Perhaps the best way into his mature cosmological vision is to begin with his earlier philosophy of science (or natural philosophy) as developed in 'The Concept of Nature' (1920)
Difficult to interpret what lies beneath Whiteheads facial expression as he holds the match to that powder keg! I have seen my 3-year-old granddaughter make that face when mischief is afoot!
Only made it half way through this before I felt a headache coming. On a lite note - I use to go to a Jazz club in NYC called Cleopatra's Needle and if this is where that name comes from - cool! Kudos to to Whitehead for such a freaky reference! Correct me if I am wrong but what he is generally referring to in his thesis on the Concept of Nature in contemporary Consciousness science is now called the qualia or phenomena of experiencing a red color versus a surface deductive materialist breakdown of what part of the electromagnetic spectrum etc. Yet each has a subjective perspective of red as do entire cultures - West and East, North and South.
I had read the greatest minds of world history and I find the way he writes very verbose and tiresome and kind of obvious. Two quotes to wrap up - Einstein - “If you can't explain it to a six-year-old, you don't understand it yourself” And there is a great song by James Brown where the hook sings "Talking a lot but you don't say nothin'"
There are a couple of Needles, one in NYC and one in London. Whitehead means the one in London (it is a large marble obelisk with hieroglyphs).
Whitehead's account of perception is different from the contemporary accounts of "qualia," which tend to be discussed in the terms of subject-predicate logic and substance-property ontology. This is precisely what Whitehead is criticizing, as it ends up turning our qualitative experience of, eg, red, into the private property inside an isolated substantial mind. Whitehead is saying the red is in nature as sensory object situated in events. The events include our body and nervous system, the atmosphere, the sun, the electromagnetic field, etc.
She is borrowing from the neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer, but his view of myth has no real parallel in Kant. The idea is that human beings interface with reality through various "symbolic forms," with myth being one such mode. Cassirer also mentions science and art as other examples of symbolic forms.
Difficult to interpret what lies beneath Whiteheads facial expression as he holds the match to that powder keg! I have seen my 3-year-old granddaughter make that face when mischief is afoot!
mischief is certainly afoot!
Only made it half way through this before I felt a headache coming. On a lite note - I use to go to a Jazz club in NYC called Cleopatra's Needle and if this is where that name comes from - cool! Kudos to to Whitehead for such a freaky reference! Correct me if I am wrong but what he is generally referring to in his thesis on the Concept of Nature in contemporary Consciousness science is now called the qualia or phenomena of experiencing a red color versus a surface deductive materialist breakdown of what part of the electromagnetic spectrum etc. Yet each has a subjective perspective of red as do entire cultures - West and East, North and South.
I had read the greatest minds of world history and I find the way he writes very verbose and tiresome and kind of obvious. Two quotes to wrap up - Einstein - “If you can't explain it to a six-year-old, you don't understand it yourself” And there is a great song by James Brown where the hook sings "Talking a lot but you don't say nothin'"
There are a couple of Needles, one in NYC and one in London. Whitehead means the one in London (it is a large marble obelisk with hieroglyphs).
Whitehead's account of perception is different from the contemporary accounts of "qualia," which tend to be discussed in the terms of subject-predicate logic and substance-property ontology. This is precisely what Whitehead is criticizing, as it ends up turning our qualitative experience of, eg, red, into the private property inside an isolated substantial mind. Whitehead is saying the red is in nature as sensory object situated in events. The events include our body and nervous system, the atmosphere, the sun, the electromagnetic field, etc.
So every little thing is an event? Like within a matrix?
It seems that Langer is Kantian here in her sense of “myth”?
She is borrowing from the neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer, but his view of myth has no real parallel in Kant. The idea is that human beings interface with reality through various "symbolic forms," with myth being one such mode. Cassirer also mentions science and art as other examples of symbolic forms.