Charles Explorer logo
🇬🇧

Thing as an event: using Whitehead’s tools to disassemble early Chinese cosmological texts

Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2023

Abstract

Borrowing the conceptual tools from Whitehead's ontology, the paper offers a reinterpretation of a thing (wu 物) as a nod in the continuous stream of events and explores further implications of this view, including the reinterpretation of the relationship between a thing and a subject, but also the radically situational and temporary character of a thing, and the need for other sources of ontological 'reliability.' Whitehead's processual view also helps elucidate the 'One' and 'many' conundrum in early Chinese cosmology.