Preludes to Philosophical Thinking: (1) Loafing with Clara-Clara, (2) Whitehead, Trigonometry
Gordon Bearn (Lehigh University, USA)

(Also streaming on Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81813506541)

I will be bringing the opening preludes of a work-in-progress whose motivating experience is what Whitman called merging: attending affectionately to things, a melting merging. Such things, in Whitehead’s terms are unconceptualized concrete, “devoid of numeracy” (MT, 96-7). Schools teach us to think with abstractions, clean-cut or vague concepts with clean-cut or vague relations from which we can deduce various consequences (SMW 58). But abstractions are the result of in-attention, thinking constrained, their justification can only be pragmatic. Remembering Gertrude Stein perhaps philosophical thinking takes place not in algebraic calculation beforehand, but in the open between pen and paper.

Gordon C.F. Bearn is Stewardson Professor of Philosophy at Lehigh University. His publications have been stimulated by Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein, Derrida’s pursuit of the consequences of iterability, and Deleuze’s intimation of an aesthetics of existence. He has written a book on Wittgenstein and Nietzsche, Waking to Wonder (1998), and a book inspired by reading Deleuze, Life Drawing (2014). He is now beginning a book whose idea was the energy in every smaller thing he has written for some time: Inklings and Algebra: Preludes to Philosophical Thinking. This new book may become six suites of preludes.

For further inquiries: Yuxin Su (yuxin.su.16@ucl.ac.uk).

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