The Allure of Things: Process and Object in Contemporary Philosophy

263 Pages·2014·1.53 MB·English

by  Roland Faber

The Allure of Things
Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy
Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy presents cutting-edge scholarship in all the
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Scott M. Campbell and Paul W. Bruno
The Virtue of Feminist Rationality, Deborah K. Heikes
The Unity of Content and Form in Philosophical Writing, Jon Stewart
The Allure of Things
Process and Object in Contemporary Philosophy
Edited by
Roland Faber and Andrew Goffey
Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy
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First published 2014
© Roland Faber, Andrew Goffey and Contributors, 2014
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ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-2520-8
ePDF: 978-1-4725-2782-0
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Contents
Notes on Contributors vii
Preface ix
Introduction: Thinking Things Thinking Things, or Some Themes
in Philosophy After Correlationism Andrew Goffey 1
Part 1 Crossings: Connection, Disconnection, Vibration
1 Atomicity, Conformation, Enduring Objects, and “Things”:
Science and Science Studies after the Whiteheadian Turn
James J. Bono 1 3
2 Another Response to Shaviro Graham Harman 3 6
3 Touch: A Philosophic Meditation Roland Faber 4 7
Part 2 Things: Substances, Individuals, and Creatures
4 The Time of the Object: Derrida, Luhmann, and the Processual
Nature of Substances Levi R. Bryant 7 1
5 Conatus and Concrescence: Stearns and Whitehead on
Individuation Judith Jones 9 2
6 Creaturely Things: Living Matter, Dead Matter, and the Resonance
of Actual Entities Beatrice Marovich 109
7 Facts as Social Things Michael Halewood 123
Part 3 Dramatizations: Situating, Abstracting, Experimenting
8 Between Realism and Antirealism: Deleuzian Metaphysics
in the Style of Whitehead Jeffrey Bell 145
9 A Situated Metaphysics: Things, History, and Pragmatic
Speculation in A. N. Whitehead Melanie Sehgal 162
vi Contents
10 Speculative Philosophy and the Art of Dramatization
Isabelle Stengers 188
11 Philosophical Experimentation Between Deleuze and
Guattari Andrew Goffey 218
References 237
Index 247
Notes on Contributors
Jeffrey Bell is professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University
in Hammond, Louisiana. He is the author and co-editor of several books and
numerous articles, including Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos and Deleuze’s Hume.
He is currently at work on a book on Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy?
and preparing for a manuscript on metaphysics in contemporary analytic and
continental philosophy.
James J. Bono is (chair, Department of History, University at Buffalo, SUNY;
School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences) past-president of the Society for
Literature, Science, and the Arts, founding editor of Configurations, and recipient
of numerous fellowships. He is also author of The Word of God and the Languages
of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine, [vol. 2 near
completion]. Projects on metaphor, narrative, and science; on technologies of
the literal and early modern science; and on Whitehead are in progress. He has
(co-) edited a number of books, most recently, of A Time for the Humanities:
Futurity and the Limits of Autonomy (2008).
Levi R. Bryant is a professor of philosophy at Collin College outside of Dallas,
Texas. He is the author of Difference and Givenness: Deleuze’s Transcendental
Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence, The Democracy of Objects, Onto-
Cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media, and is co-editor of The
Speculative Turn: Continental Realism and Materialism along with Nick Srnicek
and Graham Harman. He has written widely on speculative realism and
contemporary French thought.
Roland Faber is Kilsby Family/John B. Cobb Jr Professor of Process Studies at
Claremont School of Theology, professor of religion and philosophy at Claremont
Graduate University, USA and executive director of the Whitehead Research
Project. He is the author of God as Poet of the World and The Divine Manifold
and most recently co-edited Secretes of Becoming, Butler on Whitehead, Beyond
Superlatives, and Theopoetic Folds.
viii Notes on Contributors
Andrew Goffey is associate professor of critical theory and cultural studies at
the University of Nottingham, UK.
Graham Harman is distinguished university professor at the American
University in Cairo. He is the author of numerous books, most recently Bells and
Whistles: More Speculative Realism (2013).
Jude Jones studied Whitehead with Elizabeth Kraus as an impressionable
undergraduate, and has never recovered. With sensibilities framed fundamentally
in the process vein, he is interested in the metaphysical, ethical, and practical
life of process-relational thought. He has explored the various dimensions of
Whitehead’s notion of “intensity” that grounds the aesthetic orientation of his
axiological metaphysics. As part of a lifelong commitment to the philosophical
status of literary texts, he is currently beginning work on a manuscript on Harry
Potter and Philosophy, tapping into a process approach that is usually absent
from philosophical discussion of Rowling’s series and its impact on a generation
(or two) of readers.
Beatrice Marovich recently finished her PhD in theology and philosophy at
Drew University’s Graduate Division of Religion. She teaches in the Philosophy
and Religion Department at Montclair State University.
Melanie Sehgal is professor of Literature, Science and Media Studies at the
European University Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder, Germany. She received her PhD
in philosophy from the Technical University of Darmstadt with a dissertation
on William James and Alfred North Whitehead (“A Situated Metaphysics.
Empiricism and Speculation in William James and Alfred North Whitehead”).
Isabelle Stengers teaches philosophy at the Université libre de Bruxelles. Her
interests centered first on the adventure of modern sciences and the association
of this adventure with claims to rational authority. She is working now on the
crucial challenge, both political and cultural, of an ecology that would embed
our many diverging practices in a democratic and demanding environment.
Among her books are Order out of Chaos (with I. Prigogine), The Invention
of Modern Science, Capitalist Sorcery (with Philippe Pignarre), Cosmopolitics
(I and II) and Thinking with Whitehead.
Preface
Aiming at the exploration of the depth and relevance of current modes of
thought in light of Whitehead’s vision of a universe in which physical and
mental entanglements, the intertwining and interfering of regions, localities and
perspectives, is not the exception, but of the most fundamental character, the
Whitehead Research Project has hosted, and goes on to facilitate, a series of
conferences, one of which has laid the groundwork for the collection of articles
forming this book: The Allure of Things.
With this series of conversations, the Whitehead Research Project celebrates
the confluences, diversities, and unexpected novelties of philosophies in the
endeavor to follow Whitehead’s conviction that “the use of philosophy is to
maintain an active novelty of fundamental ideas illuminating the social system,”
and his prediction that without it society would fall into a “slow descent of
accepted thought,” thereby diminishing “towards the inactive commonplace”
(Whitehead, Modes of Thought, p. 174).
Whitehead’s philosophy traverses the fields of mathematics and logics,
philosophy of science and metaphysics, cultural theory and religion, physics
and aesthetics. As the influence of Whitehead’s thought can appear in surprising
places in the wide spectrum of disciplines extending from quantum mechanics
to theology and including such fields as biology, political theory, economics,
psychology, and education, so does this book on the encounter between
Whiteheadian relationalism and Object Oriented Ontology demonstrate
philosophy’s undiminished attraction of being unexhausted of its potentials. It
is hoped that the contributions of this book may, in their own way, further the
“Adventure” of thought that “belongs to the essence of civilization” (Whitehead,
Adventure of Ideas, p. 295).
Roland Faber
Founder and Executive Director of the Whitehead Research Project
Kilsby Family/John B. Cobb, Jr. Professor of Process Studies
Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Lincoln University