Adventures Of Ideas Research Articles

Bringing the world back in: Revolutions and relations before and after the quantum event

Quantum physics is being positioned as a new archive for addressing major theoretical problems in the field of international relations. Two of the major proponents of engaging quantum thinking within international relations, James Der Derian and Alexander Wendt, have argued that quantum thinking offers the possibility of a major paradigm shift in the field. Before we determine quantum’s revolutionary potential, the persistent and most pressing question for me is how to position quantum thinking among other kinds of and claims to knowledge. I want to horizontalize where different kinds of knowledge sit within the renewed attention to quantum theory. Rather than just horizontalize or flatten ontology, I want to see what happens when we place scientific and philosophical inquiry in dialogue, and what that conversation does to the authority and value of quantum thinking for the social sciences. The article reconstructs the dialogue between the first generation of quantum physicists and the philosophers who informed them. Rather than make an explicit argument about the philosophical debt of physics, I argue that a broad and highly interdisciplinary set of questions drove both fields well beyond the specific areas of expertise of any of these thinkers. I believe this adventure of ideas followed by physicists, philosophers, and social theorists alike offers us a way forward as the complexity of our contemporary global challenges confront us now with the necessity to think well beyond our disciplinary expertise.

관념의 모험과 그 형상들 : 「시간의 문」론

이청준은 복잡하고도 지난한 정신의 실험을 거쳐 진실을 탐구한다. 세계 구조의 취약성으로 인하여 그것은 일종 모험의 형식을 낳곤 한다. 그리하여 그에게 문학 행위는 탐구하는 자의 그것이 된다. 지극히 단조로워 보이는 듯한 한 개인의 삶조차 그 내면성의 과정에는 얼마나 심원하고 또한 음험할 수조차 있는 생각들이 흘러드는가를 그는 궁극으로 추적하고자 한다. 고난이자 환멸의 단계를 거쳐야 하는 이 내적 형식에 자유와 사랑이란 관념이 주어진다. 자유와 사랑은 당신들의 천국이나 자유의 문에서 집적된 이청준 문학의, 그 문학 행위의 목적이 된 관념들이다. 그것은 ｢시간의 문｣에서도 인간 생명에 보존되고 앙양되어야 할 근본정신이어야 한다. 『당신들의 천국』에서 김현이 보고자 한 ‘자유와 사랑의 실천적 화해’는 ｢시간의 문｣에도 여전히 내속한다. 그것은 “타자에게로 향하는 자기 초월적 힘”을 얻으며 “미래로 가는 시간의 문”을 열게 된다.BR ｢시간의 문｣에서 자유는 사진의 의미작용에서 일어나는 불화이고 분쟁인 의미의 불가능성에 가 닿아 있다. 이러한 의미의 논리 구조에서 사진은 소설과 다름없는 창작 텍스트이다. 곧 이청준은 사진을 통해서 다른 방식으로 자신이 끈질기게 탐색해 온 소설론을 모색한 꼴이 된다. 사진은 자유와 사랑이란 문학적 주제의 탐구의 장소이자 또한 소설이란 무엇인가에 대한 자기 모색의 공간이었던 셈이다. 사진이 ‘시간의 문’임을 밝힘은 그렇게 이청준 문학의 정체성을 확인하고 그것을 자리 잡게 하는 방법의 특이성을 또한 분석하는 계기가 될 것이다.

Rytmus a událost krásy

This article starts with an exposition of Whitehead’s conception of beauty in his Adventures of Ideas as a quality exemplified in an actual event. On the basis of his distinction between lower and higher forms of beauty we may reasonably infer that beauty, more precisely an experience of beauty, is formed by several nexuses of events, and eventually by a society of events in the special meaning of ‘society’ in Whitehead’s metaphysics – that is, a multiple interconnection of structured contrasts. Comparison of the phases of the constitution of an actual entity, the rhythm in the process of education, and the role of reason in human cognition and behaviour results in the notion of rhythmical interconnection between the ‘horizontal’ and the ‘vertical’ dimensions of the aesthetic experience, in which the vertical means the realized relationship between the affective and the ‘intellectual’ strata of human consciousness, so that the rhythmical interconnection or rhythm of rhythms forms an inherent component of every aesthetic experience, including an event of beauty.

Speculative cuteness. Adventures of ideas in Adventure Time

The article examines Cartoon Network’s popular television series "Adventure Time," attempting to demonstrate that the show’s use of cuteness is highly subversive and can be interpreted as an attempt to problematize accepted notions of childishness and maturity. Its cute design may be viewed as a way in which social anxieties of so-called millennials find proper expression. At the same time, it could announce the necessity to develop new sensibilities that would form an adequate response to the challenges of the Anthropocene. To conceptualize these issues, the article utilizes the philosophical theories of Alfred North Whitehead (speculative philosophy) and Catherine Malabou (brain plasticity).

The Eros and Tragedy of Peace in Whitehead’s Philosophy of Culture

One of the most intriguing and underappreciated aspects of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy is his treatment of peace as a civilizational aim of culture. The problem of peace is the subject in the final chapter of Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas. It is considered along with the other four qualities of civilized societies, “Adventure, Art, Beauty, and Truth.” Although his analysis is driven by examples from Western and Christian history, respectively, the treatment of peace developed is not limited to this or any specific experiential epoch. Peace is a transcultural value, the “harmony of harmonies,” which lies at the heart or in the “nature of things.” Whitehead designates the permanence-flux contrast of peace in human life as a tension between the “dream of youth” and “harvest of tragedy.” Our lives give way to the dance of the possible and actual that both unites and divides us. This article explains how Whitehead attempts to argue for peace by way of “balanced intensity” in response to the triumphs and tribulations of life. Section one deals with the ways in which youth and eros symbolize possibility and orient us toward the possible. Tragedy, or the determination of the individual in its own subjective realization and the consequent nature it produces through the “unity of adventure,” is the focus of the second section. In section three, the erotic-tragic contrast is presented in relation to peace as an “intuition of permanence.” In conclusion, Whitehead’s humanism will be offered as a viable alternative against the modern belief of progress or the quest for worldly success, in which prosperity becomes antithetical to the achievement of peace given its propensity to evade or outrun tragedy.

Wisdom, management and organization

The motive of success is not enough. It produces a short-sighted world which destroys the sources of its own prosperity ... A great society is a society in which its men of business think greatly about its function. Low thoughts mean low behaviour, and after a brief orgy of exploitation, low behaviour means a descending standard of life. (Alfred North Whitehead, Lecture given at Harvard Business School, 1932, published in Adventures of ideas, 1933, pp. 119–120)

From Sefer Ha'aggadah to the Jewish Bookcase: Dynamics of a Cultural Change

Sometimes adventure is acting within limits. It can then calculate its end, and reach it. Such adventures are the ripples of change within one type of civilization, by which an epoch of given type preserves its freshness. But, given the vigor of adventures, sooner or later the leap of imagination reaches beyond the safe limits of the epoch, and beyond the safe limits of learned rules of taste. It then produces the dislocations and confusions marking the advent of new ideals for civilized effort. Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas

1. The Courage to Teach: Whitehead, Emotion, and the Adventure of Ideas

The importance of moral courage to teaching and learning has been recognized by a number of authors. The process pedagogy of Alfred North Whitehead proposes that emotion is central to experience and to the imaginative questioning which enables learning and the ability to stand up for one’s beliefs. Faculty who wish to connect with their students should recognize this fact lest ideas become “inert.” In contrast, process pedagogy encourages a holistic, cyclical approach in which students and faculty engage in the “adventure of ideas” as a balance between freedom and self-discipline. This search for new ideals involves certain risks, as both a recent example of alternative higher education and Whitehead’s own vision of the university show. Process pedagogy’s synthesis of the emotional and intellectual can spur imaginative critique and the capacity to put one’s ideas into practice.

Creativity and Causality

Abstract Many readers of Process and Reality have felt the absence of a robust theory of efficient causation in Whitehead’s final position. There have been numerous remedies proposed, including Whitehead’s own (in Adventures of Ideas), but all of them fail to make what to me is a crucial distinction between creative and noncreativeforms of activity. The activity of the superject, the basis for causal activity, is derived from the creativity of concrescence, but is itself noncreative. It is simply the impress of the past, lacking in itself any genuine novelty.

Creativity and Causality

Many readers of Process and Reality have felt the absence of a robust theory of efficient causation in Whitehead's final position. There have been numerous remedies proposed, including Whitehead's own (in Adventures of Ideas ), but all of them fail to make what to me is a crucial distinction between creative and noncreative forms of activity. The activity of the superject, the basis for causal activity, is derived from the creativity of concrescence, but is itself noncreative. It is simply the impress of the past, lacking in itself any genuine novelty.

In Defense of Secularizing Whitehead

This essay responds to Lewis Ford’s “Allan’s Atheism,” in which he assesses a recent essay of mine that finds God an unnecessary and indeed coherence-destroying addition to Process and Reality . I clarify my position by showing how Whitehead’s notions of physical purpose and aesthetic determination adequately account for the novelty required for an actual occasion’s concrescence and for increases in achieved value. I then criticize Ford’s claim that genuine novelties must have a divine origin and that in Adventures of Ideas the Eros of the Universe refers to God.

Dialogues at One Inch above the Ground: Reclamations of Belief in an Interreligious Age (review)

Reviewed by John Berthrong Boston University School of Theology Dialogues at One Inch Above the Ground: Reclamations of Belief in an Interreligious Age. By James W. Heisig. New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 2003. 215 pp. Few scholars are better prepared than James W. Heisig to write about the current state of Buddhist-Christian dialogue, and few have written more insightfully about the historical, theological, religious, and spiritual factors that have made Buddhist-Christian dialogue so intriguing for the last four decades. Heisig is the director of the Nanzan Institute, one of the premier institutions in the world dedicated to cultivating dialogue primarily between Christians and Buddhists, but also with people of other traditions and no religious belief at all. The title of the book is taken from the writings of the famous medieval poet Saigyō, who said that he tried to live at "one inch above the ground." Heisig follows Saigyō's advice by focusing many of his articles on themes such as health and ecology rather than abstruse metaphysical discussions of the intricacies of Buddhist and Christian doctrines, although, as one would expect, he shows a deft hand at explaining the philosophical and theological dimensions of living life at one inch above the ground. The opening two chapters on how we can collectively view the current ecological crisis demonstrate Heisig's sure hand at moving between profound meditations on current events and demonstrating how these problems can be even better understood in terms of spiritual and religious insights. Heisig argues that having two eyes, one Buddhist and one Christian, might just help us walk better on the ground, especially a ground that is being harmed on a daily basis by human disregard for the natural environment. His essay on the interpretation of the Buddhist principle of sufficiency is based on the injunction that we should learn to "consider how much is enough." The following essay demonstrates how hard-headed he can be with his call for us not to move from an uncaring contempt for nature to an equally ill-conceived sentimentalization of nature. There are so many insightful and clever features to the essays in the book that it is hard to pick out any one essay for special comment, but one of my favorites, high-lighting [End Page 213] Heisig's rhetorical powers, is "Six Sūtras on Dialogue" (pp. 139–157). This essay demonstrates what a Christian theologian might learn from engaging in interreligious dialogue. Moreover, it even takes the form, as Heisig explains, of the traditional Buddhist sūtra of six teachings on the nature of dialogue. Dialogue, according to Heisig (echoing Alfred North Whitehead), "is an adventure of ideas" (p. 141). The first teaching is "The spirit of interreligious dialogue need not be born of traditions in order to be reborn there" (p. 145). One of the strong points Heisig makes over and over again is that we now live with increasing self-awareness in a religiously pluralistic world. Actually, we always have, though various theological traditions have been adept at either ignoring or rejecting the notion that there could be anything positive about religious pluralism. At its worst, pluralism simply demonstrated the spiritual depravity and turbidity of humankind, and at best, it could simply be ignored as unworthy of serious comment. With the growing social, political, economic, military, and cultural interconnections of the modern world, no one can ignore pluralism. Theologians and religious leaders, in particular, need to think about religious pluralism even if this dialogue is not something that was "born" within their traditional theological discourse. The second teaching is a corroloary of the first: "Dialogue is primarily a minority enterprise that stands free of the obligations of institutional religion" (p. 147). Now, the leaders of institutional religion might dispute this point, but again Heisig is correct in noting that people are going to talk to their neighbors regardless of what they are told to do by worried religious authorities. He makes the...

Saving Whitehead’s Universe of Value

Saving Whitehead’s Universe of Value

The Mortal Blessings of Narrative

Go, go, go, said bird: human kind Cannot bear very much reality. Time past and time future What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present.I Introduction: Narrative and Autobiography In many corners it has been rightly argued that ideas take their time to emerge, develop, and spread.1 For those of us who may desire changes to fundamental nature of Western civilization, patience thus often appears as virtue. In a recent issue of Philosophy Today, however, Arran Gare notes that some of us becoming impatient. Problems now confronting us call for a more response.3 By way of this immediate response, Gare argues that what is necessary is formulation of philosophical position underpinned by process philosophy and, indeed, much important work has been done by Gare in this area.4 Having achieved this, then, what is required is reconstrual of world in terms of this philosophy, whereby common understandings embodied by people replaced by a metaphysic that does justice to world, rather than one which attempts to control it. Here, justice is understood as the proper appreciation in thought and practice of what all beings are, of what is their present situation, of what they have been through, of what they contributed to common good of world and what their potentialities.5 Gare argues that best way for individuals, communities, and institutions to reconceptualise themselves in this way is through narratives. As I have argued myself, this is because narratives way in which humans sense of world, including its peoples, institutions, and myriad individuals.6 As such, by reconceptualising nature of institutions through narratives, outlining those elements of narratives that problematic, and developing alternative narratives based on process philosophy, individuals and groups seeking change will be in a better position to speed up sloth-like `adventures of ideas' necessary for fruitful change. Essential to this argument for narrative and, mutatis mutandis, cultural change based on 'stories', is notion of autobiography.7 In agreement, Paul Ricoeur writes: What justifies our taking subject of an action, so designated by his, her, or its proper name, as same throughout a life that stretches from birth to death'? The answer has to be narrative.... Unlike abstract identity of Same, this narrative identity can include change. mutability, within cohesion of one's lifetime.... As literary analysis of autobiography confirms, story of a life continues to be refigured by all truthful or fictive stories subject tells about himself or herself.8 As such, 'self' understood as an autobiography can be reevaluated, reauthored, and relived, just as long as these refigurations engage with various articulations and interpretations constitutive of narrative's background, and overcome them appropriately. This done, new self may further evaluate those elements of its story that conflict with various institutional, vocational, social, and cultural relationships constitutive of wider sense of self illuminated by autobiography. In short, contradictions in world pertaining to oneself thus become contradictions in oneself. In response to such contradictions, as David Carr writes, we are composing and constantly revising our autobiographies as we go along.10 However, if we acknowledge realist position, we should note that autobiographies, qua stories, partly constituted by scenes that play before them. Thus, as Karl Marx writes, people make their own history, but they do not it just as they please; they do not it in circumstances chosen by themselves.11 Indeed, this sentiment has been amply acknowledged and negotiated by narrative theorists Alasdair MacIntyre12 and Carr. …

Process Philosophy and the Possibility of Critique

ed phase of conformal feeling is not meant to imply that such a phase could, in concrete, ever occur alone. concrete becoming of an actual entity is always dipolar and atemporal. This discussion is for purposes of analytic clarity only. It is a discussion that can occur only within genetic division. 9. For a superb treatment of these notions, see Jorge Luis Nobo, Whitehead's Metaphysics of Extension and Solidarity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986). 10. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 42. 11. This is, I suppose, a rather fundamental notion of psychology. past presents possibil ity of its overcoming. But I emphasize again that non-conformal proposition emerges from feeling of specific situation to which that proposition refers. As evidence of this, I have noticed, when teaching African American Philosophy, that many white students in class will repeatedly say that does not matter believing that this pronouncement is very liberal and liberating. They do not understand that only someone who has not been subjected to racism can make this claim. For those who are oppressed on basis of their race, race always matters. It is (processively) a part of who they are because it is a part of landscape out of which they must construct themselves. 12. Take, for example, recent event of mainstream media being increasingly acquired by major corporations. Such acquisition allows a certain formal characteristic of these media to appear rather more evidently and starkly than it has in past. 13. See Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 19-34. 14. See Noam Chomsky, Chomsky Reader, ed. James Peck (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), 121-36. notion of the manufacture of consent was, Chomsky points out, coined by Walter Lippmann to indicate a revolution in practice of democracy (136). Needless to say, what Lippmann saw as a great advance, Chomsky sees as fundamentally antithetical to freedom. 15. This may be at heart of Walter Benjamin's notion of dialectical image and its explo sive revolutionary potential. 16. See Max Horkheimer The Authoritarian State, in Essential Frankfurt School Reader, eds. Andrew Arato and Mike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1995), 115-17. 17. original line is, of course, Thinking of key, each confirms a prison. line is from The Waste Land, in T. S. Eliot, Waste Land and Other Poems (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, Inc., 1934), 45. 18.1 should hope that one would think here of Derrida's astounding passage: let us never neg lect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, never have so many men, women, and children been subjugated, starved, or exterminated on earth, from Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: State of Debt, Work of Mourning, and New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 85. 19. Karl Marx, Grundisse: Foundations of Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1973), 542. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.112 on Wed, 29 Jun 2016 05:22:44 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Process Philosophy and Possibility of Critique 49

Philosophy, Civilization, and the Global Ecological Crisis

In Science and the Modern World Alfred North Whitehead proclaimed: Philosophy is the most effective of all the intellectual pursuits . . It is the architect of the buildings of the spirit, and it is also their solvent:-and the spiritual precedes the material. Philosophy works slowly. Thoughts lie dormant for ages; and then, almost suddenly as it were, mankind finds that they have embodied themselves in institutions.1 Whitehead's conviction was based on his analysis of the seventeenth century scientific revolution and aftermath, and he further defended it through the historical studies described in Adventures of Ideas. Such a conviction is encouraging to those involved in developing philosophical ideas who, for whatever reason, have become convinced that civilization requires a radical reorientation in thought. It suggests there is reason for optimism, at least in the long term. But some of us are becoming impatient. Problems now confronting humanity call for a more immediate response. The global ecological crisis is a crucial case in point. It is this, I believe, that makes the practical success of radical philosophical ideas an imperative rather than an ideal. What would such success involve? What does it mean for thoughts to be embodied in institutions? How did past thoughts come to be so embodied? And how might new philosophical ideas come to be embodied in this way? To this end we need to analyze the relationship between philosophies, individual and collective action, and institutions. The work of Alasdair MacIntyre provides a useful starting point for such an analysis. MacIntyre has squarely faced the present problematic status of philosophy in Anglophone countries and reflected deeply on the relationship between philosophy and social life. Such reflections have led him to defend systematic philosophy and to consider the relationship between philosophy and narratives. He has argued that narratives are central to adjudicating between fundamentally different ways of thinking, and that narratives are constitutive of social life and are of central importance to ethics. While Maclntyre has not fully developed his ideas on narratives nor sought to integrate his observations on these issues, my contention is that doing so reveals the crucial missing link between systematic philosophies and everyday life. The missing link is narratives; that is, stories. Systematic Philosophy, Narratives, Practices, and Institutions Philosophy, Maclntyre argues, is now seen to be: a harmless, decorative activity, education in which is widely believed to benefit by exercising and extending the capacities for orderly argument, so qualifying those who study it to join the line of lemmings entering law school or business school. The professor of philosophy, on this view, stands to the contemporary bourgeoisie much as the dancing master stood to the nobility of the ancien regime. The dancing master taught the eighteenth-century expensively brought up young how to have supple limbs, the philosophy professor teaches their twentieth-century successors how to have supple minds.2 Academic philosophy, with its piecemeal character, selective history and inability to bring any issue of importance to agreed resolution,3 provides no basis for opposing this popular view. But, Macintyre argues, pre-philosophical discourse invariably gives rise to what are essentially philosophical questions. Present day philosophers are not doing their job. They are not providing solutions to these problems but are proliferating arguments which confuse rather than clarify pre-philosophical discourse. Only systematic philosophies can provide the requisite means to provide determinate solutions to the issues raised by pre-philosophical discourse. A philosophy is systematic, MacIntyre proposed: when as large a range as possible of the problems, incoherencies and partial unintelligibilities of prephilosophical discourse, action and enquiry are made the subject matter of an enquiry in which the questions to be answered are of the form: How are all these to be understood in the light of the best unified and integrated conception of rationally adequate enquiry possessed so far? …

David Gauthier and The Development of a Contractarian Morality

AbstractThe appearance of the following pages might suggest an "intellectual biography". My purpose is not, though, to offer such a simple thing (interesting as it might be). Indeed, I would like to follow the evolution of Gauthier's thought not only to show how a thinker evolved from a particular view about a particular problem toward a quite original and suggestive formulation, but also to deepen our comprehension of moral contractarianism and its implications, by means of its contextualization. For this reason, I will focus not on Gauthier's philosophical production as a whole (we will pay little attention to his historical works, for example), but on the papers and works that mark the line toward moral contractarianism as it is found in Morals by Agreement (henceforth MA). The trajectory we are about to go over is not, therefore, only a personal adventure (though it will be displayed this way), but (if I may use this pompous language) the adventure of ideas. This will not be an easy journey. Our focus on the historical development of concepts will prevent us from giving a fully systematic account of every one of them. The unfamiliar reader may be disappointed as we use somewhat strange terms without completely explaining their meaning. We beg acquiescence with our method, hoping that, on the whole, the essential ideas will be understandable without a detailed discussion.

Whitehead's intellectual adventure

This article traces Whitehead's own adventure of ideas, . especially the way in which he gradually worked out his concept of God. This adventure had its own dark side. Whitehead was impatient with the process of preparing his manuscript for publication. In Science and the Modern World, he left his original lectures intact, even though his additions espouse a very different orientation to time. The original lectures are about events, each infinitely divisible, while the additions examine occasions, which are atomistic and not further divisible without loss of actuality. This is often overlooked because we tend to assume a book should represent a single unit of interpretation. In this case the book is read as if it were all about occasions, when most of the book is about events. In Process and Reality Whitehead determined to leave everything he had written intact, even though he seems to have changed his mind on crucial points some 13 times. Because all these passages are simply placed side by side, they offer valuable clues as to his intellectual adventure, which is examined in this essay in terms of its three successive concepts of God: God as non-temporal, as the conceptual realization of all forms and as the temporal experience of the world.

Notion of Truth in Adventures of Ideas of Alfred North Whitehead

Notion of Truth in Adventures of Ideas of Alfred North Whitehead

New Tools vs Old Methods: A description of the CHEMCONF '93 discussion

During the on-line conference on “Applications of Technology in Teaching Chemistry” held between 12 June and 20 August 1993 the topic “New Tools vs Old Methods” generated wide interest. This paper is based on the discussions surrounding this topic during the conference and on participants' reactions to a document that summarized the major points made during that discussion. The conference consensus and necessity for using new computer tools in chemical education are supplemented with ideas drawn from the literature. The integration of new pedagogical techniques with the new technology is seen as essential for effective use of computer tools in chemical education. Participants responded very enthusiastically to CHEMCONF. The advantage of computer conferencing as a new tool for educators lies in the opportunity for wide, in depth participation in an adventure of ideas.