>>25610060
Tried it for a few weeks after having read his principles of natural knowledge, concept of nature & science and the modern world. P&R is nothing like these. It is a piece of unashamed speculative metaphysics. It is baroque and bizarre. It needs to be read page by page if not line by line, but the analytic philosophers having done so have had very little nice to say. e.g. the mereology in the book is given as a corrective to the failed mereology of pnn, but in P&R it is blatantly inconsistent, I mean embarrassingly - especially for an author of the principia. Whitehead had lots of notable phd students, including Quine, but none of them, to my knowledge, wrote on P&R. The book *was* taken up by continental philosophers, notably Deleuze, who seemed to find something worthwhile. I have nothing to say there.
All that being said it contains many beautiful passages reconciling art & philosophy, and memorable one liners (“footnotes to plato”).
Soz bad grammar, phoneposting.

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/regulars/55561/wittgensteins-forgotten-lesson

>>25610092
i tried to get into it but i couldn't. maybe i'll try again some day.

>>25610092
yeah whitehead basically mogged D&G with this shit, and it's fucking immediately obvious when you read Anti-oedipus because they cant yapping about "the process" or the NOTORIOUSLY god awful translation of " the flow"

>>25610060
Post-analytical (neo-) "Neo"platonism
Plotino-schellingian twist to William James systematized.

>>25610978
asking genuinely, what books have brought you to see it as this?

>>25610060
This book seemed widly inaccessible when I got a copy from my library for a bit.

>>25610092
Someone told me that there's an annotated edition of this that is extraordinarily helpful. Any knowledge of this?

>>25611107
*heavily annotated. He said I shouldn't bother reading it unless I scored a copy.

>>25610985
Whitehead says this, his main influences are Platonists and William James

>>25611111
Checked. No, no knowledge of this, sorry.

>>25610060
i thought you were reading that bret easton ellis book?

>>25611404
Yeah, I have as well, which is why I made the inquiry

>>25610060
I wonder what Russell and Whitehead would have thought of Bell's theorem, and the extended Wigner friend thought experiments. They were both aware of the developments of the "new" physics, especially relativity and quantum mechanics (to an extent) and this heavily informed their later philosophies- Whitehead with PR and Russell with his neutral monism. I've read that Whitehead didn't keep up with all the developments of quantum mechanics, though. I'm not sure whether Russell did either.

>>25612511
FWIW Whitehead met Einstein--spent an evening with him--in which he failed to convince him of his interpretation of general (or special, I don't remember) relativity, chiefly revolving around an ontology of, only of, events. Einstein couldn't see why a point-free ontology was desirable. I may be misremembering this last. I can't remember where I read it.

>>25610092
>>25612573
P.S. I wish the secondary literature on the later Whitehead wasn't one and all so fucking terrible. I can't read any of it, the first lines are almost always enough to put me off. What gives? Does process philosophy exclusively attract second-, third-, fourth-, fifth-rate philosophers? Sellars had a process phase: Brandom says he never understood what he (Sellars) saw in it, and it was, in any case, short lived. And why does it so disproportionately attract artists? I am so strongly drawn to it, and yet there are no heroes, sans Whitehead, of the field. Sigh.

Bergson introduces duration/Time via intensive magnitudes, a concept which originated in Newton (then through Kant onto Bergson), and which Berkeley lampooned, famously, as being as "irrational" as belief in God, hence the loudmouthed atheism of Newton's followers was hypocritical. & In CPR Kant tries to give a transcendental argument for the existence of intensive magnitudes in sensation, but the argument is notoriously and uncontroversially terrible, even those that defend/fix it admit it. Allison recommends that the critique be read without that section, and would have preferred if the CPR had been published without it. And then there is James' "passage" which Wittgenstein thought was paradigmatic of philosophical conclusion (though he commended James for at least expressing himself clearly--rare lavish praise). In any case the notion, of passage, process, etc., has an extremely fucked, at least modern, history.

>>25612652
Isn’t Bergson’s goal with Duree (at least in Matter and Memory, dunno about later stuff) a rebuke of Kantian accounts of space time? It seems to me that advocating for a strong separation of ‘the real time’ - as a heterogenous multiplicity - from ‘spatialized time’ we model in experience complicates things a bit. Even if he’s in error in his account of Duree, I’m not sure it makes sense to lump in this error with the same problems faced Kantian (or especially Newtonian) accounts of time.

>>25612573
From what I remember, Whitehead had an alternative version of relativity that was at the time empirically equivalent to Einstein's. It only became empirically falsified decades after he put it forward. Whether that weighs on points vs events, I have no idea. It's interesting that Russell also interpreted relativity as doing away with things and instead put forward events as the ontology of physics. I don't know if he got that from Whitehead or what. In some of Russell's later papers on physics he uses some terms like concrescence, I believe, which he may have picked up from Whitehead. The real interest to me is whether either of them appreciated the questions the measurement problem raises.

>>25612678
Intensity, for Kant, involves a different notion of time than his 'spatialised' time, it is a very strange, in some ways arcane, section of CPR. He introduces them, like Bergson (first in Time & Free Will), in contrast, as you point out, with extensive ('spatialised', part->whole, commutative, homogenous) magnitudes. The latter are given as additions of homogenous units, where "the representation of the parts makes possible the representation of the whole (and therefore precedes the latter)", unlike intensive magnitudes which are given as indivisible wholes, those "which can only be apprehended as a unity, and in which multiplicity can only be represented through approximation to negation=0". But this "approximation to negation=0" (whatever the fuck that means) is given under a different sort of time, the time of a "moment" or "point". Since they are grasped always as wholes, 'multiplicity' or 'parts' within these can only be thought through the imagined possibility of continuous change from one degree of intensity to another, like two brightnesses of a flame. The weirdness is this isn't a change one could actually, literally, observe, over some period of time. "Every sensation", he says, "has a degree or magnitude, through which it can more or less fill the *same time*" [emphasis mine] (A143/B182). The notion is thoroughly Bergsonian, he just pressed the point, took it seriously.

>>25610060
British man reinvents Plato.

>>25612690
Yes, you are right, I read up on it on the SEP. And yes, he did get it from Whitehead: it was the site of their falling out. Russell published on Whitehead's event based (point-free) ontology without his permission, under his own name & before Whitehead had, specifically on his theory of constructing points out of events by means of infinitely "overlapping" events, converging, intuitively (though not really, it is a little more complicated), to those points - his "method of extensive abstraction" - which was to make up the final, unpublished, section of the principia. Unhappy stuff.
RE: Whiteheadian terms, he also popularised the word "prehend" (a form of tactile grasp) which one finds in Broad, and occasionally in contemporary philosophy of perception.
No idea on the measurement problem, sounds interesting.

>>25612652
I think it is because some people think process philosophy vindicates their ideological conceptions of the good life. But imo, ontology is superfluous scum when it comes to conceptions of the good. Take buddhism and advaita vedanta as examples. Buddhism is process philosophy, vedanta is almost parmenidean. And yet, their sages are practically the same. Meanwhile, western processualists tend to think that this somehow justifies their dandy lifestyle of constantly reinventing themselves and chasing different desires. The opposite of buddhism.
I fucking hate this world. God must really like fucking with us.

>>25612738
>superfluous
Meant superficial

>>25612730
Ah I see, thanks. Though I suppose later in that same section there’s a line about time as “unchangeable and permanent” (B183|A144), which to me just seems incompatible with our experience of the memory image. The past keeps building up like thread on a winding spool and the future does not literally exist but is always in a process of unfolding, becoming actual. I’m not sure that any part of time is, for Bergson, summative or determinate as Kant suggests.
This said, I think you’re correct w/r/t a shared characterization of sensation here. It would be interesting to see if there are any really thorough dives into this — Deleuze would be the obvious consideration but I don’t recall this specific issue coming out as described by you in “Bergsonism.”

>>25612738
Yes, I agree with you, but why does it vindicate "their ideological conceptions of the good life"? What about it? Is it a feeling that we are bound, forced, to endure in time; that 'process' provokes a feeling of our helplessness? Is it that it just a basically mystical philosophy, beginning and ending in value, i.e., quasi-religious? Gestalt psychology, that other 'science' contemporary, but ignorant, with Whitehead, never took off for also seeming mystically suspect.

(A bit confused on your assimilation of Parmenidean philosophy to process philosophy, if this was your point with 'Vedanta Buddhism' (I have no idea about this). Parmenides is the antithesis to process philosophy, the antithesis to Heraclitus. But I guess it doesn't affect your point that Buddhism is ascetic where "dandy" proccessualists aren't?)

>>25612737
>measurement problem
It really is interesting. One can get such radically different interpretations about what our fundamental physics is telling us based off how one interprets this issue. Since there is talk in this thread of James some of you might be interested in knowing that one of the interpretations of quantum mechanics is called QBism. Its chief proponent is inspired by James and also the phenomenologists. There is lots of interesting work going on in the foundations of physics field. There are various papers on No-Go theorems. The idea being that you put forward some metaphysical presuppositions (some may claim them as physical principles, I take no real stance) and churn it through the quantum formalism and you arrive at contradictions meaning that one or more of the presuppositions are false. This has led to some very interesting results in terms of what's on the table. Though I am no expert and am already in danger of overstepping myself, so I won't go on.

>>25612742
Sounds about right, there's definitely a disconnect somewhere between Bergson and Kant, yea. Not sure where to pinpoint it, not knowledgeable enough.
On Deleuze, yes, I assume so. I've only read summaries of his philosophy by A.W. Moore (by the by, a fascinating figure: accomplished Oxford analytic philosopher who also writes on figures like Deleuze) and intensity is there front and centre.

>>25612755
Thanks for this, I will have a glance at the theories. I've toyed for so long with reading physics. There are a few things that put me off, first and foremost is that my hero, Wittgenstein, thought that advanced knowledge of maths (and so, I assume, physics) was unnecessary, even a hindrance, for philosophising about it; second that W thought popular interest in the "latest discoveries of physics" was the most base tendency of the public of his time; third that it would be an enormous time sink. But I am envious anytime I hear someone competently talk about it.

>>25612758
Also should mention that I (very) strongly suspect that understanding intensity is key to understanding swathes of modernist painting and sculpture.

>>25610060
God this is a blast from the fucking past. 10+ years ago the catalog always had a Process and Reality thread.

>>25610060
I did a special project on Whitehead in undergrad. You should start with Science and the Modern World, Process and Reality will be much easier to digest if you do. The latter is very poorly written.
>>25611343
He gives a very long list of influences in the beginning of PR. What you say is correct insofar as one way of understanding his point of view is as a correction to the pragmatists who ignore the unavoidability and necessity of metaphysical speculation. Whitehead specifically looks back to Plato, not to other Platonists, and even more specifically to A.E. Taylor's presentation of Plato. British Idealism is deeply influential for Whitehead, PR is essentially a critique of it. The dualism of eternal objects and actual occasions means that there is no Plotinian One for Whitehead. In fact between SMW and PR, he changes his mind on whether God is an eternal object or an actual occasion. Process theology, the theory of a God in process as an actual occasion, begins with PR.

>>25610092
>deleuze but analytic
This is probably the best description of the feel of the book. Reading 1KP unprepared feels like a string of in-jokes you are not in fact in on; reading PnR unprepared feels like opening up a math textbook two grades up.

>>25612690
Russell basically retired from serious philosophy during the war and everything after should be read as an attempt to make a political career for himself like his grandfather or to sell books and make some money because he didn’t got any.

Not that Russell isn’t intersting even after the war but he’s not actually trying to do serious work so much as promote his own celebrity. Can’t hardly blame him given he was a a celebrity in a time when intellectuals were actually respected and appreciated by the public.

White head seems to dislike Russell and Russell’s ideas and so thought to simply go the opposite way. Russell didn’t really follow his career at all after PM was published and didn’t give PR serious thought as it was completely contrary to his own personal view (on purpose).

They got along professionally and supposedly Russell did the philosophy in PM and Whitehead did the Logic and they would revise each others work so that it was truly written by them both.
Whitehead was seemingly peeved that Russell got the credit for PM. Sort of a Paul and John bit of jealousy

>>25614702
Russell retired from philosophy after a, now famous, tumultuous encounter with Wittgenstein, finding himself no longer "available to do foundational work in philosophy". Wittgenstein eviscerated him horribly. Russell says it in a letter, also famous, to Ottoline Morrell; and FWIW Michael Potter--Cambridge's resident Wittgensteinian--says that an account of W's objection to Russell, the one that "paralysed" him, is a rite of passage for scholars of early analytic philosophy.

Before the war Russell and Whitehead got on famously, Russell even funded a large part of Whitehead's life (without his knowledge: it would, apparently, mortify him). He goes over it in one of his many autobiographies. Also Russell won the Nobel prize for his post-war writings. He had a strong social conscience; they were not written solely for the furtherance of his celebrity.

As I mentioned earlier, the site of their falling out was Russell's publishing, without Whitehead's permission, on Whitehead's theory of "extensive abstraction", what would have been the last instalment of the principia. They were also already on tenuous philosophical ground. Russell accepted Whitehead's empiricism, but not his idealism (Russell, with Moore, had led the "charge against [British] idealism"), chiefly Whitehead's belief that, as Russell would put it, a proposition can be true or false not independently of other propositions. And Whitehead had sympathies with Bradley, James, and Bergson, whilst Russell had earlier written a scathing review of Bergson.

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