Matthew Segall on Whitehead

Matthew Segall’s book the Physics of the World-Soul: The Relevance of Alfred North Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism to Contemporary Scientific Cosmology places Whitehead’s cosmology in a historical context dating back to Plato. Segall also compares Whitehead’s philosophy with today’s scientific cosmology. One of Segall’s main arguments is that “a coherent naturalistic perspective on the relationship between physics and biology (not to mention psychology) requires panpsychism”.¹

Whitehead tried to articulate a cosmology with as much logical rigor as possible and invented his own vocabulary. Segall writes that Whitehead “attempted to reveal the structure and dynamics of reality through the medium of a strange, invented language”.² Whitehead hoped that “the lexicon of his open system” could “guide us at least a few steps forward” in our understanding.³ His “cosmological scheme remains provisional, experimental, imaginative, and always pluralistic”. It’s “not a search for the certainty of a final systematic theory”.⁴

This reminds me of F. Bradford Wallack’s conclusion that Whitehead’s writings are ambiguous: “There is no way to conclusively prove a particular interpretation of the philosophy, since it contains enough ambiguous statements to satisfy opposing theories”.⁵ Whithead’s cosmology is in fact so ambiguous that Segall notes that “readers may wonder if Whitehead’s cosmology rests on a personal whim”.⁶ Even a provisional map may be useful. It can remind us of what we have missed. The map is not the territory.⁷

Notes
1. Matthew David Segall, Physics of the World-Soul: The Relevance of Alfred North Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism to Contemporary Scientific Cosmology, p. 79.
2. Ibid., p. 148.
3. Ibid..
4. Ibid., p. 160.
5. F. Bradford Wallack, The Epochal Nature of Process in Whitehead’s Metaphysics (State University of New York Press,
1980), p. 199.
6. Matthew David Segall, Physics of the World-Soul, p. 147.
7. Map–territory relation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map–territory_relation, Wikipedia. Accessed: 2022-12-06. Published: 2022-08-26.