Other Minds and Whitehead… a resource

Topic

Re “Other Minds”

Whitehead says: “We find ourselves in a buzzing world, amidst a democracy of fellow creatures” (PR 50).

This morning I discovered that our beloved barn-cat, “Zoomer” had themselves made a discovery of a family of mice living in or around our deck the results were complicatedly messy… and sad.

I was reminded of a piece I read a month ago by a Rebekah Sinclair, entitled “A Democracy of Fellow Creatures: Thinking the Animal, Thinking Ethics in Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism”

Here is her marvelous first paragraph.

“The day my canine companion Jack presented me with a dying rat she’d “overwhelmed” in our grass, my backyard became a troubled political site, shared by multiple identities, each with their own, inaccessible claims on the space, its rules, and the politics of belonging there. As I held the rat, I tried to lay various kinds of meaning over her and our shared event. But my efforts were thwarted by her singular gaze, and my identity as comforter, perpetrator, mourner, and human was unsettled by my inability to know who I was in her eyes.”

…perhaps a “lure” to read more, here:

https://www.academia.edu/3879126/A_Democracy_of_Fellow_Creatures_Thinking_Ethics_Thinking_the_Animal_in_Whiteheads_Philosophy_of_Organism