Revitalizing the Life Sciences: Whitehead’s Organic Realism and the Return of Romantic Science

Matthew Segall

My aim is to expand on my prior work linking Whitehead’s process metaphysics and evolutionary cosmology to Goethe’s participatory scientific method and Schelling’s Naturphilosophie. I believe Whitehead’s theory of perception and efforts to interpret the 20th century revolutions in physics in organic terms allow for the retrieval of the onto-epistemic approach developed by Goethe and Schelling, thus justifying a Romantic alternative to Enlightenment mechanicism.