INTEGRAL WORLD MAILING LIST http://www.integralworld.net Newsletter Nr. 798 Amsterdam, September 21st, 2019 KEN WILBER AND THE FALLACY OF MISPLACED CONCRETENESS - FRANK VISSER I won't go into the intricacies of Whitehead's philosophy here, but one thing struck me as relevant while consulting online sources about him. He came up with the expression "fallacy of misplaced concreteness".[9a] Now, within Whitehead's philosophy this has a very specific meaning. My take: we take objects like the sun and the moon to be permanent, but in fact they have a life cycle, even if a very long one. It would be more true to see them as processes of origin and decay. In that sense, seeing them as solid objects is a fallacy. However, Charles Darwin's contribution was exactly that: to expose the fallacy of seeing species as immutable and fixed. Instead, in his On the Origin of Species (1859) he suggested that species had evolved... from earlier species. To believe in immutable species is called "essentialism", another fallacy that evolutionary theory dispensed with. There was a time when dogs were not dogs, but wolves. There was a time when we humans weren't humans yet, but apes (which, technically, we still are). Read more: http://www.integralworld.net/visser149.html AUDIO BOOKS AND THE DISTRACTED MIND - A Memoir - DAVID LANE One of the chief motivating reasons for why I and others at the MSAC Philosophy Group have invested so much time and energy into audio books is that it helps our college students who have benefitted from alternative formats to learn new material. Presently, we have produced 150 books that are available on Amazon, Audible, and Apple's iTunes. We have also made certain to have free PDF versions of every book we have published. Our hope is to reach the 200 mark by the end of 2020. I often tell my students that in an age where everyone is distracted by too much information, too much social media, and too many new gadgets, it is important to find ways to focus our attention. Listening to audio books is in some way a throwback to our ancestral past where we would sit around a camp fire and listen to our elders tell stories about their own lives or the lives of those who came before them. It is ironic that futuristic technologies can allow us to go back to our historical roots and perform that most primordial of tasks: the art of listening. Read more: http://www.integralworld.net/lane167.html