>>12677746

i'd like to revive this thread
just found a passage that fit well with my last post
will provide in follow up post

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in process theology and other derivative lones of religious thought, there is often a shirt-sightedness or maybe a willed blindness as to the less agreeable implications of whitehead's cosmology
here is a commentary on plato, but it is on those general notions that whitehead has adopted to his own system
there are rages and terrors in our experience that we cannot ignore or simply think away
and i don't know if equanimity or defiance is the proper stance when they turn their ugly heads toward us

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vanity bump

one more, for posterity, before we are again frozen in time
>me in the middle

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bump

i lied
>A civilized religion should aim at the training of such emotions as naturally rise from a civilized rational criticism of the metaphysical intuitions powerfully influential in great epochs of human history. The appeal to history is the appeal to summits of attainment beyond any immediate clarity in our own individul experience. It is an appeal to authority. The appeal to reason is the appeal to the ultimate judge, universal and yet individual to each, to which all authority must bow. History has authority so far, and exactly so far, as it admits of some measure of rational interpretation

Parmenides' "empty" ontology stands a challenge against Whitehead's philosphy of process. Can a Whiteheadian, or a scholar well-versed in Whitehead, please elucidate how Whitehead overcomes the veritable immovable object that is Parmenides?

i already did, last thread you brought this up
a merely intellectual refusal, on abstract grounds, of an aspect of concrete experience, is insupportable.
whitehead doesn't engage parmenides directly, i think mostly because there isn't enough there to engage, and what is there is opaque and fragmentary. but he *does* take zeno seriously, especially the doctrine of non-motion. his answer is in orocess and reality, most fully elucidated in the chapter on the extensive continuum.
it reads like a geometry textbook. it *is* non-metric geometry. but it is also an answer to the paradox.

This dude seems based af. How do I get into him?

but okay, to make this more interesting
when you say 'becoming requires non-being', what does that even mean?
to use, maybe unfairly, a concrete example: do my fingernails require the absence of fingernails to grow?

wordsworth's preludes
then science and the modern world

>a merely intellectual refusal, on abstract grounds, of an aspect of concrete experience, is insupportable.
What is "merely intellectual", "abstract" and "concrete" within one worldview, is not within another. To the Parmenidean, process is nothing but illusion; abstract, merely intellectual. You speak as if Whitehead has achieved access to aperspective epistemic space. Do you believe he has? As it stands however, Whitehead does nothing to overcome Parmenides.

refute aristotle's refutation of parmenides.

The quality "absence-of-fingernail" IS i.e. it can be predicated of is-ness (of being). Being -> being -> being, ad infinitum. The chain of being is eternal, never broken

whitehead basically agrees with this, the eternailty of reality, though he objects to the subject-predicate formulation.
again, you can't just ignore those aspects of experience which are inconvenient to your argument
thought is not a primary substance--it's not a substance at all. by that, no category or series of categories, nor deduction therefrom, can be taken to overrule reality
make parmenides' argument coherent and we can talk. otherwise, defer to zeno and whitehead's answer there

but let's also get clear on our presupositions and maybe our misunderstandings first
what do you think 'process' is?

>again, you can't just ignore those aspects of experience which are inconvenient to your argument
And you repeat the same, self-defeating argument; change is NOT an aspect of the Parmenidean experience
A continuum of momentary events of experience

i realize i am not articulating myself particularly well, but i also believe you are being deliberately ungenerous in your reception of what i am trying say
parmenides puts forth what argument he has in the form of a mystical vision, an encounter with a goddess, who reveals to him the alleged nature of reality 'as it truly is'. already we are way beyond the bounds of what constitutes normal experience, but my point is actually different than this. parmenides' argument proceeds deductively, and makes no pretense to test his conclusion against what a normal mortal, one without the acquaintance of godsesses, could ever hope to witness. insofar as abstract thinking is still experience--only, obviously, abstract, i.e. purely a mental exercise--it must be command some piece of our respect, as to its cogency and force. but it is incomplete, as is. and if it cannot be conciliated with what we actually find, in our concrete experience, then it is worth less than a glance backward.
what you call 'parmenidean experience' is, as far as i can tell, only meant to be a bit of equivocation, an attempt to confuse the issue by entangling the terms of these two distinct doctrines, to render both incoherent. you have the benefit of your bullheadedness and trollsome attitude. these things don't actually matter to you. but i am trying to answer you in some way that leaves open for others, watching this interchange, a chance to find whitehead amidst the muck your stirring up.
as to your 'definition' of process, there are at least two confusions that stand out immediately.
1) occasions or actual events, the basic 'constituents' of reality, are atomic. continuity is not 'given' for whitehead. as he puts in, there is not a continuity of becoming, but a becoming of continuity. reality is, in a sense, accretive--or a growing together, a 'concrescence'.
2) an event is not 'momentary'--events are logically prior to their temporality (and their spatiality

for the celebrants of christmas among 'us'

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i do not think a non-christian interpretation of whitehead is impossible, but his own interest in christianity's role in the progress of civilization can't simply be set aside.

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to the parmenides-fag:
because the argument is confused by its form, and because whitehead does not address parmenides directly, it is difficult to give an account or defense that would satisfy your demand.
in the limited way you have presented it, i see no challenge by parmenides to the philosophy of organism. that does not mean the eleatic philosophy, generally, does not. if we are to continue this conversation, i would ask that you explain what it is in whitehead's answer to zeno you find inadequate.

i would add that if you are to insist upon the, not *merely*, but *totally* illusory nature of our experience, it must be shown how parmenides was able to 'pierce the veil' and discern the real truth.
for insofar as it is admitted (per and ) that in his argument, parmenides is relating an experience, if only an imaginative and intellectual one, that experience is, as such, suspected of illusion, just as all other experience must be.

and to balance these demands, i offer whitehead's contention that there can be *no* illusion in immediate experience. everything *is* precisely is it is *recieved*. error is the consequence of misinterpretation, which is only possible at a highly complex, sophisticated level of subjectivity.

The Pre-Socratic fragments (Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles) -> Plato (Theaetetus) -> Aristotle (Metaphysics) -> Descartes (Meditations on First Principle) -> Leibniz (Monadology or Discourse on Metaphysics) -> Kant (Critique of Pure Reason or the Prolegommena to any Future Metaphysics) -> Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit or Science of Logic) -> Wh*tehead (Process and Reality)

why this order?
what about the british empiricists?
what about spinoza?
what about newton?

re: occasions
>An occasion of experience is an activity, analysable into modes of functioning which jointly constitute its process of becoming. Each mode is analysable into the total experience as active subject, and into the thing or object with which the special activity is concerned. This thing is a datum, that is to say, is describable without reference to its entertainment in that occasion. An object is anything performing this function of a datum provoking some special activity of the occasion in question. Thus subject and object are relative terms. An occasion is a subject in respect to its special activity concerning an object; and anything is an object in respect to its provocation of some special activity within a subject...
others have advanced similar lines of argument of course. schopenhauer, for instance. but whereas for schopenhauer the subject is necessarily a conscious entity, whitehead gives the concept much broader extension. the human subject relates to its object of concern as much as a hailstone relates to the asphalt it approaches, or vice versa. The difference is in complexity of relation within a nexus.
anyway:
>...Such a mode of activity is termed a 'prehension'. Thus a prehension involves three factors. There is the occasion of experience within which the prehension is a detail of activity; there is the datum whose relevance provokes the origination of this prehension; this datum is the prehended object; there is the subjective form, which is the affective tone determining the effectiveness of that prehension in that occasion of experience. How the experience constitutes itself depends on its complex of subjective forms.