Presenter(s): Lisa Landoe Hedrick

Topic: The Artisanship of Facthood

Dr. Lisa Landoe Hedrick will explore “The Artisanship of Facthood: Thinking with Whitehead on the Fragility of a Common World.”  It’s a timely theme articulated in her June 3 article in Sightings, “Alfred North Whitehead and the ‘Facts’:  How an old philosophical trap continues to ensnare us today.”  (Before Tuesday, please read it!)  Her conclusion?  “If we are to make our way out of this era of ‘alternative facts,’ then we must beware the trap of appealing to the world of facts as some kind of bedrock. We would do better to remember that ‘facts’ themselves are constituted by the social relationality of belonging. In other words, we will not be able to persuade each other with facts alone, but must begin with what it means to be in relation with one another.”

Dr. Landoe Hedrick will elaborate on the context of the article, which draws upon her recent book, Whitehead and the Pittsburgh School: Preempting the Problem of Intentionality, and how it relates to her intellectual concerns going forward. Reviewing the book, Nancy Frankenberry (Dartmouth College) said, “Not since the pioneering work of the late George W. Shields has a Whitehead scholar tackled the critical relation of Whitehead to analytic philosophy. Hedrick does it here in a thoroughly up-to-date and decisive way with a brilliant focus on the meaning of intentionality and the need to make sense of the relationship between mind and world.”

Lisa Landoe Hedrick (Ph.D. U of Chicago, 2019), is now a Divinity Teaching Fellow in the College at the University of Chicago.  Her current research explores the relationship between Anglo-American theories of language, nature, and metaphysics.  She is Book Review Editor of The American Journal of Theology and Philosophy, the journal of the Institute for American Religious and Philosophical Thought.

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