Process, Reality, and the Power of Symbols

Following A.N. Whitehead, this book takes up the principal challenge facing a natural philosopher who wishes to engage with Nature while rescuing both Life and Thought from materialistic approaches which rob them of their ‘quicknesses’. Selecting certain insights and intuitions from the writings of Peirce, Coleridge, Deleuze and Nietzsche, the author proffers a remedy for the pervasive nihilism of ‘the moderns’ which illustrates Deleuze’s suggestion that philosophy should be imaged as a dynamic collage that is forever in the making.

MURRAY CODE who taught mathematics at the University of Guelph, Canada, has argued for the importance of A. N. Whitehead’s views on logic, mathematics, philosophy of science, and metaphysics in two previous books: Order and Organism: Steps to a Whiteheadian Philosophy of Mathematics and the Natural Sciences (1985); and Myths of Reason: Vagueness, Rationality, and the Lure of Logic (1995).

Science and the Appropriation of Reality * Signs, Symbols and Metaphysical Imaginaries * Minding, Imaging and Symbolizing * A Nearly Comprehensive Naturalism * In Search of a ‘True Naturalism’ * Putting Life Back into Nature * On Learning Good Sense * Against ‘Conceptual Idolatry’ * Epilogue: Notes for a Cultural Therapy