Whitehead on the non-mathematical reality

A commentary to the choric commentary on Alfred North Whitehead's The Concept of Nature in The Partially Examined Life:

Whitehead tries to deal with the post-relativistic world as well as with the world of common-sense perception, and it’s a worthy attempt, but he comes up very much with a mathematician’s view of reality and nature. Which is hardly surprising. Several of his weirdest notions make much more sense when read through the lens of George Herbert Mead’s “The Philosophy of the Present”, which tries to deal with many of the same problems from a pragmatist’s perspective (much saner as I see it). Mead manages to incorporate into his naturalist notion of the sociality of all phenomena some of the elements that would seem to lead Whitehead into some really weird pan-spiritualism. It’s not easy reading but it won’t lead you into the corners and contortions that Whitehead gets himself into: https://www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/Mead/pubs2/philpres/Mead_1932_toc.html


More on panpsychism and consciousness here: http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/34263

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