In this wide-ranging IAM Research Forum session, Andrew M. Davis introduces process philosophy and the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead spent his first career as a mathematician, co-writing Principia Mathematica, and turned to metaphysics only in his sixties, after Harvard offered him a chair in philosophy. What came of that turn was a philosophy insisting that nothing in experience may be left out, that certainty is folly, and that value is something nature proclaims to us rather than something we project onto it. Those claims get their fullest expression in Process and Reality, the 1929 Gifford Lectures that made his name synonymous with process philosophy, where he holds that “the elucidation of immediate experience is the sole justification for any thought.”

Timestamps:

00:00:00 – Introduction
00:05:25 – Whitehead’s Three Periods, from Mathematics to Metaphysics
00:09:54 – The Papers That Were Never Burned
00:16:05 – Dare We Utter the M Word?
00:21:58 – Nothing Can Be Omitted: Experience Drunk and Sober
00:24:16 – Why the Values of Nature Are Intrinsic
00:30:55 – The Aeronautical Method
00:34:50 – Ancient Antecedents: Tao, the Buddha, Heraclitus
00:43:42 – Permanence and Flux
00:50:30 – Modern Process Thinkers: Leibniz, James, Bergson
01:07:07 – Mystical and Psychedelic Experience as Data