The Work-In-Process seminar series aims to provide a space for regular exchange between researchers working on the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. As a hybrid between a seminar and a community event for all those working in process thought, researchers will be given the informal opportunity to present and discuss their work in progress, to receive input and use this space to build collaborations.
The Work-In-Process series is hosted by the European Society for Process Thought and will take place online every two weeks, alternating between Mondays and Fridays. For an updated full schedule see below.
The seminar is completely free and we welcome everyone regardless of their academic position. If you want to present your own work or simply attend the seminar, please get in touch with espt@milanstuermer.com to register.
Schedule
You can also access and subscribe to our schedule on Google Calendar or import the .ics/iCal.
Winter 2024/2025
Thursday, Oct 10, 18:00 – 19:00 CET
Paul Stenner: Reflections upon transdisciplinary applications of Whiteheadian process thinking within Social and Human Sciences
With Lennart Posch and Gabriel Bianchi, Paul Stenner has recently been involved in assembling a Special Issue of the journal Human Affairs which deals with the relevance of Whiteheadian process thinking to social and human sciences. His contribution to the Special Issue provides an overview of Whitehead’s thinking which stresses the differences and continuities at play within the three main phases of Whitehead’s career. The paper is available here (A.N. Whitehead and Process Thought (degruyter.com) and can be discussed during the meeting. After introducing this paper, Paul Stenner will reflect upon some of his research which aims to apply process thinking to a number of topics at a variety of scales within several disciplines, but always with a ‘transdisciplinary’ orientation. At the broadest scale, Whitehead’s ‘turn’ towards a critique of scientific materialism provides the basis for a series of so-called ‘postmodern’ perspectives springing from a new sociological orientation to ‘the modern world’. At a smaller scale of focus, Whitehead provides powerful ways of re-thinking a host of psychological questions from the nature of feeling and emotion, through the role of the brain in the production of experience, to the problem of psychosocial transition.
Thursday, Oct 24, 18:00 – 19:00 CET
Michael Rahnfeld: Title tbd
Thursday, Nov 07, 18:00 – 19:00 CET
Christopher Hill: The experience of suffering: the path(étique) of AN Whitehead and Michel Henry
Suffering is an experience that arrives unmediated from ‘nowhere’ yet from ‘within’, ineluctably subjective, sui generis, at best an experience vaguely and inadequately comparable. It is a phenomenon that takes a purely phenomenological analysis beyond its own limit. Yet, if we may struggle describing the phenomenon of suffering, can we at least establish the ontological possibility of suffering experience? In this paper I answer the question affirmatively by drawing on the respective thought of AN Whitehead the ‘process metaphysician’ and Michel Henry the ‘process phenomenologist’ (Mullarky, 2006:48pp). Though disparate thinkers sharing little but an apparent consent to the processual nature of reality, I argue that both offer in their respective yet complimentary ways a fundamental ontological basis for the experience of suffering.
Thursday, Nov 21, 18:00 – 19:00 CET
Katarina Perovic: I am a Process and so are You: The Process Philosophy Approach to the Self
I will argue that a process approach is not only a promising strategy in philosophy of time, but that it is also a promising approach in the metaphysics of the persistence of objects, metaphysics of the self, and personal identity. I will argue that static approaches to various dimensions of the self fail to capture the fundamentally dynamic aspects of our identity and that a shift to a process approach makes much more sense in accounts of both intrinsic and relational properties of the self.
Thursday, December 05, 18:00 – 19:00 CET
This paper discusses ongoing research on public philosophy and its application to the philosophy of technology and current debates. It is divided into three parts, each using a different method. The first part briefly introduces public philosophy. The second part illustrates the main advantages of adopting a processual approach to the philosophy of technology. Finally, the third part presents a single case study: creativity and genAI. In particular, I will adopt Whitehead’s processual perspective to assess how creative genAI is.
Thursday, December 19, 18:00 – 19:00 CET
James Kearns: “Seeing Human Nature”: A. N. Whitehead and Jason Brown’s differing patterns of Feeling in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway
By revisiting the limitations of the dominant cognitivist hypothesis through which brain process is understood via computational modelling, James examines two apparently opposing (yet “continuous”) accounts of the philosophy of organism in Virginia Woolf’s fourth novel, Mrs Dalloway – Alfred North Whitehead’s process of “concrescence,” a “coming together” (as it were) of the many into one, and Jason Brown’s formulation of microgenetic theory which presumes individuation, not combination, that is to say, a cognitive process of whole-to-part transition, or one into many. Bringing to the forefront the “valuation” of Septimus Warren Smith who, according to Woolf, “was invented to complete the character of Mrs Dalloway,” James argues that Clarissa Dalloway’s mode of fictionalising Septimus post-mortem is not only an operating factor in what constitutes “self-completion,” a term provided by Brown to express a recurring process through which our emotional response to objects and others in the external world may be said to mirror or to supplement our needs, but, ultimately, a mode by which Woolf herself comes to memorialise the early death of her brother, Thoby Stephen.
Spring 2024
Friday, Jan 19, 15:00 – 16:00 CET
Veronika Krajíčková: Reading modernism differently via Whitehead’s metaphysics of experience, feeling and value
In her talk, Veronika Krajíčková is going to discuss her project focussing on reading (literary) modernism via the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, which presents this movement in different, and hopefully more bright and constructive light. Analysing modernist texts with the aid of Whitehead’s concepts of experience, feeling, value and concern uproots the “detached”, individualist and reality-disconnected vibe that is traditionally associated with high modernism. Moreover, Whitehead’s theory of prehension applied to the process of reading permits more emotionally responsive and situated engagement with a text, which anticipates the affective turn in literary criticism long dominated by disinterested close reading and “hermeneutics of suspicion” (Rita Felski).
Monday, Jan 29, 18:00 – 19:00 CET
Andreas Wiechers: On the possibility of rhythm between God and the temporal world
Andreas Wiechers is exploring the concept of rhythm in A.N. Whitehead’s Process and Reality. His research is looking at the passages where rhythm is explicitly mentioned for their explanatory value in analyzing the concept and its status within Whitehead’s metaphysical framework. In this talk, he will focus on a specific passage that, due to its parallel structure with a core quotation on rhythm, suggests that rhythm occupies a significant systematic position in the interplay between the single actual entity named God and the actual world of actual occasions. Starting from this passage, Andreas will embark on a search for further clues and possibilities in Process and Reality for a systematic understanding of the rhythmicality between God and the world.
Friday, Feb 16, 15:00 – 16:00 CET
Svenja Schmitz: New ways of thinking about matter with Alfred N. Whitehead and Ernst Bloch
In her talk, Svenja Schmitz will present the topic of her doctoral thesis, in which she tries to find new ways of thinking about matter based on the thinking of Whitehead and Ernst Bloch. Although the two thinkers seem to have nothing in common, Svenja shows that the thinking of both can be understood as a reaction to what they see as an unsatisfactory thinking about the actual world, namely to one that results from a mechanistic view of matter.
In her reading of Whitehead, she is going to focus on a particular passage in Modes of Thought in which Whitehead emphasizes the transcendent function of existence, which is also the theme around which Bloch’s thinking revolves. In trying to understand this transcendent function, both develop a new idea of matter. In her project, Svenja discusses three theses that she believes apply to this new concept of matter:
1. matter can be understood as having a speculative surplus,
2. enduring objects can be understood as a moments of holding: to Bloch as experimental figures (,Versuchsgestalten‘) and to Whitehead as societies,
3. both concepts of matter share a utopian potential.
Monday, Feb 26, 18:00 – 19:00 CET
Alexandra Kimbo: Sociality as “feeling-for”: Thinking through interspecies relations with Whitehead
Friday, Mar 15, 15:00 – 16:00 CET
Martin Kaplický: Significant Form Revisited: Whiteheadian Perspective
The talk will concentrate on the key notion of modernist art and aesthetics – significant form, which was coined by Clive Bell and helped him to show the relevance and importance of modernist post-impressionist art. The concept later underwent much criticism and was considered as a radical and untenable form of formalism. Although much of the criticism is reasonable, I believe that the concept of significant form can still show important features of works of art and especially the inseparability of the objective and subjective poles of aesthetic experience. For proving this potential, I will read Bell’s formalist theory through the lens of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophical system.
Monday, Mar 25, 18:00 – 19:00 CET
EASTER BREAK – We’ll be back after the Easter Break with a brand new program every other Monday, 18:00 – 19:00 and Friday, 15:00 – 16:00. If you want to contribute, please get in touch with espt@milanstuermer.com
Friday, Apr 12, 15:00 – 16:00 CET
Denys Zhadiaiev: Where Language is not Enough: Concrescence, Cadences, Microgenesis
Based on the last chapter of the Modes of Though (The Aims of Philosophy), Process and Reality and Dialogues… (Price, L.), we will try to develop the idea of why Whitehead warned us to be careful with the belief in sufficiency of words and sentences. The talk aims to demonstrate the opposition between “atomic” concepts (meanings of words) and wave-like reality (perception). It poses a new question on why discrete meanings (values, ideas, concepts) do not fully match continuous reality (feelings, emotions, perceptual data) unless we take it as so-called “bits (or droplets) of experience”.
The importance of this topic is in the problem for scientific discourse in its attempt to express quantum phenomena. Process philosophy foresaw this issue with propositions and mentioned that some of the contradictions in science and philosophy are seemed to be solved by the “sleight of hands” but not fully solved indeed.
Not pretending to provide solution, we aim, at least, to outline the metaphysical barrier where discourse may stumble upon and we, unintentionally find ourselves committing “good-old” error – an ignoratio elenchi (fallacy of proof).
Monday, Apr 22, 18:00 – 19:00 CET
Gerard Jagers op Akkerhuis: The Operator Theory, a new Framework for Analysing Organization in Nature
An open discussion on the intersections between Whitehead’s thinking and contemporary biology, particularly the hierarchical organization of nature.
Friday, May 10, 15:00 – 16:00 CET
Daniel Bella: Cartesian Recurrences – On Whitehead and the History of Philosophy
The Work-in-Process online seminar series will continue in autumn/winter season of 2024/2025.