Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

... what does Whitehead have to say about the emergence of consciousness and its place in a largely hostile cosmos? Still working my way through his masterpiece, Process and Reality.  I'm looking especially at Part III (The Theory of Prehensions), Chapter III, "The Transmission of Feelings,' Section IV, where our man seems to be working this through in real time himself.  "It is evident," he says, "that adversion and aversion ... only have importance in the case of high-grade organisms. They constitute the first step toward intellectual mentality, though in themselves they do not amount to consciousness."  He uses the phrase "adversion and aversion" and sometimes "adversion or aversion" repeatedly, with "adversion" apparently meaning attraction and "aversion" meaning repulsion. The two words suggest reaction to lures, positive or negative.  These "high-grade organisms" approach food and they avoid preda...

 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...