Event overview
A seminar with Michel Weber (Centre for Philosophical Practice, Brussels) under the auspices of the Unit of Play.
This seminar has a threefold aim. The first is to make plain the relevance of Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) for the history of ideas. In a nutshell, Whitehead is the Post-Modern Plato: he not only studied, taught and contributed to all the major sciences, he also devised a unified, coherent and applicable worldview giving a positive ontological status to the ‘sumbebekos’ aka becoming, process, event.
The second aim is to interpret Whitehead secundum Whitehead. How should one read Whitehead? How to make sense of his incredibly dense tissue of imaginative systematizing, spread over decades of work in disciplines so different and specialized as algebra, geometry, logic, relativistic physics and philosophy of science? Whitehead was a ‘living spring, not a tap’ (W. E. Hocking), using the imaginative power of his algebraic mind to propose a cosmology. Process and Reality (1929) is the apex of his work but it should be read only after a long circumambulation.
The third aim is to provide contemporary applications of Whitehead’s thought on three issues: the so-called bifurcation between analytic and continental philosophies, the current global systemic crisis, and the historical development of feminist movements. To a significant extent, a single key can be offered to understand the respective stakes: the Orwellian nature of XXIth century biopolitics.
Michel Weber is the Director of the Centre for Philosophical Practice (Brussels) and Adjunct Professor at the Department of Educational Foundations of the University of Saskatchewan. His current research program mainly deals with political philosophy and the philosophy of psychiatry. Dr. Weber is the author of eight monographs (e.g., Whitehead's Pancreativism: The Basics, 2006) and the (co-)editor of twenty-seven books (e.g., with Will Desmond, Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought, 2008). Sample of his work can be found at http://chromatika.academia.edu/MichelWeber
Paul Stenner is Professor of Social Psychology at the Open University and co-director of the psychosocial programme of the Centre for Citizenship, Identity and Governance. He is the author of Psychology Without Foundations (with Steve Brown, 2009) and has published widely on questions of transdisciplinarity, affectivity and health from a process-theoretical perspective.
Discussant: Paul Stenner (Open University)
Chair: Monica Greco (Goldsmiths)
Image Credit: By Onofrio Scaduto (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 2 Jun 2015 | 5:00pm - 6:30pm |
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