Process Thought & Science 2024

Live Session Info

Dates: July 10 – August 7, 2024
Times: Wednesdays, 12:00 – 2:00 PM Pacific

Course Summary

This five-session course introduces students to Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy, emphasizing its application to modern science and cosmology. It explores the applications of process thought to physics, biology, and neuroscience, as well as its potential for integrating natural science and the humanities.

Course Description

This course introduces students to Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy by exploring its relevance to contemporary natural science and cosmology. The facilitator will introduce Whitehead’s way of thinking about the philosophical presuppositions of science. The course also includes sessions with guest lecturers offering examples of Whiteheadian and other process-oriented approaches to physics, biology, neuroscience, and consciousness studies.

In light of his protest against the modern bifurcation of nature into separate physical and psychical domains, the course examines the ways Whitehead’s process-relational ontology allows us to understand the knowledge produced by natural science as compatible with human experience, including the presuppositions of ethical social relations and cultural self-understanding. Whitehead’s “organic realism” makes it possible to re-enchant the world without contradicting the latest scientific findings. In fact, his Philosophy of Organism provides us with one of the most promising means of integrating the increasingly fragmented natural and social sciences into a comprehensive and potentially civilization renewing vision.

Students can expect to gain a basic understanding of Whitehead’s cosmology and the major categories of his metaphysical scheme. Students will be introduced to Whitehead’s novel interpretations of relativity, quantum, evolutionary, and complexity theories, and will become familiar with the usually unspoken metaphysical assumptions underlying contemporary physicalist cosmology. Students will also come to appreciate the importance of overcoming the artificial modern divide between natural science and the humanities.

Course Outline

• Session 1: How is Natural Science Possible? And how does process philosophy change our understanding of the physical world?
  • Part 1: Whitehead’s Natural Philosophy: The Philosophical Presuppositions of Science
  • Part 2: Whitehead and Evolutionary Cosmology: Dialogue with Brian Swimme
• Session 2: The Place of Life in the Cosmos
  • Part 1: A New Biophilosophical Paradigm: Dialogue with Spyridon Koutroufinis
  • Part 2: Whitehead and Evolutionary Biology: The Agency of Organisms
• Session 3: Panpsychism: The Place of Mind in the Cosmos
  • Part 1: Consciousness in a Living Universe
  • Part 2: What Neuroscience Can Tell Us: Dialogue with Alex Gomez-Marin
• Session 4: Process Science and Participatory Method
  .
• Session 5: Beyond Materialism: Toward a Deeper Naturalism
  • Part 1: The Relevance of Whitehead’s Process Theology to Natural Science
  • Part 2: Process Science and Psychical Research: Dialogue with Ed Kelly