This course is the fifth in a series of five that are part of our 2024 certificate program in process thought and practice. A limited number of seats are available for individuals not participating in the program.
Applying Process Thought Across the Natural Sciences
This 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.
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Course Summary
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.
“I am trying to evolve one way of speaking which applies equally to physics, physiology, and to our aesthetic experiences. The ordinary philosophic abstractions won't do this.”
–Alfred North Whitehead (letter to his son North in 1928 while composing Process and Reality)
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
- Guest speaker: Brian Swimme
- Session 2: The Place of Life in the Cosmos
- Part 1: A New Biophilosophical Paradigm:
- Part 2: Whitehead and Evolutionary Biology: The Agency of Organisms
- Guest speaker: Spyridon Koutroufinis
- Session 3: Panpsychism: The Place of Mind in the Cosmos
- Part 1: Consciousness in a Living Universe
- Part 2: What Neuroscience Can Tell Us
- Guest speaker: 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
- Guest speaker: Ed Kelly
About the Instructor
Matthew David Segall is a transdisciplinary researcher, writer, teacher, and philosopher applying process-relational thought across the natural and social sciences, as well as to the study of consciousness. He is Associate Professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness Program at California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, CA and the Chair of the Science Advisory Committee for the Cobb Institute.
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Price
- Lifetime access to session recordings
- Receive early notification of future courses
- Watch live or follow your own schedule
- Interact with class members via discussion forums
- *If you cannot pay this amount, please contribute whatever you feel the course is worth or whatever you can afford to help support this and other programs like it.
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