/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.13749927]

Anyone here actually READ Whitehead and want to talk about him? I am not the retarded Whitehead spammer. I just picked up Process & Reality a few hours ago and I've been struggling through the first few chapters.

The first chapter was pretty easy. Just reads like a pragmatist philosophy of science to me, although I have some complaints about his vision of progressive knowledge, from a Kantian/Humean perspective. But boy was that second chapter a fucking doozy. I've read all the thinkers he's talking about (Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Leibniz), and I still had no idea what the fuck he was saying. The problem isn't even that it's unclear or complex, it's that he doesn't clarify his ontology, which is weird, because he depicts the chapter as THE clarification of his ontology.

I understand he's trying to combine Aristotelian primary substances & Leibnizian monads, but I couldn't get straight what exactly he thinks are the basic monadic units of nature. He mentions at some point that God is one, but so is a random puff of gas in far-off space. I was trying to read it from a logicist and phenomenological perspective, i.e., anything that can be talked-about logically, anything that can be the subject of a predicate sentence, is an "actual entity" (primary substance/monad). But that doesn't seem to square with much of what he's saying.

Could someone more familiar with Whitehead clarify for me what exactly an actual entity is? And how is it distinct from the other stable things in his ontology, the "eternal objects?"

[Anonymous No.13749937]

>>13749927
>2019
>STILL reading Whitehead after he was retroactively refuted by Guenon and Parmenides
ISHYGDDT

[Anonymous No.13749942]

>I couldn't get straight what he thinks are the basic monadic units of nature
The smallest and most fundamental building blocks in his system are actual entities ie. drops of experience.

[Anonymous No.13749965]

>tfw too dum to undstand whythed

[Anonymous No.13749967]

>>13749942
But are those grounded in purely logical/phenomenological, like I thought at first? I.e., are they synonymous/correlated with the "filled intuition" (to use a Husserl phrasing) of some logical judgment (predicate sentence), being either the actually experienced "thing" that is correlated with the subject of the predicate sentence, or the whole subject-predicate sentence altogether?

I can understand how that relates to an Aristotelian primary substance, since there is a purely logical interpretation of the function of primary substances (i.e., a primary substance is simply whatever is the proper subject of a predicate sentence, and is not an ontological theory). But why bring in monads without clarifying their relation to this, if Leibniz's monadology WAS very explicitly ontological?

tldr Is he being phenomenological or ontological? Is he starting from subjective experience or with an objective metaphysics?

[Anonymous No.13749985]

>>13749967
on eternal objects
http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=578

[Anonymous No.13750003]

>>13749967
>Is he starting from subjective experience or with an objective metaphysics?
Experience is a staple of his metaphysics

[Anonymous No.13750006]

http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=578
On eternal objects. Steven Shaviro's blog is a trustworthy source for Whitehead he know his stuff.

[Anonymous No.13750015]

>>13750003
I know, but there are different ways of handling that. You can ontologize the "subjective realm" and turn every subjective "occurring" into a real, actual little "thing," or you can begin phenomenologically, from subjective experience, and THEN try to gain some access to objective reality from there. I can't tell which he is doing.

I guess what I'm asking is, what are the fundamental monads of his system? He says a puff of gas in outer space is an actual entity. But WHY is it an actual entity? Because it can be considered as a logical subject? Or does it become an actual entity when it IS considered as a logical subject? Or is it simply, on its own even if no human consciousness thinks of it, still an actual entity? In the latter case, how do you avoid the standard nominalist critique of Aristotelian primary substances, namely "OK, what exactly counts as a primary substance, and what doesn't, and why?"

Do you see what I'm asking? What makes a puff of gas an actual entity?

>>13750006
Thanks m8, I will check it out.

[Anonymous No.13750027]

>>13750015
Its processual unity. Donald Sherburne's articles on Whitehead are invaluable here.

[Anonymous No.13750061]

>>13750027
But for whom is it a unity? Is it an objective unity, or is it a unity because it can be considered by a thinking subject as such (for example, in the same way that "the fact that I am cold right now" can be treated as a "unity," for purposes of logical predication, and as a fact of consciousness)?

Or is it only a unity once it HAS been considered by a subject as a unity, e.g., in the same way that I could look at a massive gas cloud in outer space, in a telescope image, and divide it up into "regions" based on its apparent shape to me, even though those regions don't really exist, and in fact are an artefact of my subjective perspective of the cloud? This view makes the most sense to me and it's closest to the standard phenomenological/logical view. It's essentially nominalist. But I don't think that's what Whitehead is saying.

Pic related only confused me more. There seems to be exactly the debate I was referencing above, the nominalist problem of what qualifies as a primary substance, going on in Whitehead circles as well. How can something so elemental to his system be unclear?

[Anonymous No.13750082]

>>13750061
I'd be wary of attributing anything to the "thinking subject", that's the kind of thinking Whitehead gets away from. I would say it is a unity for itself, internally regulated and internally confirmed (continuously, until it isn't).

I won't pretend to translate this to Whiteheadian. These are just the intuitions I've gleaned from his texts and secondary sources. sorry

[Anonymous No.13750108]

>>13749927

[Anonymous No.13750399]

He's a hypocrite
>don't bifurcate nature bro
>*bifurcates experience into experience-proper and intellection*
And don't even get me started on his refusal to address the Eleatic doctrine; their observation of the coincide of thought and Being.

[Anonymous No.13750423]

>>13750399
How do you justify saying that's an observation and not a presupposition of the Eleatics?

[Anonymous No.13750482]

>>13749937
>retroactively refuted by Guenon and Parmenides
Every time I read this Guenon and Parmenides get demoted one position in my backlog.

[Anonymous No.13750526]

>>13749927
This guy bears an uncanny resemblance to philosopher and Youtuber Stefan B. Molyneux