Introductions!

Topic

Hi all! I had a wonderful time with you on Zoom last night. For those of you who were unable to attend this first session, but would like to introduce yourself and get to know one another, please do so in this thread!

I’m Jared, one of the co-hosts for this learning circle. My background is in religious studies, specifically Islamic studies, but with some decent familiarity with both Christianity and Buddhism as well. I’m excited to be finally digging into Whitehead’s magnum opus so that I have a better sense of the foundations of process thought. Cheears!

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Hello everyone! Unfortunately, I could not attend the first session, but I look forward to seeing you all next time.

I am Satbhav, a master’s student in mathematics from India. My interest in philosophy is broadly cross-cultural philosophy and process themes in epistemology, ethics and logic (often focusing on Buddhism). I’m eager to begin to understand Whitehead’s philosophy and its applications to our lives.

I enjoyed the class yesterday (7/10) and appreciate being able to join late.

I am a retired middle-school math teacher who came to philosophy late in life largely as a consequence of a tragic death in my family – now almost a decade ago. I slowly came to realize that I desperately needed to find a generalized framework for understanding life, death and the whole damn thing – in a way that brought “meaning” and value to the fore. Most of my search has been private; threading a path through important books and ideas.

Though I found good, reasonably-scientific evidence for moving beyond the materialist model, somewhere along the line I recognized that unraveling the “knot” of the mind-body problem was central to the search.

I encountered panpsychism as a powerful metaphysics in a number of places, the most comprehensive of them, for me, was Christian DeQuincey’s book “Radical Nature” which also introduced me to panexperientialism and Whitehead. I discovered Matt Segall’s “Physics of the World Soul” and read David Ray Griffin on Whitehead.

The denseness of Whiteheaed’s categoreal schema and his “organic” mode of presentation has kept me from reading P&R itself over the years. So much of the commentary on ANW arises from academic philosophy and goes way over my head.

I have really benefited from Hosinski’s book “Stubborn Fact and Creative Advance” and from Nicholas Rescher’s writing on process philosophy. My most recent foray into P&R was supported by the dual crutches of Sherburn’s “…Key” and Elizabeth Kraus’s “…Companion”. But both are themselves dense and have differing takes on how restructuring P&R might make it more accessible. I stalled-out near the end of Part III some months ago.

My first, nearly-flunked course in philosophy (“Deductive Logic”) back in college 50 years ago left me with a bit of PTSD for for the discipline. But the last decade of self-education has been rewarding. In an odd twist I recently discovered that the room in which that university class was offered was apparently the same room in which Whitehead delivered his early lectures upon arrival in the US in 1924 and 1925.

Now. I am delighted to return to P&R with a group of co-explorers.
Thanks

Howdy folks,

Both Madolyn and I come from a non-academic background, what draws us to Whitehead is largely the non-standard image of big G as a being not only in collaboration with existence but affected thereby instead of the more common ‘god has a plan for youu’ one way point of view.

We took part in a Homebrewed Christianity introduction to Process and Reality with John Cobb and hope to make better sense of what we learned there and to broaden our understanding of Process Theology broadly and this work specifically.

Thanks for being here with us,
-Gwen