Partially examined life precognitions introduce philosophical topics for upcoming episodes

to give you a few weeks to do the reading yourself.

They also serve as quick standalone summaries of the work.

You can read more about these topics, get the words we cover, and listen to Partially

Examined Life Conversations at partiallyexaminedlife.com.

This is Mark Lintonmeyer, outlining Alfred North Whitehead's The Concept of Nature, most

of which was only slightly adapted from a series of lectures he gave in 1919 at Trinity College.

He sets out to tell us first how philosophers should approach descriptions of nature.

This approach involves two elements.

First, just talk about nature, not about the relationship between nature and perceiving

minds.

It may well be that Kant is right, and the experienced world is shaped and colored by the structure

of the human mind.

But nonetheless, if you're trying to do science and not philosophy, you need to just talk

about the world of our shared experience.

Second, you need to actually pay attention to the way the world is actually experienced,

not healously impose some sort of interpretive theory on that world.

He thinks that our current common descriptions of nature are infected by grammar with its

subject and predicate structure, which is also reflected in Aristotelian metaphysics.

We talk about nature as essentially a matter of substances that have attributes.

Even though we only see to perceive the attributes, like the greenness and texture and shape

of a leaf, there must be, according to this way, of thinking a substance that underlies

...