Eight New Books Challenge Assumptions
Books that reassess fundamental assumptions and examine worthy alternatives -- for your reading list between now and the June conference.
/ January 31, 2015
Blue Planet Prize Goes to Daly
Economic growth should stop when the marginal cost of economic growth begins to exceed its marginal benefit. Beyond that point, further growth brings about dis-economy, or growth-induced problems, which do more harm than good.
/ January 31, 2015
Shoji’s Memories, and Mine
The city that had been obliterated by a single bomb was the city in which I had played with the dog: Hiroshima, my childhood home.
/ January 9, 2015
Conference Plenaries and Banquet
The vision we as Whiteheadians want to promote is of the world as “a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects.” The phrase comes from Thomas Berry, who gained his vision from Teilhard de Chardin.
/ January 9, 2015
That’s Interesting, But Is It True?
Despite these difficulties, most logicians continue to identify the proposition as a linguistic entity and to assume that the language can be settled in such a way that the statement is either true or false. Whitehead makes a different move. For him, the proposition is not a linguistic element. It is a relation in the real world between some entity, usually a society of some kind, and a pure potential or abstract possibility on the other.
/ January 8, 2015
An Atom Is Hard to Find
The data of our conscious experience are all what Whitehead calls societies, and the vast majority of our thoughts are about societies.
/ January 8, 2015
Do Ideas Matter?
Whitehead saw that a moment of human experience is neither physical nor mental, or we could say it is a very complex integration of both.
/ January 8, 2015
Are We Really Related?
Whitehead shows us the importance of what in popular parlance are sometimes called “vibes.” Learning takes place in experience that is the synthesis of real relations -- to the personal past, the body, and the wider world.
/ January 8, 2015
Spirituality
All too often today, at least in the United States, “spirituality” is juxtaposed to “religion” as an alternative. “Spiritual but not religious” has become a cliché. It often becomes individualist, self-serving, and separated from concerns for justice and peace in the public world.
/ January 8, 2015
World Loyalty
In a time of global crisis we need leaders who care about the whole world and think in terms of what is good for the whole. We need world loyalty.
/ January 8, 2015
What Can We Hope For?
The more clearly we think about positive possibilities, the more strongly we hope for this outcome, and the more attractive the prospect becomes, the more we will invest in thought and in practices that have a chance of bringing these prospects to fruition.
/ January 8, 2015
Ever Wonder What It’s Like To Be a Mouse?
In the Cartesian view, to attribute feelings to these animals was to commit the “pathetic fallacy.” Even today, the industrial production of meat takes no account of any subjective experience on the part of cows, pigs, and chickens.
/ January 8, 2015