I have recently purchased a copy of Alfred North Whitehead's notorious volume, PROCESS AND REALITY. I have long promised myself I would read this book some day. It has long played a part in my own view of the history of philosophy through the 20th century, and I have had sporadic pangs of guilt over not having tackled it myself. I gather from the secondary literature that Whitehead tried to bring a philosophy akin to Henri Bergson's into the world of Anglophonic analytical philosophy. Whitehead of course knew the latter tradition from the inside. The title page of a classic work therein, the PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA, three volumes on the logical foundations of mathematics, bears his name, along with Bertrand Russell's. The third and final volume of PRINCIPIA appeared in 1913. PROCESS came out in 1929. So there were sixteen years between them -- a lot of history (and one world war) and a lot of time for reflection. So ... you might consider Whitehea...
Posts
By Andreas Vrahimis Palgrave Macmillan, 2022 402 pp., $139.99 Reviewed by Christopher C. Faille In the late years of the nineteenth and the early years of the twentieth century, French philosopher Henri Bergson became an international celebrity on the strength of three books, known in English as Time and Free Will , Matter and Memory, and Creative Evolution. Bergson’s philosophy holds that time, novelty, and free will are all closely intertwined realities: The future contains surprises that cannot even in principle have been determined by calculation from the facts that exist today, and future human decisions are among those surprises. Bergson ties this case to a dichotomous view of cognition. He sees a sharp distinction between intelligence and intuition. Intelligence is very useful; it is a survival mechanism for humans, but it cannot grasp the essence of reality: the movement of time. Intelligence geometricizes, reducing time to space and eliminating free w...
The philosophy of Henri Bergson, summarized. (I may have done this before but I can't find that post now, so we'll try again.) Time is real and important: it cannot without loss be treated in Einsteinian fashion as a particular dimension of space; Because time is real, novelty and free will are also realities: the future contains surprises that could not even in principle have been determined by calculation from the facts existing today; One must make a sharp distinction between intelligence and intuition. Intelligence is very useful — it is a survival mechanism for humans — but it cannot grasp the essence of reality, the movement of time. Intelligence geometricizes, which is why intelligent people often find themselves denying the first two propositions; As a philosophy of biology, Bergsonism asserts too that there is something about life that escapes mechanistic formula: that life and its evolution can never be explained as so much organic chemistry. Bergson populariz...
In a famous passage, G.K. Chesterton described the philosophy of medieval Catholicism as the common sense of the human race, the philosophy to which we all tend when we aren't poisoned by ... any of the alternatives. "Since the modern world began in the sixteenth century, nobody's system of philosophy has really corresponded to everybody's sense of reality: to what, if left to themselves, common men would call common sense. Each started with a paradox; a peculiar point of view demanding the sacrifice of what they would call a sane point of view. That is the one thing common to Hobbes and Hegel, to Kant and Bergson, to Berkeley and William James. A man had to believe something that no normal man would believe, if it were suddenly propounded to his simplicity: as that law is above right, or right is outside reason, or things are only as we think them, or everything is relative to a reality that is not there. The modern philosopher claims, like a sort of confidence ma...
Henry, You observe that I spoke in an earlier post of something not-this-worldly about us as humans. You want to know more about what I mean. All definition is founded upon pointing. A dictionary will just send you around in circles if it is complete and you treat it as a closed system. You could learn what all the words in a language mean in relation to each other without learning what any of them really mean in extra-textual terms, unless someone (through illustrations or perhaps the use of an actual index finger) POINTS you to something extra-textual to which one or more of those words alludes. I could try creating the appropriate definition for the not-this-worldly reality I have in mind. But I am wary of chasing words around in a circle. In this case more than others, I can only point toward the something I have in mind. Point toward it without trying to do anything as rigorous as defining it because, after all, if I could define it with my pragmatic this-worldly intellect...