that Whitehead thinking took was
to doubt the adequacy of this particular system and any
such system for describing nature--
a loss of faith and language as a tool for the expression
of propositions is a way he put it.
This comes up more strongly in his philosophy of organism
which is presented as a self theory of nature.
I don't think the argument for a self theory of nature have been
up strongly, even by Whitehead as it could be.
I myself personally am quite convinced that that's the way we go.
Consider how, for example, the atomic theory was discovered.
It's true that Einstein got the Nobel Prize for his work
on Brownian motion which finely convinced most hard-nosed physicists
that atoms exist even though you couldn't touch them or see them.
But in fact chemists had taken for granted that there are atoms
for centuries before Einstein.
And they came to this conclusion just from the fact
that you find the same chemicals everywhere and they combine
in certain fixed ways everywhere.
The simplest way to handle this without invoking a lot of deities is
to say they're all made of the same little particles
and their properties are derived from those of the particles.
So chemical atoms existed long before physical atoms,
you could say.
Just-- in order to account for the remarkable uniformity
of the properties of nature.
Today, we have changed physics into what is virtually a theory
of the symmetry of nature and at each point
of the world one finds a gauge group characterizing the symmetry
of the immediate neighbor of that point and miracle of miracles,
a gauge group is the same everywhere,
are all of these points talking to each other?
Is there some miracle going on?
And again, the simplest way to understand this is to say
that nature is cellular and the gauge group tells you the symmetry
or the dynamics of the individual cell for I simply have no doubt
that the practical road for physical research today is in the direction
of cellularity and this is not my conclusion especially,
there's a long line of physicist following this road
but because it's a difficult
and rather branching one we haven't gotten very far
and one doesn't expect a physicist to earn is living at physics
to undertake this particular adventure.
If you look in the process of reality, it's pretty clear
that Whitehead takes as the basic process of nature concrescence
in which 2 or several things die
and their concrescence is born is the way he puts it.
And this is a pretty description of the iota of Principia and I must say
that for an unpleasant number of decades I've pushed the idea
that the passage of time was represented
by a quantum version of iota.
And I think that a deep mistake, iota is deeply irreversible,
it doesn't-- it doesn't have an inverse,
the empty set is not the iota of anything.
There is no reason to doubt
that at the microscopic level nature is reversible.
The cause and effect irreversibility that was we see
in the large is very likely matter of thermodynamic irreversibility,
a matter of there being too many variables
for our mere model tools to control.
We can't put the steam back into the teapot just by turning off the heat.
So-- well, I think with Whitehead that the process
of abstraction is a fundamental one.   It ain't the passage of time.
On the contrary, the passage of time is one of the basic symmetries dealt
with in quantum theory today by standard measures
of group theory used for any other translation or rotation.
The catch being that when you put many elements
of resistance together an irreversibility arises
out of complexity, a complexity which you can't build just
with the Boolean algebra, that was the main language before
Principia Mathematica.
You can say when Heisenberg described the quantum theory
in the earlier years, he said,
quantum theory is non-objective physics.
I guess he didn't have the word process here so he had to put it
in a negative way, but it's true that quantum theories deals
with operations and the main difference between them
and the propositions of Boole is it don't commute and handy
to represent them if you like [inaudible] as Heisenberg did,
but in fact another way to express the--
what replaces Boole in quantum theory is projective geometry,
I'm not sure that Whitehead ever had enough confidence
in projective geometry to suggest it as the next language
after Principia, I think that's the way things are going though.
And that-- that language of quantum theory today,
although I think most physicist don't take courses
in projected geometry Derek did
and it profoundly influenced his pioneering work in quantum theory
as he describes it his own biographical--
Let me just close by saying that every few years, I go back
and reread Whitehead, mostly a result of some gentle stimulation
by Timothy Eastman and I discover that Whitehead is one
of those fortunate individuals who doesn't let the mere accident
of death interfere with his intellectual development.
Each time I go back to him,
I find him inconsiderably wiser from the previous time.
[Laughter] Thank you.   [ Applause ]
[ Pause ]
>> Hi! Well, David that was great, thanks so much
for introducing physics, it makes--
it's gonna make my job a little bit easier because it's difficult
to talk about something as complex as Whitehead and something
as complex as modern physics in a very short period of time
without either frightening all of you or frightening myself away,
if I do run away, don't take it personally,
it's really-- it's just doing my best.
But actually the thing about Whitehead and the thing
about modern physics for me is that yes, its complex
but it's deeply intuitive, I think.
I-- I find-- I find the quantum theory to be deeply intuitive
in the same way that I find Whiteheadian cosmology
and metaphysics to be deeply intuitive and so if I'm right
after 10 minutes I think everyone should be happy.
I think-- I'm hoping that I'll at least be able
to communicate something that's coherent in 10 minutes.
And what I'd like to do actually is start with just
by reading a quick section of the-- of Dr. Leonard's letter,
this is actually the last paragraph where Whitehead says,
"What I do object to is one, the reduction of all possibilities
of symbolism to the scanty productions of mankind so far,
and two, the notion that no pattern can be directly discerned unless it
is symbolized."
>> Of course symbolism enormously facilitates the discernment
of the pattern for we thereby discern the pattern
in alternative exemplifications.
In fact, the curse of the history of human thought is overstatement
and with respect to physics, I think what he would say
about classical physics is that it's a perfect example
of such an overstatement.
Because in classical physics, the idea is that you can provide
through measurements ideally a complete specification of the system
that you're measuring and by specification I mean a specification
in terms of some patterns, some logical mathematical pattern of--
that's represented symbolically, that's what science does
and classical physics by its belief, its presupposition
that a complete specification is possible would be an example
of an overstatement in that regard.
And I would say that with respect to modern physics, quantum theory,
the brute fact is that a complete specification
in that sense it's impossible and the reason it's impossible is
because in quantum theory, a measurement interaction
for the most part is, I think, most fundamentally expressible
as a schematization or a system of relations
between the detector system and the object system
and it's an integration of those relations and so
by bringing the subject system the detector in connection
with the system that's being measured, it's difficult--
I mean it's difficult to maintain the definition of objectivity
in that sense and, you know, Bohr was famous for admonishing us
that there is-- there is no sharp separation
between the divisors you're using to measure a system and the system
that you're measuring, the impossibility
of sharp separation is what he says.
So that's-- that's a difficulty, that means that-- well, to--
to bring this back to your discussion of the Principia,
in essence this means that any measurement of a system,
any predication of the system,
because you can't divorce the subject from the object,
any measurement is essentially self-predicative,
it's a self-predication which produces all kinds of paradoxes
if you believe that that type
of predication gives you a complete picture so that's one problem.
The other problem is the fact that if you universalize quantum theory,
if you look at it as an ontological significant way
of looking at nature.
It's not only impossible to separate the object system
from the subject apparatus, the device, it's also impossible
to separate the rest of the universe
from the system and the device together.
The entanglement isn't just between the--
the measuring apparatus and the system but the entanglement is
between all of that and the rest of the world
and this can be physically expressed in the sense
of environmental relations between facts of the world that are
in thermodynamic contact let's say with the system in the apparatus
and no matter how much you try to isolate the system,
you're never gonna be able to completely isolate the system.
So that means that's-- that it's not just the self-predicative
measurement that happens in quantum theory
where you can't get rid of the subject.
You also can't get rid of the rest of the world either.
And in that sense, that's the only problem in the Principia,
you don't just run into trouble when you do self-predication,
you run into trouble whenever you try to predicate a totality,
you run into all kinds of problems.
So the-- the key in quantum theory is to answer the question,
how do I isolate or how do I refine my scheme,
the pattern that I'm trying to depict when I make a measurement,
how do I-- how do I isolate that pattern from the rest of the world.
How do I-- how do I focus on just the relations between the system
and the detector and in abstraction from all of the other relations
between the system and the environment the--
the detector and the environment, how do I do that?
Because-- well you have to do it just--
in order to do the calculations I mean there's no possible way
to follow all these relations together.
The other problem is that and those of you who are familiar
with the Schrodinger's cat, it's not really a paradox but it's a--
it's an interesting thought experiment
where you have the sum total of all these relations being something akin
to saying at the same time the cat is alive and the cat is dead.
When you try to integrate relations quantum mechanically
that way you're left with these types of statements
which defy the logical principle of non-contradiction
in that sense cannot really be said to be logically coherent
because that principle of non-contradiction is violated
so you don't want a statement, "the cat is alive
and dead" at the same time.
So how do you refine those relations that are the result
of a quantum mechanical measurement?
How do you refine them so that they yield logically coherent statement
such as, "the cat is alive or dead", which is what you want
and which luckily that's what you get at the end
of quantum mechanical measurement.
Well how? I think that Whitehead was on to something with respect to--
with respect to the idea that there are aspects
of a symbolic representation of a system
that are ignored for a reason.
You actually get mileage out of the fact that there are unknowns
and that both known unknowns and unknown unknowns sorry
to evoke Donald Rumsfeld here but, you know, I--
I get what he was saying, the fact that if you incorporate
that into you symbolic representation
of the physical system, you're--
you will wind up with a logically coherent set of probability outcomes
that work and-- and so I've-- before I get into how that works
in physics, I wanna read another quick section from this letter.
This is actually from the first page, the last paragraph there.
In here he's commenting on Dr. Leonard's take and he's agreeing
with him in the sense, he says, you take the line in effect that
"order" means a pattern of qualities
with accumulative effect namely the one composite satisfaction derived
from those, "things" in that pattern, underline that,
and also the rationalization means the discernment of the pattern
which dominates the effect, so those things in that pattern
and in quantum physics what we're doing there is saying I want
to specify the state of these particular things,
the system I'm measuring and I'm going to predicate that by--
by referring to those things in terms of a particular pattern
in divorce from all the rest.
Well, in-- in quantum theory to-- to make a long story short,
no one really knows how it is that this crazy integration
of mostly illogical relations between the system
and an environment and a detector gets distilled
into very logical matrix of probable outcomes that make sense.
We don't know how that works or that it actually works,
we just know that which you end up with when you do a measurement.
In the past couple of decades, there has been a--
an attempt to answer that question by saying that when you bring
into the formalism, all of those relations
that you previously thought were unimportant all
of those environmental relations, when you integrate them
into the scheme without specifying them, you're not following them,
you're just integrating their existence into this scheme,
what you end up with mathematically is a nice reduction
of this crazy integration of probable outcomes
to a nice coherent logical collection, a menu,
a matrix of probable outcomes
that do satisfy the principle of non-contradiction.
They also satisfy the principle of the excluded middle which means one
of them will happen which is also a benefit
because it's the other problem quantum theory can't account
for why there's a fact at the end of a measurement.
And what Whitehead I think would say is well, it's presupposed
because you're dealing with a collection of possible outcomes.
Each has a probability valuation meaning all
of them together must sum to unity
which you could interpret philosophically is mean--
meaning that well one of them will happen
and they're mutually exclusive so they don't interfere.
There are no live or dead cat superpositions,
there's simply the probability of a live cat and the probability
of a dead cat and so, we call this decoherence, this is what happens
when a coherent superposition of potentia are integrated
into a logically coherent--
I shouldn't say coherent here because it sort
of defeats the purpose I'm using
in 2 different ways let's say a logically consistent matrix
of probable outcomes, we--
that's referred to as a decoherence, what drives decoherence?
There's different theories about it but one type of decoherence,
environmental decoherence is driven
by just what I've been talking about.
Bringing in these relationships between the system, the detector
and environment, bringing them into the specification, into the scheme
without specifying them so I-- I suppose I can close by simply saying
that in a nutshell what this means is that though in classical physics
and probably early quantum physics where all
of those extraneous relations were thought to be unimportant.
We just simply ignore them, they're not important
to the particular thing I'm measuring right now.
>> A Whiteheadian sort of outlook on that would--
would repudiate that belief, I think Whitehead would say, well,
they may be unimportant to that particular scheme
that you're developing, they may be unimportant
to that particular measurement that you're trying to develop
but they're not unimportant to the formation of that measurement,
the formation of that scheme,
the formation of that scheme depends upon all of those,
well what Whitehead would call them diversities of detail.
And yes, you negatively select those because they're unimportant
to the particular measurement that you're making
but he's point would be that you can't have a logically coherent
measurement in the first place without integrating those,
without specifying them but without integrating those--
those extraneous relations so the unknown whether it's a known unknown
or an unknown unknown, it's important to physics and its--
it's a-- I think it captures the essence of what he was saying
with respect to where positivism would lead us ultimately would lead
us to a dead end.
It's important, these things that we don't follow because everything
in quantum mechanics, I mean,
essentially any particular measurement
if you universalize quantum theory, any measurement
of a particular system is a measurement of the universe itself
and this-- both of the known features of the universe
and the unknown features and I think that captures the essence
of what Whitehead had in mind probably if--
if you'd thought about his cosmology,
actually informing physics as it progressed.
I think he would have something like that in mind, very basically anyway,
so thank you very much, appreciate it.
[ Laughter ]   >> Thanks a lot.
[Applause]   [ Pause ]
>> I'm currently a physicist, a space scientist working
at NASA Goddard and when I first got into my current career,
I was thinking about going into philosophy
and my philosophy teacher Herbert Feigl who was one of the members
of the Vienna Circle Logical Positivism,
very good lecturer and teacher.   He advised me if I really want
to do philosophy I should first complete my physics degree
and then do that and then come back to philosophy.
Well, I never got back to philosophy but I enjoy sort
of doing some philosophy so to speak on the side which led in one case
to this edited volume on physics on Whitehead that I worked on
and this came up from SUNY Press in 2004 and also context
with all the wonderful presenters that have been here and this--
and hearing the various presentations
of this symposium makes me recall the time
when I had just finished my quantum physics courses and electromagnetism
and relativity and right after my undergraduate degree
and having initial exposure to these concepts, after having been growing
up on the farm but here is all these various esoteric kinds of things,
having a lot of struggles with what this field really mean.
These abstract concepts about electromagnetism and so forth,
what do-- what do they mean?
Well, my professor said well, one way to approach this is learn, obey,
compute, you know, that's often--
for those in the quantum physics course
when you don't know what does it really mean and so I was learning
and obeying and computing but not yet understanding and so then
that summer after that-- after the spring semester I read-- I got a--
obtained a copy of Process and Reality by Whitehead
and for whatever reason I just got-- I just got--
just buried into it and sort of into that mode of thinking
and I had been living in this world of perceptional objects.
This ordinary world and thinking of that and just not being able
to integrate this notion about what field theory
and these new physical concepts are, I was reading the Process
and Reality and then getting myself immersed in Whitehead's discussion
and then I just had a high experience,
it just all came together for me.   And it was emotional, you know?
So-- and then I began to see ways
in which these different ideas are almost like a generator of ideas.
It wasn't just a particular conceptual system,
it was here with a particular methodology, a way of thinking
about the very way of being in the world and asking questions
and so it-- it just sort in a way transformed how I thought
about who I was and the nature of the world and so if not--
and so then I just launched into so to speak my own particular adventure
of ideas however limited it was and--
and so that so to speak led to me thinking about my own specialty
of space plasma physics in different ways of how electromagnetism
and plasmas are an integral part of the whole astrophysical systems
and so you have not just gravity being significant
in contemporary studies of astrophysical systems,
it's a combination of gravity and electromagnetism
and this combination leads to a whole bunch of processes
that we're just really beginning to understand by decisive observations
that my fellow scientists at NASA Goddard are really involved
in a great, you know, new discoveries and explorations
that you read about but I would say that they are not tied
up in the kind of abstractions and being constrained and confined
by that they are right now in this kind of motive--
no great discovery period and-- and they're just not--
they're too busy in that to be caught up in so to speak the logical
or other kinds of straightjackets that Whitehead spoke out against
in this 1936 letter that Whitehead called attention to whether be
in philosophical thought or scientific thought we need
to constantly be bring-- breaking out of whatever bounds we create
for ourselves or others appear to create for us to have confidence
in your own immediate experience in the world as an individual.
Have confidence in your encounter with others and-- and from that--
that experience to identify possible abstractions
and relevant say formalisms even mathematical ones
that can give suggestions, insights to hypotheses
that then can help order that experience,
so that one can then find new ways of finding order amidst the disorder
of applying so to speak the scientific kind of methodology
of hypothesis and testing and falsification and identifying,
you know, new understanding but then going on to the next step
but doing this in philosophy and doing that kind
of methodology in one's daily life.
And so, let me just briefly indicate a little bit of history of Whitehead
that got him potentially into his notion apprehension
and applying some of that con--
those concepts in his work in the 1920's and some of that backdrop
because I think it's an important backdrop.
Now, Whitehead himself was a mathematical physicist,
he's sometimes described as a well, logician, mathematician, philosopher
but in our current parlance at least
in part he was a mathematical physicist and of course he was
at that time same time was as well these other things.
And in the traditions of mathematical physics
from the 19th century there was just a tremendous sequence
of breakthroughs of Faraday and Maxwell with respect
to electromagnetism and the insipient development
of field theory then and Whitehead was greatly impressed by the success
of Faraday and Maxwell's models of electric and magnetic phenomena
in particular as stated by Professor Ronny Desmet of the Free University
of Brussels, Whitehead was especially struck by the fact
that Hamilton's formal generalization of complex numbers
into quaternions ultimately gave rise to a vector calculus
that lead Maxwell and his followers to the descriptive unification
of electricity and magnetism.
In turn the foundation of modern field theories cornerstones
of modern physics is described by Professor Finkelstein.
These successes encouraged Whitehead
in his successive involvements quoting Desmet,
with "Grossman's algebra of extensions in universal algebra,
that's his great work of the 1890s, his involvement
with Russell's logical relations
and Principia Mathematica now the 100th anniversary of that great work
and his involvement with Einstein's Theory of Relativity
and the Principles of Relativity 1922 as successive expressions
of his urge to unify all branches of mathematics and physics
in a way his own struggle was trying to get
at a unified theory of all of these.
His generalizations of patterns of relation,
you might say that is what mathematics is about.
>> Going that even on a generalized mathematics led him further
to discover "abstract" according to Desmond, "abstract patterns in terms
of which all concrete elements of our experience can be unified going
from even the abstract mathematics right
to the mediacy of human experience."
What, structurally, commonalities could be evolved at a procedure
of the core of Whitehead methodology of speculative philosophy?
Indeed, philosopher James Bradley of the University
of Newfoundland argues that "in processing reality
in subsequent writings, Whitehead builds on the brilliant success
of the Frege-Russell generalization of the mathematical function
and develops his philosophy on that basis so there's a way
in which he then methodologically is utilizing in particular way
of thinking about the mathematical function and the mapping activity,
mapping procedure done in mathematics
at a very fundamental level to a way of thinking about how
to generate new hypothesis and new conceptual notions
that then ultimately can help us with understanding questions,
very philosophical questions about human experience and other things,
not just abstract mathematical objects.
And a prime example of this methodology
of speculative philosophy with its unique roots in the new field theory
and at generalized mathematics is the concept
of prehension previously mentioned which is developed in part
as a philosophical generalization
of physical interactions and field theory.
Now, this all seem-- may seem rather abstract but then it came back to me
in a new way just reading this past week a most interesting book
by Brian Henning, it was mentioned
by George Lucas whose new book Ethics of Creativity lays
out a whole new way of approaching questions of ethics.
A really fundamental new approach to ethics that's just not virtue ethics
or deontological ethics or utilitarian but incorporates
within it an approach that utilizes the notion of creativity
that was elaborated by our main presentor, Professor Faber
and also Frederick Ferre has been working with this on his book Being
and Value but this connects to--
he discusses how this connects to Leopold's Land Ethic
and to new works by Wes Jackson who does work in agriculture
and this comes back for myself to new ways of connecting my background
of growing up on a farm connecting to these abstract notions
in mathematical physics and physics and my own experience when working
with physical systems in space science to a new approach to ethics
and this seem like unexpected connections and
yet this is the very nature of Whitehead and what's been generated
by his work and the International Process Network
and the Center for Process Studies.
Indeed this is reflected in a recent book,
the handbook of Whiteheadian process thought.
There's 2 volumes edited by Weber and Henning, 1400 pages,
17 major areas, 64 essays by leading process thinkers worldwide
and it's just covered every area you can imagine of people
who have been similarly inspired
to connect these otherwise dispirit areas in new interesting ways
in an adventure of ideas, adventure of discovery to which,
I wish to thank, so much to thank Whitehead for
but of course my colleagues here that I am in constant dialogue with.
Thank you very much.   [ Applause ]
>> I didn't really think it was possible to keep
so many brilliant minds and energetic thinkers roped into close
to 10 minutes each, but we have succeeded
and that means we do have time for questions and discussion so,
and this will include both people on the dais but also those of you
in the audience, et cetera, so the floor is open.
[ Silence ]   >> Yeah, please do.
[ Silence ]
>> Question for Dr. Finklestein, in discussing--
your discussion of principia, you mentioned the iota positive only
but not the symmetric negative on it.
You also talked about category theory for a while.
In category theory, and I'm wondering whether
or not there's a relationship between these 2.
You have a zero element, an initial element and a terminal element,
and any category also gives rise to the construction
of a symmetric algebraic system, one of the constructions.
My question is whether or not the elements - zero, initial, terminal
and symmetry is brought about by limits and co-limits, whether
or not those would give you a hint
that category theory might be suitable as a basis for mathematics.
>> First of all, I'm really not a mathematician.
>> Well, but you--
>> So, and I respect mathematicians greatly.
>> Sure.
>> And many great ones think their category algebra is a reasonable way
to express the ontology of mathematics,
the nature mathematical being and they're doing it, it seems to work.
>> Can I just add?
>> -- original discoverers of the concept
of category algebra in connection, okay.
>> Just an answer to your question too.
With respect to the application of category theory to Whitehead
in particularly his method of extensive abstraction,
Tim and I are actually involved in a research group where we're doing
that very thing, there's a theorist at the University
of Athens named Elias Zafiris who is applying category theory
and [inaudible] theory to Whiteheadian metaphysics
and its application to physics and so that's something
that we're actively working on right now.
>> Right. A lot of formulated questions--
>> You can go, actually, we have the Center for Philosophy
and the Natural Sciences, it's at Cal State University,
Sacramento where I teach.
It's-- if you just go to www.csus.edu and then slash CPNS,
you can see basically a white paper that we have posted up there
that addresses the question you asked.
Sure.   >> Could I just add one thing?
Then the category algebra is designed
to study classical objects so, for example, there's a category
of quantum theories which are classical objects but if you look
at a quantum system, its algebra is not a category algebra,
it violates the axiom of enough identities.
In a quantum system there's only one identity and it ain't enough.
>> Thanks a lot.
>> And that's very basic fact of quantum theory.
>> Okay, any questions?   >> How's that?
[ Inaudible Discussions ]   [ Laughter ]
>> Thank you.
>> I wanted to thank all the speakers for accumulating so much
for us to take in and try to integrate in a manner
of a natural entity in Whitehead's system or in a manner of any
of the speakers who basically done the same thing in the course
of getting here to give this talk so I just wanna pick up one element
in there, so many but the fact that consistency couldn't be captured
in the principia mathematica as a sign of its failure
to Whitehead himself, that seems to me to be a peculiar moment
because in a way you could turn that around and say the fact
that it proved that consistency couldn't be captured
in a mathematical or a symbolic system is the sign of its sort
of triumph, it really expressed that completely as Godel did too,
I guess, but in a sense that's a positive sign
of really knowing articulately the limits of expression,
whether its mathematical or scientific.
And there's something in that, I think it kinda connects
with the last statement about category theory as well its failure
to apply to a quantum system.
>> In a sense any system that really achieves a unification
of it's environment in the manner that you just spoke
and in the manner of any measurement in a quantum system is sort of a--
I don't-- I don't know to finish that thought [laughter]
but basically it does that, it achieves that sort
of by becoming a measurement or by becoming a unified moment and the--
it does that sort of by violating a number of [laughter] certainly
by violating consistency, and I think that's because time moves on
and every next moments sort of requires it be done again.
>> I just wanna say, just to answer that, Whitehead's cosmology--
there is consistency, and you only get into trouble when you're talking
about the totality or the universe.
If you look at the universe as a process, where you're not dealing
with the totality but a totality that's internally related
to an antecedent totally put
in another way every new fact incorporates a new universe.
With every new fact, with every novel fact,
novel universe then you can recapture consistency.
So it's only when you're dealing with a fina--
not, sorry, when you're dealing with sort of a block universe totality
that you run into trouble and that was one of the wonderful things
if you read the Principia and then you read Process and Reality,
you see an evolution of thought I-- I think in that regard.
>> Another way to express that way of avoiding the trouble
as often happen in conventional thinking is to not--
and for Whitehead and then in this approach you--
one distinguishes 2 aspects of the real--
a possibility and actuality as Jeff Bub described it in one of his works
in quantum physics and interpretation,
a distinction between possibility space which may be
like your logical order, you've introduced an actuality space
which associates with the causal order by making these distinctions
and not simply conflating all of the real and actualized and so
to speak then forcing yourself into a block universe by virtue
of your philosophical presupposition
which thus then basically is embedded in claims
by say certain physicist that it's an absolutely deterministic
universe, those claims have a--
implicit mathematical proposition in it that is unstated.
So by simply making this distinction which is clear in Whitehead this is,
I think, very helpful in--
>> I just wanted to say, I mean, this-- this issue of totality as a--
then a significant one in process I think it's--
it's one of the reasons for the split
between Hartshorne and Whitehead.
It certainly is something that Whitehead has been criticized
in terms of implying a notion of a totality,
systematic notion of a totality.
I'm-- have a-- an article coming out a correspondence
at the APA few years ago between another process thinker George Hilde
and I is leading to a focus section
and process studies it should be coming out soon if you're interested
in this and we get into this issue a bit and I'm no mathematician
but if I can hopefully not too violently reduce this issue
in terms of the way it works.
There's a-- sometimes this is termed the problem of big omega,
right and the idea is as Tim put it that each--
if there is a totality that is the sort
of uber set right then its relation
to its contents becomes another set add infinitum, there's a sort
of infinite regress problem.   I'm more and more convinced
and I think this would not be a distinction in the logic
between sets and categories.   I think this would work with either,
that this problem is not really a problem that it's the result
of a mistake in application of the concept of a set or a category.
A set or a category is something that distinguishes one thing
from another groups and therefore excludes
but if totality has no exclusion, and totality if there is one
and I think like Whitehead that the proper understanding
of totality is the holistic conception of God the primordial
and the consequent nature of God together including
in my mind the full range of eternal objects
as robustly platonically formulated by Whitehead
that represents an ontological hole
that cannot be distinguished from anything.
It's not a set and so it seems to me that Whitehead liked
to say right that, well actually I should say Hartshorne said
of Whitehead that he may have been led astray
by his mathematical thinking right in terms of developing this notion
of the eternal object, he quite felt contrary Whitehead may have
perceived underneath the mathematical theory,
a conceptual distinction that was not being made explicit elsewhere
that between sets or categories and the totalities
so I think we're moving towards a solution of that problem implicitly,
as Whitehead had in theory.   [ Pause ]
>> This is a question for Professor Lucas, you made a passing reference
to William James and I want some elaboration on the relationship
of Whitehead and James' thought
because I think this might have some potential for overcoming the lament,
if this can be recovered in contemporary times,
I think there's some richness there,
I'd just like to have you say something more
about that relationship with William James' thought.
>> There are a number of ways of--
okay, there are number of ways of going about that
and I'm probably not the best person to take it
on since I'm not really a James' scholar.
One is-- to what extent Whitehead himself paid any attention
to William James, was influenced by him, he acknowledges him
with great respect and politeness in several of his works but doesn't
to my knowledge appeared
to have made any great study of James thought.
Though those who have made studies of both see a great deal
of similarity between their conceptions of--
especially ontological conceptions of the world that what I referred
to in passing Russell's critic of James and later appropriation
of James' neutral monism can be interpreted in a way James
and scholars well its-- it looks very much
like the ontology of actual occasions.
So that's one way of going about it.
A second way would be in terms of the comments I made about the sort
of decline or marginalization of Whitehead's influence.
James by contrast has not been entirely given up on in a sense
that there are departments of philosophy in this country
with really imminent scholars on a number of parts of the nation
who continue to study James.
There is a collected James edition of works preserved for posterity.
I myself had some-- some role over--
a modest role in helping to fund those projects, the editions--
the James edition when I was
at the National Endowment of the Humanities.
The-- I-- how would one put this
that in those departments were a student interested
in exploring the affinities of Whitehead
and James they would find a sympathetic audience.
If they wanted to argue that the Whitehead from1923, '24 on,
the work of the American period belonged in the American Canon
in the same way that the works of James Dewey belong
in the American Canon I think it's actually the case that Roland,
myself and others are trying to make with regard to Whitehead now
that if we did an addition of James' works,
why are we not doing one of Whitehead's?
If we did an addition of Dewey's works
and are now contemplating an addition of Josiah Royce's works
and of CS Peirce's works, why are we not doing one of Whitehead,
so it's a-- in a sense a matter of cultural patrimony and fairness
so that's an entirely different approach of--
sort of cultural approach to the resurrection if you will
of Whitehead, not only through his intellectual affinities with
and his historical influence and respect for James but also as part
of that American conversation which is I suspect what you're referring
to that that would provide a more hospitable context and has actually
in the society for SAP, the Society for Advancement
of American Philosophy has always been very open to Whitehead,
its just that there haven't that many Whiteheadians
that are part of that society.
So there's a place there-- my suspicion is--
this answer is going on too long but the problem is that a person
who is caught between 2 cultures is in danger
of being appropriated by neither.
>> So this-- this was Wittgenstein's problem as well of course
and it didn't happen to him, he was an Austrian,
and an engineer, and a mathematician.
On the other hand, he was a philosopher
and his English language avatar incarnation
and both Wittgenstein's are deeply appreciated by both cultures.
Why can't the same be true of Whitehead?
But it is the case that right now not only is that not happening
but it's not clear which culture the British or the American ought
to step forward and put the money out to--
to do the work, to fund the departments,
to fund the additions, to fund the scholarship.
Each looks to the other and says, "Well, here's your guy," you know.
If the British aren't interested, why should we be,
well, the funders will say.
We'll probably hear something like that in--
in response to our grant proposal for the addition.
Well, he's really not our guy, why should we pay for this, I mean, it--
it gets down to something like that.
So there's-- there are avenues, intellectual, historical, cultural,
archival, in which this could be done but they are all fraught
>> Thank you.
I like to make a few comments about the questions of ontology and logic.
Professor Leonard always emphasized that Whitehead's philosophy
to be true to itself, must be in continuous process
of creative development, creative application
and creative modification, and the development also is
because it's an axiomatic system processed in reality
so the implications are infinite and Whitehead understood that.
What is not recognized as--   as clearly as it should be is
that Whitehead's philosophy itself evolved.
The ontology of Principia Mathematica looked upon mathematical
entities as classes of classes.
By the time Process and Reality was created, there was a subtle
but real shift in Whitehead's thought where rather than classes
of classes, its attributes were eternal objects and attributes
of attributes, and relations of relationships that became important
and that distinction is not clearly understood.
Even his treatment of geometry, I contend became more rooted in--
in eternal objects that is space wasn't created--
space is a totality, a spatial magnitude,
and spatial relationships.
Change doesn't create space but change pre--
presupposes space so Whitehead's treatment of space took
on a very different ontology in Process and Reality
and that ontology, that contrast with Einstein's general theory
of relativity and also the work of string theorists like Brian Greene
and [inaudible] speak about space that's being created [inaudible],
bending, et cetera.
It's groups of entities that that change can try, not--
not space as a totality of potential relations.
The other thing in terms of the ontology,
the logic of Principia Mathematica is a propositional truth
functional logic.
The logic as I try to argue a little bit in-- in my talk and in my paper,
Process and Reality is much more a modal logic.
Possibilities as pure possibilities represent not truth
but possible modes of being.
In contrast, potentialities are actual facts that if the events have
within them multiple causal potentialities which are realized
and which are frustrated in the function of environment
and as Mike said, that environment extends beyond and beyond
and changed in the [inaudible] way that Carolyn references is always
in interaction of internal reality with external reality.
That's very profoundly Whiteheadian.
So the logic in Process and Reality is really a modal logic.
And Professor Leonard was blessed to be a student
of the greatest propositional logician, Whitehead,
and Whitehead is the-- is the one who did most of the deductions
of Principia Mathematica, not Russell.
And also the great modal logician C.I.
Lewis though there is in process reality--
in Process and Reality a shift in the development,
a creative development of the underlying logic.
Unfortunately, Whitehead never articulated that logic,
he utilized the logic of potentiality
and potentiality became a part of actuality.
They didn't exist in a platonic realm of pure abstract possibility.
They are part of the living soul of the actual world,
of the events as they evolved and developed.
So, I think we had to look at Whitehead's own work
as not only calling for its development, its application,
its exploration of its implication, an adventure but we have to see it
as manifesting and an evolution in Whitehead's own ontological concept
and I will make, you know, available for those who are interested,
Professor Leonard's White Language W which is very magnificent work.
It's his magnus opus.
But it's very important that we have a synthesis of propositional
and model logic because Process and Reality cannot be understood.
And cosmology and ontology cannot be understood if Whitehead is correct
without underlying logic that goes beyond the logic and in--
and its ontology of principia.
>> I think Ron has had the last word; we are 5 minutes over time
which to my mind is just on time.
I wanna thank all of our many speakers this morning
for the magnificent job of clear articulation of something that is
so complex, for coming and spending the time with us.
I also wanna thank all of the audience who were here,
all of the library specialists who made it possible
to come together and-- and pull this off and thank you.
May the conversation continue informally.
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.