Concept
2 readings
Symbolic reference
Concept · 2 readings
Symbolic reference connects Whitehead’s modes of perception and helps us encounter an appearance as a thing. The relation also matters to language; its usefulness does not guarantee correct recognition.
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2 readings · Title A–Z
Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world · Lesson 9 of 9
What can last in a world that perishes?
Whitehead holds that the past goes on having effects and proposes that God preserves what the world achieves. The lesson tests what either claim establishes about personal survival and suffering, and ends the study with a cumulative checkpoint.
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.