Participants & Papers

• Isabelle Stengers (Université Libre de Bruxelles) BIO

  Isabelle Stengers writes about the philosophy of science. Stengers holds her Professorship in the Philosophy of Science at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and received the grand prize for philosophy from the Académie Française in 1993. Stengers has written on English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead ; other work has included Continental philosophers such as Michel Serres and Gilbert Simondon. Stengers has collaborated in the past with other philosophers including Leon Chertok, Ilya Prigogine, and Bruno Latour.

  "PAPER TITLE HERE"

• Michael Austin (University of Newfoundland) BIO
  "The Inner Life of Objects: Speculative Metaphysics for the 21st Century" ABSTRACT

  Michael Austin
  Bio currently unavailable.

  "The Inner Life of Objects: Speculative Metaphysics for the 21st Century"
  
  Contemporary philosophy is characterized largely by an affinity for reductionism, either reducing reality to matter as in the case of scientific naturalism, or to signs and signifiers as in the case of structuralism. These systems also eliminate objects in their reductions, transforming them either into billiard balls in a deterministic causal chain or into vessels for human meaning and concepts, if they can be said to exist at all. In opposition to these reductionisms, object-oriented philosophy has championed the existence of individual entities and the irreductionism of Bruno Latour. These thinkers still maintain a distance from objects however, grasping only their outer lives, their effects. Instead, a robust realism must not only maintain the existence of objects, but must attempt to understand reality by grasping their inner lives. By presenting a way out of the correlationist circle that has plagued much of post-Kantian philosophy, the author constructs a new philosophical canon based on the idea of conatus, a theory of things as hungry for Being. By turning to Spinoza, Schelling, Schopenhauer and Whitehead, a philosophical method is constructed whereby we are shown to have access to things-in-themselves via non-cognitive means, namely through feeling. This presents the realist with another tradition in opposition to correlationism, and a view of what speculative metaphysics should look like in the 21st Century.

• Jeffery Bell (Southeastern Louisiana University) BIO
  "Between Realism and Antirealism: Deleuzian Metaphysics in the Style of Whitehead" ABSTRACT

  Jeffery Bell
  Bio currently unavailable.

  "Between Realism and Antirealism: Deleuzian Metaphysics in the Style of Whitehead"
  
  In 1967 after a talk Deleuze gave to the Society of French Philosophy, a talk now published as "Method of Dramatization," Ferdinand Alquié expressed concern during the question and answer session that Deleuze was relying too heavily upon science and not giving adequate attention to questions and problems that Alquié took to be distinctively philosophical. Deleuze responded by agreeing with Alquié; moreover, Deleuze argued that his primary interest is precisely in the metaphysics science needs rather than in the science philosophy needs. This metaphysics, Deleuze readily admits, is to be done 'in the style of Whitehead' rather than in the style of Kant. This essay examines what it means to develop a metaphysics in the style of Whitehead, drawing from Whitehead, Hume, and Latour along the way as this case is made. This discussion will in turn enable us to situate a Whitehead-styled metaphysics into contemporary debates concerning speculative realism and correlationism. Our conclusion will be that the style of metaphysics Deleuze pursues is neither correlationist nor straightforward realist, but rather between realism and antirealism.

• Ian Bogost (The Georgia Institute of Technology) BIO
  "Process vs Procedure" ABSTRACT

  Ian Bogost is a videogame designer, critic, and researcher. He is Associate Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Director of the Graduate Program in Digital Media. Bogost is also Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC. His research and writing considers videogames as an expressive medium, and his creative practice focuses on political games and artgames. Bogost is the author or co-author of seven books on media, material, and philosophy, the most recent of which include Newsgames: Journalism at Play (about games and journalism) and the forthcoming Alien Phenomeology (his brand of speculative realism/object-oriented ontology). Find him online at www.bogost.com.

  "Process vs Procedure"
  
  There are several commonalities between object-oriented ontology and the process philosophy of A.N. Whitehead. But important differences distinguish Whitehead's ontology from that of OOO. Among these are a subtle but critical disagreement about what it means for a thing to *do*. This paper presents a discussion of this distinction, motivated by the difference between a process as a relation between things and a procedure as a logic of operation within a thing. Given my own perspective as a theorist of computational media, I draw the term procedure from computation, and offer metaphors from computation, systems theory, and engineering as a way of understanding the ontological distinction in question.

• James J. Bono (University at Buffalo) BIO
  "Atomicity, Conformation, Enduring Objects, and "Things": Science and Science Studies after the Whiteheadian Turn" ABSTRACT

  James J. Bonois Associate Professor of History and of Medicine at the University at Buffalo, and chair of the Department of History. A Past-President of the Society for Literature and Science and founding editor (emeritus) of the journal, Configurations, he is the author of The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine, vol. 1, Ficino to Descartes (1995), and co-editor of Ethical Issues in Health Care on the Frontiers of the Twenty-First Century (2000), and of A Time for the Humanities: Futurity and the Limits of Autonomy (2008). Professor Bono has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton; an Eccles Fellow at the Tanner Humanities Center, University of Utah; and a recipient of several NSF grants. He spent 2006-07 as a NEH Senior Fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library completing a draft of volume 2 of The Word of God and the Languages of Man. He is also working on Figuring Science: Metaphor, Narrative, and Scientific Practices. His next project will be a book entitled, Imagining Nature: Technologies of the Literal, the Scientific Revolution, and Visual Cultures of Early Modern Science.  A Focus Section, "History of Science and Literature and Science: Convergences and Divergences," which he edited just appeared in the September 2010 of the journal Isis: it includes his essay, "Making Knowledge: History, Literature and the Poetics of Science."

  "Atomicity, Conformation, Enduring Objects, and "Things": Science and Science Studies after the Whiteheadian Turn"
  
  This paper addresses the question of "things" by taking up the central role of atomicity to understanding Whitehead's fundamental notion of actual occasions. By describing a world of interconnected actual occasions that "call unto" each other, Whitehead refused traditional notions of perduring principles and deterministic substances that replicate unchanging patterns as foundational to, for example, biological explanations of life and organisms. Instead, I argue that Whitehead points to the concreteness of experience in the continual making and remaking of actual occasions as events as offering an alternative account of "inheritance" that avoids the abstraction of "purpose" and "ends" as pre-programmed "in" the organism. For Whitehead, such "enduring objects" as those societies of actual occasions that comprise what we call organism and organic life arise from the "contrast between inheritance and novel effect." Central to a Whiteheadian analysis of organism, societies, and life, then, is "taking time seriously." Indeed, the very notion of "pattern" in most pre-Darwinian biology is subject to the same critique that Whitehead leveled against the mechanistic materialism of the seventeenth-century: namely, that it presumes a "succession of instantaneous configurations of matter" that elides all trace of temporality.
  
  By contrast, Whitehead prefers to speak of pattern in relation to rhythm: the intensity of the vectorial flow of feeling arising in the process of actual occasions both atomistically remaking themselves and simultaneously "calling unto" other actual occasions leads, in the case of "societies" or "organisms" that share a spatial and temporal "life-history," a "rhythmic character" that can lead to stability. The rhythmic for Whitehead is in dynamic spatio-temporal relation to "physical vibration" and their creative gathering together in the enduring object produces both inheritance and novelty. "Things," thus, are imbricated within an extensive network of occasions calling unto each other in the very constitution of enduring objects as structured societies. Things, so to speak, live the vibratory life. Never simply "private bundles of abstract characters"-or, abstract entities abstracted from experience and thus (fallaciously) assumed to be simply the conventionally familiar concrete furniture of the world-"things," we must remember, are never truly isolated. Rather, things always remain rhythmically entangled in a world of flux and flows, in the buzzing world of actual occasions and enduring objects.
  
  In the end, I suggest, science studies must somehow learn both to attend to such objects-to such "things"-and to re-member how they are, at root, abstractions and "compressions" standing in for enduring objects: that is, for objects, that take account of and call unto other objects/actual entities. This last statement, as a form of conclusion, remains incomplete. It calls out for examples: for exemplifications of "things" in science as abstractions and compressions and for examples of how, alternatively, science studies might re-think things as simultaneously useful abstractions and as concrete vectorial webs of experience communicating with other things.

• James Bradley (University of Newfoundland) BIO
  "The Semiotic Object: Speculative Philosophy, Nominalism and Triunity" ABSTRACT

  James Bradley is Professor of Philosophy and Head of the Department of Philosophy at The Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. He was educated at Upholland College, Lancashire, and the University of Cambridge, England. In 1999-2000, he was Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy, the University of Leuven, Belgium. He has written numerous articles on anglo-american speculative philosophy and has recently devoted a lot of time to the philosophy of C.S. Peirce.

  "The Semiotic Object: Speculative Philosophy, Nominalism and Triunity"
  
  I will present five closely connected theses, respectively on existence, the principle of reason, the strange phenomenon of the concurrent break-up and persistence of triune theories of objects, the nominalism that bedevils contemporary realist theories of objects, and the strength of a triune and semiotic theory of objects. I will defend speculative philosophy proper and argue that being is communication.

• Nathan Brown (UC Davis) BIO
  "The Technics of Prehension: On the Photography of Nicolas Baier" ABSTRACT

  Nathan Brown
  Bio currently unavailable.

  "The Technics of Prehension: On the Photography of Nicolas Baier"
  
  Abstract currently unavailable.

• Levi Bryant (Collin College) BIO
  "The Time of the Object: Towards the Ontological Grounds of Withdrawal" ABSTRACT

  Levi Bryant
  Bio currently unavailable.

  "The Time of the Object: Towards the Ontological Grounds of Withdrawal"
  
  Abstract currently unavailable.

• Roland Faber (Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University) BIO
  "Touch: A Philosophical Meditation" ABSTRACT

  Roland Faber, Ph.D. is the Kilsby Family/John B. Cobb Professor of Process Studies at Claremont School of Theology, Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Claremont Graduate University, Executive Co-Director of the Center for Process Studies, and Executive Director of the Whitehead Research Project. His fields of research and publication include Theology; Process Thought and Process Theology; Poststructuralism; Interreligious Discourse, especially Christianity & Buddhism; Comparative Philosophy of Religion; Philosophy, Theology, Spirituality, and Cosmology of the Renaissance; Mysticism; and integrated studies in Physics, Philosophy, and Psychology.

  "Touch: A Philosophical Meditation"
  
  Graham Harman's "On Vicarious Causation" explores an object-oriented philosophy in nascendi that, to the exact correlations, mirrors Whitehead's understanding of the "touch" of real things (and there are only real things, and besides that, things as sensed) in his organic refutation of mechanicism with "prehensive" connectivity. Although this connection only exists vicariously in my mind and in contiguous independence, that is, in mutual incompleteness, the sensibility of resonance it insinuates may give rise to certain (real) objects such that they can be meditated on and which are as "strange" as Haman defines his realism. Since "allusions" in Haman suggests such connections, I could not resist following their "tunneling" through the very "blasphemy" that Harman's buries by his non-theological recapitulation of the occasionalism of Malebranche and Al-Ghazali. Hence, in relation to Whitehead's secular divine, my "object" of meditation will finally flow into the question of the status of the intentional/prehensive "space" in which the constitution of Self might point to its internal "molten core" as an allusion to that in the midst of its intentional constitution as real object, which it must always "really" exclude in order to touch, be touched, and vicariously facilitate the touch of real things.

• Andrew Goffey (Middlesex University) BIO
  "Magic Capture: Whitehead's Metaphysics as Experimental Activity" ABSTRACT

  Andrew Goffey
  Bio currently unavailable.

  "Magic Capture: Whitehead's Metaphysics as Experimental Activity"
  
  This paper will propose a reading of Whitehead's account of speculative philosophy as an experimental activity. Starting out from the first chapter of Process and Reality, with its account of metaphysics and the protocols of its operation, the paper will ask what such a conception of philosophy demands. The reading will focus on exploring the the notion of 'capture' as a way of thinking about the process by which experimental subjects learn how to 'feel' their way into an experience attuned to what Whitehead calls the 'infinitude of things'.

• Michael Halewood (University of Essex) BIO
  "Facts as Social Things" ABSTRACT

  Michael Halewood is a lecturer in sociology at the University of Essex, UK, where he is a member of the Centre for Theoretical Studies. His main areas of interest are the work of A. N. Whitehead, philosophy and social theory, the materiality of subjectivity. His recent publications include "Being a Sociologist and Becoming a Whiteheadian: Concrescing Methodological Tactics," in Theory, Culture and Society 24:4 (2008) and a collection of papers on Whitehead for Theory, Culture and Society.

  "Facts as Social Things"
  
  The question of "metaphysics and things" would seem to refer to the supposition that metaphysics searches for fixed, abstract, eternal, prior explanations of the status of things and individuality and in doing so it rids such things of that which makes them interesting as individual things - this pencil, this penicillin, this beetle, this transport system, this university. One task would seem to be to develop a way of thinking the individuality and thingness of real things in the real world rather than in terms of categories of things or as derivative exempla of more general principles.
  
  In this paper I will start by looking at the Whitehead's notion of transcendence as applying not only to thought but to objects, as one way of re-approaching the metaphysical aspect of this problem. The remaining sections of the paper will look at the work of Durkheim and Marx and the extent to which their attempts to describe the sociality of things (or commodities) offers some insights for metaphysics. I will argue, perhaps surprisingly, that one common theme which informs both these writers is the status of religiosity and the theological. Hence, I will conclude by returning to Whitehead's call for a "secularization of the concept of God's functions in the world". In this way, I will rephrase to the question of metaphysics and things through the demand to take seriously the non-factual lives of things beyond human thought and acquaintance.

• Donna Haraway (University of California at Santa Cruz) BIO

  Donna Haraway
  Bio currently unavailable.

  "PAPER TITLE HERE"

• Graham Harman (American University in Cairo) BIO
  "Occasion and Process" ABSTRACT

  Graham Harman
  Bio currently unavailable.

  "Occasion and Process"

• Judith Jones (Fordham University) BIO
  "Conatus and Concrescence: Stearns and Whitehead on Individuation" ABSTRACT

  Judith Jones
  Bio currently unavailable.

  "Conatus and Concrescence: Stearns and Whitehead on Individuation"
  
  This paper explores the theory of "individuals" offered in a forthcoming, previously unpublished manuscript by Isabel Scribner Stearns, and compares the theory to key elements of Whitehead's metaphysics concerning the individuation of beings. Stearns was a student of Whitehead's, and an early President of the C.S. Peirce Society. While Stearns consciously compares her theory of individuation briefly to Whitehead's notion of events, she does not extensively explore the connection to the kind of beings (personally ordered societies and the like) that would most aptly correspond with what she means by "individuals" which are, for her, the kinds of things that are spread out in time and subject to change (unlike Whiteheadian 'actual entities'). The paper will assess the comparison on both levels, assessing Stearns' complaints against Whiteheadian individuation at the event-level, and inquiring into the compatibility of the models at the level of socially ordered enduring entities. Stearns' model is built around the central concept of the "conatus" (borrowed from Spinoza) that informs the dynamic processes of becoming that individuals exist through and across. It is my view that this adoption of a 'conative' view of individual, processive thing-hood parallels the notion of valuational, concrescent process in Whitehead while being pitched at a broader metaphysical level than the events of the latter's theory. Relative merits of the parallel but contrastive approaches will be assessed.

• Beatrice Marovich (Drew University) BIO
  "Of Creaturely Things: Reflections on the Actual Entity" ABSTRACT

  Beatrice Marovich
  Bio currently unavailable.

  "Of Creaturely Things: Reflections on the Actual Entity"
  
  This essay suggests that adoption of the term "creaturely" as a rough synonym for "animal life" in the developing field of critical animal studies may limit the possibilities resident within the term itself. It could, that is, collapse some of the metaphysical wideness (and wildness) that folds monstrosities, or more thing-like units into the creaturely fray. As a "tonic" against this conceptual tightening, this essay calls attention to the metaphysical importance of Alfred North Whitehead's elaboration of the creature as the "actual entity"—a category so broad and generic that it can account for the creatureliness of an electron as much as it can a human creature. What makes an entity creaturely is simply its emergence, its becoming, its becomingness. More, the eventive character of the creature as actual entity (sometimes, alternately, called the "actual occasion"), which recreates a creature anew in each instant, already brings creatures out of the lockstep of the human/animal binary—for big, gangly humans (for instance) are never rigidly unitary or holistic creatures but are, themselves, already societies of millions of creatures, already overflowing this binary logic in their own emergence and endurance.

• Melanie Sehgal (Technical University Darmstadt/Europa Universität Viadrina (Frankfurt/Oder)) BIO
  "A Situated Metaphysics: Reading Whitehead on Things and History" ABSTRACT

  Melanie Sehgal is writing her phd on William James and Alfred North Whitehead at the University of Potsdam and the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. She is a member of the DFG Doctoral Program ‚Lebensformen und Lebenswissen’ (University of Potsdam and European University Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder) and is currently teaching at the latter university.

  "A Situated Metaphysics: Reading Whitehead on Things and History"
  Beginning with Bruno Latour's claim that in order to include things in the making of history, history has to bargain with metaphysics, the paper investigates the relationship between history and metaphysics in Whitehead's thought. Reading the second chapter of Modes of Thought on 'Expression', it explores the possible contrast between a metaphysical notion of every thing having a history and contributing to the making of history on the one hand and the specificity of telling history, of producing historical accounts on the other. The paper argues that Whitehead's description of history - as a 'record of expressions of feelings peculiar to humanity' - can account for both the generality of having a history (in Latour's sense) and the singularity and situatedness of historical accounts. In a second step, the paper asks how this way of thinking about history informs Whitehead's metaphysics, taking into account that he begins its construction within a historical diagnosis of modernity. The paper argues that Whitehead's metaphysics can be described as an attempt to construct a situated metaphysics, a metaphysics that is inherently related and relevant to the modern epoch. Not only does history need to bargain with metaphysics then, but metaphysics, it seems for Whitehead, must bargain with history too.

• Steven Shaviro (Wayne State University) BIO
  "Consequences of Panpsychism" ABSTRACT

  Steven Shaviro
  Bio currently unavailable.

  "Consequences of Panpsychism"
  
  The doctrine of panpsychism -- "the view that all things have mind or a mind-like quality... mind is seen as fundamental to the nature of existence and being" (David Skrbina) -- is easily subject to derision and ridicule. Yet David Skrbina convincingly demonstrates that panpsychism has a long genealogy in Western thought, from the pre-Socratics up through Whitehead and Hartshorne, and onward to contemporary analytic philosophers like David Chalmers and Galen Strawson. Skrbina also demonstrates that panpsychism plausibly and cogently addresses many of the dilemmas that haunt contemporary philosophy, both analytic and continental. My paper extends this line of thought, by considering the consequences of panpsychism, and particularly of Whitehead's version of it, for the recent philosophical trends of speculative realism, new materialism, and neo-vitalism. Whitehead argues that all actual entities, whether living or not, possess a ``mental pole,'' and are involved, however minutely or negligibly, in acts of "conceptual prehension." Incipent thought is in this sense prior to life, rather than the reverse. Taking this assertion seriously leads us, in the first place, to displace and reframe current discourses on biopower, and on the definition and management of "life." In the second place, it leads us to redefine thought or mentality in terms of affectivity (or what Whitehead calls "feeling") rather than in terms of cognition or computation. Conceptual prehension -- or thought as affectivity -- is prior both to life and to consciousness; and it is through Whitehead's analyses of conceptual prehensions that we may best grasp the genesis, or emergence, both of life and of consciousness.