Concept
1 reading
Presentational immediacy
Concept · 1 reading
Presentational immediacy gives a clear field of qualities such as color and shape. Whitehead distinguishes this clarity from what the appearance tells us about the actual thing exerting an influence.
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Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world · Lesson 6 of 9
What do we encounter when we perceive?
Whitehead separates presentational immediacy, a thing’s clear appearance, from causal efficacy, its felt influence, and joins them through symbolic reference. How does that joining make perception useful, and how can it mislead?
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Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world
An experience receives a world it did not make, yet becomes something that was not there before. How can both be true? Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality builds a philosophy around that difficulty, asking us to begin with occasions of becoming and to explain enduring things, perception, judgment and value through their relations.