The Metaphysics of Experience: The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead 3700-AL-TME-QPR

Until recently, the thought of the mathematician turned metaphysician, Alfred North Whitehead, was widely regarded as too obscure, challenging, and even anachronistic to gain wide readership. Indeed, for over a half century, Whitehead’s metaphysics gained precious little attention among philosophers (both “analytics” and “continentals” alike), and was only read in highly scholastic circles of process theology. Times have changed, however, and Whitehead’s thought is increasingly read not only by philosophers and theologians, but also by film and media theorists, artists, designers, anthropologists, biologists, and many others. Part of this turn of favor has to do with a sea change underway in the humanities and social sciences: while many scholars are committed to breaking with their Kantian past, they are doing so by explicitly attending to the nonhuman scales of materiality and relationality that, as Isabelle Stengers reminds us, we no longer have the privilege of ignoring in the age of extreme climate change. Whitehead’s thought, for all its difficulty, directly responds to this contemporary challenge, and for this reason has struck a chord with theorists seeking, among other things, to decenter the “human” in contemporary philosophical registers; to build more-than-human theories of process, relationality, and becoming; and to engage with mathematics and the sciences without privileging them.

Through interactive lectures (30%), assigned readings (30%), writing assignments (30%), and presentations (10%), this seminar examines Whitehead’s metaphysics of experience (conceived over the course of several major works, including Science and the Modern World, Process and Reality, Modes of Thought, Adventure of Ideas) is designed to overcome the crippling habit of modern thought that bifurcates reality into “mental” and “physical” stuff. We look at how this bifurcation plagues modern philosophy, and still debilitates much of contemporary philosophical and scientific thought. Students examine the meaning and function of essential concepts in Whitehead’s system (e.g., actual occasion, concrescence, prehension, eternal object, proposition), and then consider how with many “post-critical” projects dubbed “speculative,” „posthumanist” and “(new)materialist.” In this way, students investigate the enduring legacy of Whitehead’s wor, and we also engage the work of Gilles Deleuze, Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Brian Massumi, Didier Debaise, and others, for whom Whitehead’s thought has proven to be essential to addressing some of the most pressing problems in the twenty-first century. By the end of the course, students gain a critical understanding the emergence and development of Whitehead’s philosophical system and deep appreciation for its relevance today and in the future. Possible guest lectures by notable Whiteheadian philosophers.