Bono/Goffey discussion period

3:02. Jeff Bell asks Goffey, isn’t Socrates a kind of hypnotist of his interlocutors? Deleuze felt hypnotized by parts of Whitehead too.

3:03. Goffey responds. Plato does assemblage, not system. Deposed philosophical systems still have much of value to age. Process and Reality performs that sort of rescue operation on works of the tradition. Deleuze does the same, according to Goffey.

3:05. James Bono jumps in. Whitehead’s concept of “lure” is key here, and is not unlike hypnosis. Bono, a good historian of science, starts talking about magic in the Renaissance.

3:07. Isabelle Stengers makes a remark on hypnosis. She says it has a long tradition. It used to be “magnetism,” which goes back to the Renaissance. We should take a pharmacological/pragmatic approach to capture in Whitehead, not an essentialist one. Link between capture and proposition in Whitehead is important. The power of porposition is very important in Whitehead.

3:09. Roland Faber weighs in, turning around to look at Stengers directly behind him. There are different notions of life in Whitehead. Canalization is one of them. Another is that of the entirely living nexus. One of the things about magic in the Renaissance was the discovery of philosophical works pertinent to magic, such as the Hermetic corpus. Faber cites Pico della Mirandola’s remarks on spirit. Instead of misplaced concreteness in Whitehead, how about “misplaced abstraction”? Nature is full of abstractions. Faber briefly mentions the Philosopher’s Stone in another connection.

3:15. Bono, still wearing his historian of science hat, talks some more about magic and metals in the Renaissance. The doctrine of signatures: things have marks that reveal to the pious adept of nature what a thing really is and how it is connected in complex networks or webs of meaning.

3:17. Stengers jumps back in, responding to Bono’s remarks. We should learn to dramatize abstractions. When we extract a rat from its environment and put it in a Skinner box, this is a mistaken abstraction. But putting it in a different environment could be interesting. A machine also abstracts.

3:20. Question from the floor, posed to Andrew Goffey. How do you see the role of mathematics in trying to find a syntax?

3:21. Goffey: Whitehead’s technical vocabulary in Process and Reality has something to do with his interest in the precision of mathematical logic.

3:22. Question from Luke Higgins to Goffey. Higgins cites Christian Kerslake’s Jungian reading of Deleuze [note: Goffey was also reminding me a bit of Kerslake, his fellow Middlesex faculty member]. Higgins: I guess I don’t have an actual question, sorry. Goffey: that’s quite all right.

3:25. Judith Jones questions Bono. What are the philosophical practices embedded in the diagnostic process?

3:25. Bono: that’s a huge question and an important exciting one. He recommends to Jones that she read THIS BOOK by Shigehisa Kuriyama about the difference between Greek and Chinese medicine.

3:29. I agree with Bono that Whitehead’s Aristotle is a straw man, and I ask him why (though I agree). Bono thinks Whitehead oversimplifies the form/matter relation in Aristotle. Aristotle rejects preformation in favor of epigenesis, and Whitehead falsely reads too much determinism into Aristotle.