Reading Group: 29 November 2011

A detailed discussion of Descartes, Locke, and Hume may make plain how deeply the philosophy of organism is founded on seventeenth-century thought and how at certain critical points it diverges from that thought. [Whitehead, Process and Reality]

This Tuesday, we deliberate on how Whitehead is positioned vis-à-vis other philosophers such as Plato, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant and Newton. We read Chapter 6: Whitehead and Other Philosophers. 

Date: 29 November 2011 (Tuesday)

Time: 2.30 pm

Venue: Library, Department of Philosophy, University of Delhi

Reading Group: 22 November 2011

What is Perception?

Whitehead says: Perception in its primary form is consciousness of the causal efficacy of the external world by reason of which the percipient is a concrescence from a definitely constituted datum. Perception, in this primary sense, is perception of the settled world in the past as constituted by its feeling-tones, and as efficacious by reason of those feeling-tones. Perception, in this sense of the term, will be called 'perception in the mode of causal efficacy'.

Tomorrow we read Chapter 5: Perception from A Key to Whitehead's Process and Reality.

Date: 22 November 2011 (Tuesday)

Time: 2.30 pm

Venue: Library, Department of Philosophy, University of Delhi

Reading Group: 15 November 2011

So far we were engaged in understanding the nature of actual entities that are conceived by Whitehead as the building blocks of the universe. Now we make the transition from a microcosmic analysis to the macrocosmic picture.

Tomorrow we read Chapter 4: Nexus and the Macrocosmic. The project of this chapter is to understand aggregates of actual entities — nexus and societies, types and levels of social organization.

Date: 15 November 2011 (Tuesday)
Time: 2:30 pm
Venue: Library, Department of Philosophy, University of Delhi



And if you think of Brick, for instance.
And you say to Brick: What do you want Brick?
And Brick says to you: I like an Arch.
And if you say to Brick: Look, arches are expensive and I can use a concrete lentil over you. What do you think of that? Brick?
Brick says: …I like an Arch.

[Louis Isadore Kahn]