Article
In the last decade of the twentieth century, the world is haunted by the dark side of interrelatedness. Human impact on the soils, rivers, land, air, and seas has reached devastating proportions in many places. Pesticides from farms in California accumulate in seals in the Arctic, radiation from Chernobyl spills north to Sami reindeer herds. …
Article
Introduction For several years I have been teaching a course on the problem of evil to seminary students using texts such as Hick’s Evil and the God of Love, Griffin’s God, Power, and Evil, and Davis’ Encountering Evil. Students responded well to the class lectures which drew heavily upon process thought in dealing with the …
Continue reading “A Critique of Process Theodicy from an African Perspective”
Article
The following dialogue took place on April 22, 1993 at the meeting of The Society for the Philosophy of Creativity (SPC) mentioned in the introduction to this focus section. As is usual for an SPC meeting, the dialogue was taped for the SPC archive at the Morris Library at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. The full …
Article
Whitehead’s thought covered vast areas of learning in diverse fields. In each of the areas of mathematical logic, the philosophy of science, and cosmology, his output was prodigious. However, the mere fact that we assign different names to these different branches of learning ought not to lead us to think that they were separated in …
Continue reading “A Mathematical Root of Whitehead’s Cosmological Thought”
Article
Whitehead’s creativity often has been interpreted as existing only pluralistically, that is, existing only as numerically many in the plurality of actual entities by virtue of which it is actualized. Apart from its existence in the plurality, it has been thought to have absolutely no ontological status whatsoever. The object of this essay is to …
Continue reading “A Monistic Interpretation of Whitehead’s Creativity”
Article
‘Twas a month before Christmas when all through the hall, Not a student was sleeping while under the pall Of late nights in Tipple with papers to type, And fill with the usual brilliance and hype. My notes were all nestled like birds of a feather, Nested and messily huddled together, And I with my …
Continue reading “A Month Before Christmas and a Day After Darwin”
Article
Considerable effort has been extended to demonstrate the inclusiveness of the Whiteheadian metaphysical stance. The appropriateness of this philosophical vision has been extensively explored within the domains of the natural sciences, mathematics, the social sciences (particularly. sociology and psychology), aesthetics and theology. Perhaps there is no primary dimension of human experience and reflection which has …
Article
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) was one of the most gifted and original 20th-century French philosophers. His phenomenology of perception and the body led him to explore widely, and deeply, history, political life, art, language, and the social sciences. Before his untimely death, he began to work out an ontology of Nature which he left behind in …
Continue reading “A Process View of the Flesh: Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty”
Article
[Editor’s note: Leonard Thompson Troland (1889-1932) received the Ph.D. at Harvard in 1916 and taught there until his death. In addition to the work mentioned in Hartshorne’s opening paragraph, Troland was co-author (with Daniel F. Comstock) of The Nature of Matter and Electricity (1917), and author of The Present Status of Visual Science (1922), The …
Article
I wish to draw attention to an important passage in Process and Reality that seems to have escaped the careful sleuthing of the editors of the Corrected Edition of Process and Reality. I refer to a discussion of the plenum summing up the extensive continuum in the ‘organic theory’ (PR 77). The much revised expanded …
Article
Professor Buchler’s paper, "On a Strain of Arbitrariness in Whitehead’s System," which appeared in Journal of Philosophy (66, 19 [October 2, 1969], 589-601) and an abstract of which appears on page 70 of this issue of Process Studies, is an important and a very challenging one. It is challenging not only to Whitehead, but to …
Article
Modern theologians, in keeping with recent biblical scholarship and an existential self-understanding, view revelation as a personal union in knowledge between God and a participating subject. The union is initiated by God but requires an individual response. They have difficulty, however, in relating such views to their metaphysical systems. This essay proposes a process model …
Article
In "Prehending God in and through the World" (Process Studies 29.1) Joseph Bracken comments on the recent discussion concerning the means by which finite actual entities might be able to prehend God. In this response my aim is not to add to the specifics of that debate, but rather to focus on aspects of Bracken’s …
Continue reading “A Response to Joseph Bracken’s "Prehending God in and through the World"”
Article
The problematic nature of truth stands at the center of an array of philosophic issues for our time. To one side lie questions about reality. To another side lie questions about the nature of interpretation. To yet another side, or perhaps underneath all these issues, lie the questions of value: whether reality exhibits worth independent …
Article
I. Values as Ideas In developing a Whiteheadian theory of moral responsibility as derived from his complex metaphysics and his particular notion of the self (its identity, function etc.), it is necessary first to discuss the meaning of value in that metaphysics. In this effort I shall be obliged to refer both to the infinite …
Continue reading “A Whiteheadian Account of Value and Identity”
Article
I. Introduction The philosophy of Gilles Deleuze is often classified, in the Anglophone world at least, under the heading “poststructuralist.”1 While there may be some justification for this categorization, it nevertheless fails to capture the theoretical scope and philosophical ambition of what is perhaps the most important of Deleuze’s works: Difference and Repetition (1968). It …
Continue reading “A Whiteheadian Chaosmos: Process Philosophy from a Deleuzean Perspective”
Article
Death and immortality, taken together, form a pervasive theme in Whitehead’s metaphysics. Death does not simply happen once in a lifetime, for this loss of one’s own subjectivity is a perpetual occurrence, from moment to moment. Subjectivity is identified with present immediacy, which is always fading into the past. With the attainment of its own …
Continue reading “A Whiteheadian Reflection on Subjective Immortality”
Article
The attempt to write a life of Whitehead is something one should not wish on one’s worst enemy. The kinds of private documents a biographer needs are almost nonexistent. Whitehead did not keep a diary, and he was famous for not writing letters; they took too much time from his work. Natural letter-writers, like Bertrand …
Article
I appreciate Professor Pike’s lengthy critique of a central chapter of my book, God, Power and Evil: A Process Theodicy (henceforth GPE) and the invitation by the editor of Process Studies to respond to it. Of the numerous issues his critique raises, I will respond to those which seem most important. Theodicy as Hypothesis Pike’s …
Continue reading “Actuality, Possibility, and Theodicy: A Response to Nelson Pike”
Article
In “Sharing A Vague Vision: Wieman’s Early Response to Whitehead,” I examined four central strands in Wieman’s thought which I believe can also illuminate his changing reaction to Whitehead’s thought. They form the focus of this study as well. 1. A theory of Supreme Value which, despite many changes in formulation, can always be understood …
Continue reading “Added on Like Dome and Spire — Wieman’s Later Critique of Whitehead”
Article
It seems reasonable to suppose that all people have some vague image of ideal personhood, or at least of what they want their lives to be like and what would be needed to bring that about. Put in very general terms, every person has a theory of value and of power and of the relationship …
Continue reading “Aesthetic Value and Relational Power: An Essay on Personhood”
Article
Note: this essay was translated by Eric von der Luft and Frank Eberhardt 1. The Theoretical Program: an Essay in Cosmology Without a doubt, Whitehead offers the best developed solution to his basic philosophical problem in his major work, Process and Reality. If we want to determine the direction and goal of Whitehead’s theoretical development …
Article
I The purpose of this essay is to bring three areas of thought into dialogue around a single case study. My task is to proceed from a pastoral psychology perspective and to imply a working connection between black liberation and process theologies when black people’s experience of oppression is the focus. Oppression is here defined …
Article
In this paper I shall develop a view of perception from the partial theory to be found in Whitehead’s early philosophical writings and defend it against objections which led Whitehead himself to replace it later with a somewhat different theory.1 Development of the Early Theory The first phase or moment of perception is sense-awareness (CN …
Article
It is well known that the various forms of process thought are agreed in denying the existence of an enduring self which maintains absolute identity through change.1 Process thought — regardless of whether time is taken to be Continuous or discreet, or whether one holds to an A series or B series view of time …
Continue reading “An Enduring Self: The Achilles’ Heel of Process Philosophy”
Article
Anti-Judaism has long played an important, and sometimes formative, role in the shaping of the Christian witness. It has also been a significant factor in Christian theological reflection upon that witness. Literature which analyzes its impact on the canonical writings of the early church and on the history of theology abounds (see CAS, JCP, JP, …
Article
(Note: This article is translated by James W. Felt. James W Felt S.J., is Professor of Philosophy at Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA 95053. Independently of Fetz’s book he had published in Process Studies 14/4 (Winter 1985) an essay along some of the same lines: Whitehead’s Misinterpretation of ‘Substance’ in Aristotle."} (*This is Section …
Continue reading “Aristotelian and Whiteheadian Conceptions of Actuality: I”
Article
(Note: This essay was translated by James W Felt S.J., Professor of Philosophy at Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA 95053. Independently of Fetz’s book Felt published in Process Studies 14/4 (Winter 1985) an essay along some of the same lines: ‘Whitehead’s Misconception of ‘Substance’ in Aristotle.”) Whiteheadian Process Philosophy as Transformation of the …
Continue reading “Aristotelian and Whiteheadian Conceptions of Actuality: II”
Article
The opening bars of the Finale of Mahler’s Tragic Symphony plunge us immediately into a conflict between romantic reverie and tragic fate. The soaring violins release us to take an idyllic flight, which is joyful, liberating, and serene. But Mahler breaks this mood dramatically by having the brass and tympani intrude, announcing the tragic theme. …
Article
Whoever comes in contact with process philosophy today encounters it more often than not in the form of Whitehead’s philosophy. This was the way it was for me when I was guest professor in 1963 at the University of Chicago and ran into an entire school of Whitehead adherents in the theological faculty (not, I …
Continue reading “Atom, Duration, Form: Difficulties with Process Philosophy”
Article
A doctrine that appears often in the process philosophies of this century holds that the causal determinist is contradicting himself when he talks about a fully determinate future. The idea seems to have originated with Henri Bergson. It also appears clearly in the context of a refutation of determinism in the writings of Milic Capek, …
Article
It was Duns Scotus who said: There can be no contingency in any second cause in causing unless there is contingency in the first cause in causing (De Primo Principio, Ch. 4). Scotus, of course, had God in mind, but his comment still sets the issue of freedom nicely where metaphysics is concerned. We …
Continue reading “Being and Freedom: The Metaphysics of Freedom”
Article
In much recent philosophy, including mine hitherto, space and time have been considered primarily as they appear either to common sense or to relativity physics. But quantum physics suggests important qualifications. This should not surprise us. For it is only in quantum physics that science arrives at long last at the true idea of single …
Continue reading “Bell’s Theorem and Stapp’s Revised View of Space-Time”
Article
In a series of papers (3:1-10, 4:1303-20, 5:270-76, 6:313-23, and 7) Henry Pierce Stapp has argued that quantum mechanics is incompatible with the principle of local causes. According to this principle, the earlier of two events cannot affect the other if the distance between them is so great that a light signal cannot traverse it …
Continue reading “Bell’s Theorem, H. P. Stapp, and Process Theism”
Article
The three papers and the dialogue contained in this focus section have been emerging for a number of years, since the three contributors began preparing their contributions for a gathering that took place on April 22,1993, a meeting of The Society for the Philosophy of Creativity (SPC) at the Central Division Meeting of the American …
Continue reading “Bergson and the Calculus of Intuition: Special Focus Introduction”
Article
One of the most crucial issues underlying much of contemporary philosophy is the relation of philosophy and science. Phenomenologists and ordinary language philosophers come down hard on the side of there being a radical difference between these two modes of knowing while pragmatically inspired philosophers stress their continuity. The extremes of the spectrum axe probably …
Article
I. Preliminary Consideration I would like to make a couple of points concerning two popular misunderstandings of Bergson. The first is the impression that this philosophy is “irrationalist. The second, often incongruously con1oined with the first, is the suggestion that his philosophy is — for lack of a better word – “literary.” Though this essay …
Article
Henri Bergson’s view of creative change exhibits tensions between conceptual and supra-conceptual assumptions about the nature of cognition and reality. It seems to me that such tensions are inescapable in any attempt to give an account of creative activity. Given such tensions, however, some fundamental questions arise. Not only is it proper to ask whether …
Continue reading “Bergson, Peirce, and Reflective Intuition”
Article
A central theme of Ilya Prigogine’s works is the rediscovery of time through science. Such an acknowledgment of the significance of time by the scientific world is far from complete; since the establishment of Newtonian physics, the ubiquity of time has largely been ignored. When there have been scientific attempts to treat motion, time has …
Continue reading “Bergson, Prigogine and the Rediscovery of Time”
Article
The philosophical enterprise of Henri Bergson (1859-1941) forcefully illustrates his own pronouncement: a philosopher worthy of the name has never said more than a single thing” (CM 132 — OE 1350). Bergson’s own philosophical statement of “a single thing,” of course, consists in his ever renewed and ever expansive articulations of the intuition of duration. …
Continue reading “Bergson’s Dualism in ‘Time and Free Will’”
Article
My overall response to David Griffin’s critique is that I am in danger of being bitten to death by ducks! Ducks are not equipped by nature to be fearsome biters, but if one is being gnawed on by a huge swarm of them all at once they can be quite troublesome. Similarly, none of Griffin’s …
Continue reading “Bitten to Death by Ducks: A Reply to Griffin”
Article
The purpose of this article is to show the environmental relevance of religious naturalism, in particular a minimalist version with a strong component of radical empiricism. Aldo Leopold and J. Baird Callicott, among others, speak of the need to extend our moral concern to the land or the environmental community and to develop a land …
Article
Students of Whitehead can find much of interest in the metaphysics of Justus Buchler. Buchler, like Whitehead, subjects traditional substance-quality metaphysics to a devastating critique. If we regard, as surely we must, such rejection of substance-quality metaphysics as one of the distinguishing traits of process metaphysics, Buchler is a process metaphysician. But Buchler, again like …
Continue reading “Buchier’s Ordinal Metaphysics and Process Theology”
Article
In a programmatic essay entitled “Whitehead Without God” (PPCT 305-28), Donald W. Sherburne sets out to demonstrate that a viable, coherent metaphysical system can be maintained by shifting the role assigned to God in Whitehead’s cosmology to other factors within that scheme. John Cobb, on the other hand, denies that “Whitehead without God” has coherency, …
Article
Substance metaphysics, or the view that the world is composed of individual entities which have properties and are related to each other in various ways, has been under steady attack from various quarters for around 300 years.1 It is a great tribute to its staying power that it has not disappeared completely. Indeed, it has, …
Continue reading “Can Leclerc’s Composite Actualities Be Substances?”
Article
I have formulated a complex question, for it seems to presuppose that Whitehead was not a Christian philosopher. This I have done deliberately because an interesting point of beginning is a pair of documents that spell Out clearly why their authors cannot accept him as “Christian” or a “Christian philosopher.”1 If to be a Christian …
Continue reading “Can Whitehead Be Made a Christian Philosopher?”
Article
In his article “Analysis and Cultural Lag in Philosophy” (1), Hartshorne notes that Whitehead is one of few modem philosophers, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, who have taken seriously and even adopted many tenets of classical philosophy. Whitehead is free from “cultural lag” — that is, he, “far more than most recent writers, [is] acquainted …
Continue reading “Cartesian Roots of the Ontological Principle”
Article
The intent of this paper is to present a conceptual model of a physical and biological universe in a state of constant change and evolution, based on three principal ideas: (a) neo-Aristotelian notions of reciprocal causality, (b) chaotic dynamics and contingencies of self-organizing systems, and (c) emergence of consciousness and sense of moral purpose in …
Book Chapter
Whitehead’s criticism of the existing scientific view is not that it is pragmatic, or empirical, or based on sense-data, but that it is based on a kind of theory about the nature of the world that has imparted a mistaken view of time and space and how the mind works.
Book Chapter
This discussion concerns Whitehead’s “extensive connection,” “duration,” “ingress,” “percipient event,” “the immediate,” “event particle,” “extending over,” and other abstractions.
Book Chapter
Thinking homogeneously, Whitehead’s development concerns space and time. presumably he thought one could pursue the same sort of analysis in other fields. One cannot embark on any sort of Whiteheadian scheme if one as no idea of how you are going to get space and time out of it.
Book Chapter
This discussion concerns Whitehead’s "Casual efficacy:" How does an earlier stage in this process get carried over into a later stage thereby producing continuity and the possibility of recognition?
Book Chapter
How does one get from bare sense-awareness to the idea of process? Events are abstractions, and what is concrete is the passage of nature. The grounds for thinking this has rich properties are because of what we get from direct sense-awareness.
Article
(This article is a revised version of a lecture given on September 30, 1991 in Claremont, California during a conference celebrating Charles Hartshorne and the publication of The Philosophy of Charles Hartshorne, Vol. XX in The Library of Living Philosophers Series, edited by Lewis Edwin Hahn [La Salle, IL: Open Court Press, 1991].) Reading …
Continue reading “Charles Hartshorne And Subjective Immortality”
Article
Charles Hartshorne believes that the ontological argument forces on us the disjunction, either “God exists” is true necessarily or “God exists” is false necessarily. This, he holds, is simply a logical extension of what Anselm discovered, for, as Anselm saw, God cannot be understood in the imperfect mode of contingency, whether as existing or not. …
Continue reading “Charles Hartshorne and the Ontological Argument”
Article
Charles Hartshorne was born in June 1897. In a lifetime which spans the best part of a century, he has been a prolific writer on topics ranging from neoclassical theism, the ontological argument for the existence of God, and philosophical psychology, to aesthetics, pacifism, and ornithology. It is with the first two areas that he …
Continue reading “Charles Hartshorne on Metaphilosophy, Person and Immortality, and Other Issues”
Article
Many individuals and libraries have helped me in the preparation of this Bibliography and I am grateful to them all. I am especially grateful to the authors who sent me material. Please help me fill the lacunae by sending me information about items I should have included. In this Bibliography references to Charles Hartshorne simply …
Continue reading “Charles Hartshorne: A Secondary Bibliography”
Article
Charles Hartshorne presents himself and is presented by others as a strong rationalist. David Griffin thinks, however, that Hartshorne may be also called an empiricist. Rationalism may stand in opposition to empiricism, as for example in Descartes’ philosophy, but it doesn’t have to. It may be opposed primarily to mysticism or fideism (or voluntarism), finding …
Article
Readers familiar with John Cobb’s many theological writings will know that he has already contributed a number of essays on the subject of Christology. Christ in a Pluralistic Age (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1975) significantly adds to this number, not by being, as he explains, a full-fledged Christology,” but by expressing the results of a …
Continue reading “Christology Reconsidered: John Cobb’s ‘Christ in a Pluralistic Age’”
Article
Throughout the last fifty years various philosophers and physicists have attempted to assess the extent of agreement between the conception of physical reality within the framework of process philosophy and the character of the physical world described by quantum theory.1 Recently this line of inquiry has been given new life by the discovery of Bell’s …
Continue reading “Complementarity, Bell’s Theorem, and the Framework of Process Metaphysics”
Article
The generous critical attention Hartshorne, Cobb, and Ford have focused on my small book (CG) should be the envy of any author (PS 10:73-88). The greatest true respect one can pay an author’s work is to take it seriously enough to attempt to refute it. I tried to do this for the authors of process …
Continue reading “Concerning Creativity and God: A Response”
Article
More than anyone, Stanley Hauerwas has been responsible for the recovery of the tradition of character and virtue in theological ethics during the last fifteen years. His thought has been a response to what he sees as the inadequacies and devastating consequences of modernism, particularly in its liberal form. There is much in his work …
Continue reading “Confessional Postmodernism and the Process-Relational Vision”
Article
In his article "A Suggestion on ‘Consciousness’ in Process and Reality" (PS 3:41), John Bennett argues that there can be consciousness in the satisfaction of an actual entity, even though there cannot be consciousness of that satisfaction. In support of this claim, I suggest we may look to Jean-Paul Sartre for a partial answer to …
Continue reading “Consciousness in Satisfaction as the Prereflective Cogito”
Article
It is an assumption of classical theism that God knows not only the entire realm of actuality — past, present, and future — but that he also knows the entire realm of possibility in the sense of knowing all things that could have come to pass but will not, e.g., a certain shade of blue …
Article
In a recent article in Process Studies, Richard Creel discusses the idea that the realm of possibility is a continuum and the implications of this idea for our understanding of God’s omniscience (PS 12:209-31). Although he agrees that the realm of possibility does form a continuum (or perhaps several continua), he nevertheless believes that it …
Continue reading “Continuity, Possibility, and Omniscience: A Contrasting View”
Article
The author examines Whitehead’s view that scientific laws state principles which are immanent in nature but which evolve concurrently with novel changes in the entities actually constituting the universe.. According to Whitehead, scientific laws state principles which are immanent in nature but which evolve concurrently with novel changes in the entities actually constituting the universe.1 …
Continue reading “Cosmic Epochs and the Scope of Scientific Laws”
Article
Dr. Craighead argues most ingeniously and with unusual fairness. I still think, though, that "there might have been nothing" is meaningless or contradictory. As to contradiction, consider "the being of pure nonbeing"? Also that "there is . . ." implies location. One can always ask, where? Sometimes the true answer is, somewhere, everywhere, or nowhere. …
Article
The reconstruction of psychotherapy is a great challenge, especially in the face of postmodern impulses to deconstruct concepts and theories that have been taken for granted for many decades.1 Of course, psychologists and therapists continually address this challenge, but human needs for healing continue, even while people raise foundational questions. With simultaneous pressures to reform …
Article
Benedetto Croce seems not to have read the works of his slightly older contemporary, Alfred North Whitehead; nor vice versa. The neo-idealist vocabulary of the Italian philosopher, in comparison to the empiricist and often scientific vocabulary of Whitehead, may have contributed to this mutual disregard. But beneath the language differences there are striking similarities …
Article
There were eighteen hours traveling time left, and I had not the slightest talent for sleeping on a bus. Granted a thirty-minute rest stop in Pecos, Texas, I went in search of a book. Inside a cafe I found a decrepit wire book stand of the sort that mercifully occupies every bus-rider’s oasis. Praying for …
Continue reading “Culture, History, and the Retrieval of the Past”
Article
[ Editor’s note: The following paper began as a book review of John Bowlby’s Charles Darwin, A New Life (New York: W. W Norton & Company, 1990) An examination of the various fragments and the four manuscript versions — not all complete — reveals that Hartshorne expanded it into a review article. For the most …
Article
Most process-relational theologians wish to claim that God ‘acts’ in the world by offering context-dependent vocations and persuasions. David Pailin, Britain’s foremost exponent of process-relational thought, has recently sought to avoid the traditional ‘aim and lure’ language by speaking of divine agency as a general teleological purpose: a drive or intentional cosmic urge within the …
Article
The subtitle of this special issue of Process Studies, “Process Thought in a New Key,” derived as it was from Susanne Langer’s elegant title Philosophy in a New Key, turned out to have a commemorative significance that was not originally in the minds of those who heartily applauded George Lucas’ selection, in 1984, of that …
Article
"Universality arising from particularity as its child and redeemer." (George Allan; IP 242) The voices of deconstruction would have us believe that the pillars of our culture have collapsed. God is dead. The self has disappeared. History is at an end. The book is closed. The loss of these four points of reference, it is …
Continue reading “Deconstruction and the Philosophy of Culture”
Article
I. The Encounter with Deep Ecology Whitehead’s philosophy can be understood as a deep ecology. It affirms the intrinsic value of all things and their radical interdependence in such a way that those who follow him should be profoundly sensitive to the inherent importance of what happens to all things and to how the effects …
Article
The present article is a comparative study of two process philosophies, the Philosophy of Organism and the philosophy of Organicism. It is designed to serve three stated purposes of Process Studies, the first giving primary emphasis to Whitehead’s thought, the second including other process philosophies, and the third inviting “radical critiques of process thought.” …
Article
Dennis Hurtubise (Process Studies 29.1) has provided a helpful and accurate summary of Ford’s findings on the latest stage of Whitehead’s thinking in Process and Reality. His thesis is that Ford’s work does not offer the support to the "traditional" interpretation that Ford himself suggests. Chiefly, this means that passages traditional interpreters have employed to …
Continue reading “Denis Hurtubise on Ford and the "Traditional" Interpretation”
Article
I We seek the emergence of an encompassing vision which seemingly now lies beyond us, and I am fully persuaded that it will transcend everything which is now manifest as either dialectical or di-polar understanding. No doubt my way of seeking it is very different from process thought, such as that expressed in the writings …
Article
Concepts are always somehow derivative from and accompanied by images. Even the most abstract thought is orchestrated by the imagination. For we cannot think at all without planting our minds against the backdrop of perceptual, visual, or imagined structures. Aquinas’ “conversio ad phantasmata” is a condition of human thought. At the same time, however, we …
Continue reading “Dipolar Theism: Psychological Considerations”
Article
1. The Issue and Some Definitions "The many become one and are increased by one" (Process 21) is a formulation of Alfred North Whitehead’s Category of the Ultimate so well-known it could be a mantra. Charles Hartshorne held it to be Whitehead’s most important insight. Yet "become" in this expression can mean either (1) the …
Continue reading “Disassembling the Mantra: Part/Whole Equivocation in the Category of the Ultimate”
Article
Robert Andrew Ariel has presented a concise and simplified account of Clifford Will’s work “disproving” Whitehead’s theory of relativity. It is an accurate presentation of that work as well as of Will’s interpretation of Whitehead’s theory. However, Ariel’s article lacks both a critical evaluation of Will’s “empirical test” and a critical understanding of Whitehead’s theory. …
Continue reading “Disconfirmation of Whitehead’s Relativity Theory — A Critical Reply”
Article
I. Oomen’s Proposal Palmyre Oomen proposes to answer how God can be one actual entity, one subject primordially and forever, and still (1) continuously integrate multiple prehensions of the world successively, and (2) continuously present data for the world to prehend (PS27 108-133). Her answer hinges on attributing to God (a) one satisfaction which remains …
Continue reading “Discussion of Palmyre M.F. Oomen’s Recent Essays in Process Studies”
Article
[Several years ago, in the course of a three-way correspondence on Whitehead’s educational theory, Victor Lowe directed Brian Hendley’s and my attention to a one-page summary of a 1919 lecture on education by Whitehead. It was a discussion of fundamental principles of education: “2. Discussion Upon Fundamental Principles in Education, opened by Professor A. N. …
Continue reading “Discussion Upon Fundamental Principles of Education (1919)”
Article
Whitehead’s view of time is multilateral, intricate, and finely drawn. It abounds in unique conceptions and undergoes considerable metamorphosis, starting as an epistemological realism and culminating in a philosophy of organism. But as a whole it may be characterized as naturalistic. At least there is no rejection or amendment of the early declaration that …
Continue reading “Diverse Currents in Whitehead’s View of Time”
Article
The God of classical theism is a being who is, in principle, ontologically independent from the world. In contrast, the God of process theism exists in an ontologically interdependent, reciprocal relationship with the world. The classical God creates ex nihilo; within process theism creation ex nihilo is denied. It should not be surprising, accordingly, that …
Continue reading “Divine Omnipotence: Plantinga vs. Griffin”
Article
One of the ideas for which Charles Hartshorne is known is that God is omniscient but does not have absolute foreknowledge. In several recent works, William Lane Craig argues that there is nothing to commend Hartshorne’s view, that there are positive arguments against it, and that absurd consequences follow from it (PT 103; PS 16:201; …
Continue reading “Does Omniscience Imply Foreknowledge? Craig on Hartshorne”
Article
Kant maintained that the only thing which was good without qualification was a good will — one that acted Out of pure duty. Thus, the only perfect will for him was the divine will, for in all finite wills duty and inclination would be bound to fall apart at certain points. At first reading, Kant’s …
Continue reading “Does Whitehead’s God Possess a Moral Will?”
Article
Whitehead’s account of final causation is a masterful recovery of a seminal idea which had fallen on hard times primarily because of the exaggerated claims of its proponents. Efficient causation, on which this investigation shall concentrate, has in contrast presented serious problems. More than most, Jorge Nobo has sought to restore a more vigorous sense …
Article
But God did not only create mountains, he also created jungles. And today we are beginning to understand that the jungles are the richest and most vibrant part of his creation. The modem explorer in South America or in Africa is not looking for mountains. She is looking into the depths of the jungles to …
Continue reading “Empirical Theology: A Revisable Tradition”
Article
By general agreement among process-oriented thinkers, Whiteheadian metaphysics is considered to be an event-ontology rather than a substance-ontology. That is, the building-blocks of reality are events, not things. Events do not happen to already existing things or persons, as in Aristotelian metaphysics. Rather, a complex set of events constitutes what in common sense language would …
Article
Much of what Peirce has to say throughout his published papers is pertinent to a philosophical perspective on the problems of creativity. However, the introduction of the notion of agape in his speculations about evolution is of particular importance to anyone who has thought seriously about those problems. His thoughts on the special role of …
Continue reading “Eros and Agape in Creative Evolution: A Peircean Insight”
Article
Whitehead’s theory of perception, though undoubtedly bold and original, and consequently of considerable philosophical interest, nevertheless suffers from debilitating flaws.1 So I argued in “The Incoherence of Whitehead’s Theory of Perception” (PS 9), which David 1-lildebrand criticized in “Kimball on Whitehead on Perception” (PS 22).2 In this paper I offer new reasons to doubt the …
Article
Although they have exercised much influence on Protestant theology, process theists have had disappointingly little influence on philosophical discussions of the problem of evil. Despite the fact that leading process theists have devoted a substantial part of their writings to the discussion of evil, we find publication after publication by philosophers on the problem of …
Article
Hare and Madden make five major criticisms of process thinkers’ use of the concept of divine persuasive power to explain the presence of excess evil in the world (PS 2/1, 44-48). (1) If there were a good and powerful God, he would in some respects allow freedom using only persuasive power; but if he were …
Continue reading “Evil and Persuasive Power: A Response to Hare and Madden”
Article
W. Olaf Stapledon, Ph.D. (1886-1950), a British philosopher and writer of science fiction, combines his interests in philosophy and fiction with an humanitarian concern for the future of mankind in his major science fiction novel, Star Maker (1937). In the preface Stapledon states that he is writing out of a feeling of impending crisis. Seeing …
Continue reading “Evolutionary Futurism in Stapledon’s ‘Star Maker’”
Article
It is often tacitly assumed without much debate that Whitehead’s metaphysics constitutes a species of process philosophy compatible in the main with older varieties of process metaphysics inspired by various evolutionist theories. The influence of these older evolutionary cosmologies on Whitehead’s thought, moreover, is never carefully examined so much as it is presupposed.1 Against such …
Continue reading “Evolutionist Theories and Whitehead’s Philosophy”
Article
I. Introduction We are undergoing a changing sense in our conception of nature. This was partly ignited by Alfred North Whitehead and other visionaries of nature of the 20th century. Whitehead envisioned a nature in which mind was not bifurcated from nature, and in which nature was alive. As he said, "the effect of this …
Continue reading “Evolving Sensibilities of our Conception of Nature”
Article
I. Hartshorne’s Achievement The twentieth century has not been graced with many complete philosophies. In Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method Charles Hartshorne demonstrates that his is among the few.1 Of course, completeness in a philosophy is relative to what the philosophy says it should contain. Hartshorne himself has said on many occasions that the problem …
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I Process philosophers in the tradition of Charles Hartshorne propose an account of God as changing from moment to moment, and therefore as internally complex, internally affected by events in the world, and essentially dependent on other nondivine realities. This account is fundamentally incompatible with the account of God characteristic of classical theology. For …
Article
In a previous article (HT 14:297-313) I suggested the possibility of adapting the doctrines of Alfred North Whitehead for analysis of explanatory narrative in history. At that time, it seemed that advocates of the neopositivist “deductive-law” model of explanation, following the lead of Carl Hempel, had shown how ineptly historians went about the task of …
Article
Every natural philosophy that aims to get something right about the world sooner or later comes up against a problem that Kant believed he had resolved when he distinguished between those concepts that he calls conceptus ratiocinati (“rightly inferred concepts”) and those that he calls conceptus ratiocinantes (“pseudo-rational concepts”) (GPR 309). But his failure to …
Continue reading “Explanation and Natural Philosophy: Or, The Rationalization of Mysticism”
Article
Commitment to change without abandonment of the cultural achievements of the past seems to be characteristic of much of contemporary theology. Two such schools of thought have been North American process theology based on the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and liberation theology which originated in the struggles of Third World peoples for economic, political, …
Article
Charles Hartshorne shares with most other metaphysically oriented philosophers a strong drive toward the general. Many people seem to have this drive to some degree. They will seek to understand some object or phenomenon by finding out the general class of things to which it belongs. If they are curious about what monotremes are or …
Continue reading “Feeling as a Metaphysical Category: Hartshorne from an Analytical View”
Article
Feminists and nonfeminists alike have recognized that feminist theory is without a philosophical home. This is true in two senses. First, feminism has not yet generated either a metaphysical System or, more broadly, an independent philosophical framework. Second, many feminists are critical of using established philosophical systems to articulate the experience of women on the …
Continue reading “Feminist Concerns and Whitehead’s Theory of Perception”
Article
In responding to this article, I wish first to make my own perspective clear. I am not a Whiteheadian scholar, and my limited understanding of process thought has been developed primarily through contact with feminist scholars writing from that perspective. I bring to this issue of relatedness and separatism a blending of my own particular …
Continue reading “Feminist Separatism — The Dynamics of Self-Creation”
Article
It is a commonplace of modern science that facts are one thing and values quite another, that we can rely on objective scientific knowledge, while subjective metaphysical thinking (the logical positivists would say) is dubious and to be avoided whenever possible. Indeed, it is an assumption of our world view that progress consists in the …
Continue reading “Foreword To the Newly Reprinted British Edition of Science and the Modern World“
Article
Philosophical materialism enjoys a large body of empirical support in cognitive psychology precisely because the agenda of the psychology is motivated by the very concepts the philosophy endeavors to explain. This is not the case in process thought where the genetic concepts that underlie evolutionary and developmental theories have had scant impact on process studies …
Article
One question central to current Whitehead studies concerns the nature of God: Is God a single actual entity in everlasting concrescence (the “entitative view”), or is God a society of successive actual entities (the “societal view”)? This paper will examine the arguments on each side, indicate what the societal view implies about the nature of …
Continue reading “Freedom and Faithfulness In Whitehead’s God”
Article
I. Background of the Dialogue between Process Thinkers and Evangelicals The publication of Pinnock’s Theological Crossfire (1990) signaled a significant change in the tenor of evangelical responses to process thought. In effect, it initiated a third phase of the process/evangelical dialogue. Cobb and Pinnock’s Searching for An Adequate God (2000) and Stone and Oord’s …
Article
My philosophical background which drives me today to metaphysical speculation seems to be rooted in my past access to: (I) the theories of proto-logic and proto-mathematics in the Erlangen school and (2) the intuitionistic, constructivistic approach to the logical foundations of mathematics, which became one of the post-Husserlian phenomenological movements. Paul Lorenzen, founder of the …
Continue reading “From Lorenzen Through Husserl to Whitehead”
Article
Freud’s mind was tragically oriented . . . there’s always at the end of the vision that vacant spot where he knows he’s defeated, but he wants then to be defeated with dignity. Do you see? He can’t cure everybody. He may not even have an answer, but, by God, he’s going to try with …
Article
Sensing many of the same difficulties Neville has raised against my temporalistic interpretation of genetic successiveness, John Cobb has proposed this constructive alternative: In addition to temporal successiveness, Whitehead conceives of another order of successiveness, which he calls genetic or microcosmic. This is a successiveness that becomes real only when the succession is completed. But …
Continue reading “Genetic and Coordinate Division Correlated”
Article
Whether Whitehead’s cosmology is a plausible and useful view of the world depends in large measure on the cogency of his distinction between genetic and coordinate divisions of actual occasions. Philosophically, this distinction is his way of reconciling the claims of inner subjective life with those of objective experience and knowledge. It has specific application, …
Article
In Alfred North Whitehead’s metaphysical system, God is not the source of creativity and, in that sense, not the Creator-God. For Whitehead, the relation of creativity to God has two sides. On the one hand, he designed his doctrine of creativity to eliminate the need for a Creator-God. Whitehead argued instead that each actual entity …
Continue reading “God and Creativity: A Revisionist Proposal within a Whiteheadian Context”
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[Editor’s note: Hartshorne gave me a copy of this paper just before I heard him present it at Central State University in Edmond, Oklahoma on April 7, 1987. A discussion with the audience followed the presentation of the paper, a transcript of which — from a video-tape — is appended here. A delightful coincidence is …
Continue reading “God as Composer-Director, Enjoyer, and, in a Sense, Player of the Cosmic Drama”
Article
Lewis Ford has recently been developing a fresh new interpretation of God,1 one that he thinks resolves a crippling incoherency in Whitehead’s metaphysics and in any theology based on it. I shall begin by explicating that dilemma and Ford’s way of escaping the prick of both its horns. I will then attempt to show that …
Continue reading “God as the Future: On Not Taking Time Seriously”
Article
Recent papers on process thought and feminism have used the term “androgynous to depict the range of maleness/femaleness expressed in both humans and God.1 In a similar sense, “gynandrous” has been proposed.2 To be sure, the aim is to capture, by means of an appropriate term, the rich texture of human differences, that one is …
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It has been noted from time to time in the literature that the thought of Charles Hartshorne has a number of affinities with personalism, and this is a special case of the relationship between process and personalist thought. The latter is a tangled problem at best, but it is clear that among the important founders …
Continue reading “God, Process, and Persons: Charles Hartshorne and Personalism”
Article
"All theology and commentaries and exegesis," remarked Lorenzo Dow McCabe, must be "completely revolutionized in their basal facts and principles." The "philosophical necessities of the age," including the testimony of universal religious experience, and "the varied and vast signification of divine revelation" demand it (DN 263). Yet the progress of theological reflection seemed to McCabe …
Continue reading “God’s Nescience of Future Contingents: A Nineteenth-Century Theory”
Article
In recent years, many political thinkers have argued that political liberalism is impoverished, so that our political future is better served by efforts to transcend that tradition. Frequently, the titles of their books express this general claim, e.g., Theodore J. Lowi’s The End of Liberalism (EL), Robert Paul Wolfe’s The Poverty of Liberalism (PL), and …
Continue reading “Happiness and the Public World: Beyond Political Liberalism”
Article
In Divine Impassibility: An Essay in Philosophical Theology, Richard E. Creel has authored a systematic and sustained discussion of the time-honored issue of the impassibility of God. As James Keller has observed in a review for Process Studies (PS 15/4), not only is the work an important investigation of the topic as such, it is …
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Shalom: According to Hartshorne, “to be” is “to create” (CSPM 1). Upon this basis he formulates an entire metaphysics which characterizes the person (not the word “person”) as “a kind of low-level universal” (CSPM 73). Thus the personal identity of Peter or Joan is an abstraction relatively to “the momentary states or events in …
Continue reading “Hartshorne and the Problem of Personal Identity”
Article
Within the past decade, there have been several attempts to categorize ethical systems arising from process metaphysics in their relation to ethical theory in general. Although many concur in categorizing any ethical system based on process metaphysics as teleological or consequentialist, recent writings have gone beyond this, attempting to demonstrate the affinity between process ethics …
Continue reading “Hartshorne and Utilitarianism: A Response to Moskop”
Article
Charles Hartshorne holds that concrete reality is actuality and that actuality is definite or determinate.1 Does he mean only that definiteness or determinateness is a distinguishing mark of concrete reality? No, Hartshorne’s position is much stronger than this. He wishes to identify determinateness with actuality: fully determinate particularized quality is actuality (see TDG 193). As …
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Before examining Professor Hartshorne’s view of personal identity, I wish to express my esteem for him and my gratitude for his work. I had already caught the general outline of the view that process is reality in Whitehead’s class in cosmologies in 1931-32. My revered teacher, Edgar S. Brightman, had even before this made me …
Continue reading “Hartshorne on Personal Identity: A Personalistic Critique”
Article
Christian thinkers have long reacted with wonder as well as reverence to the thought of God embodied in a specific human form. Why would divinity choose to be specially manifested in just this instance of humanity rather than in others? A similar but less partisan question is the philosophical one asking why it is that …
Continue reading “Hartshorne on the Ultimate Issue in Metaphysics”
Article
I. Introduction Charles Hartshorne introduced me to process philosophy as a graduate student at Emory University in 1960. Not until asking William A. Christian some years later why in his book (IWM) he hadn’t considered Whitehead might be thinking of God as a personal series did I realize how deeply Hartshorne had influenced my interpretation …
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1. Introduction Charles Hartshorne rests the case for his philosophy on its coherence and its adequacy to the facts of experience, including the well-established teachings of the physical sciences. And yet he has admitted over the years, and continues to admit in the Library of Living Philosophers volume (PCH), that there is one issue on …
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A. Introduction In this article I would like to accomplish three things. First, I will examine both the features of virtue ethics relevant to an understanding of Hartshorne and several of the features of Hartshorne’s thought relevant to an understanding of virtue ethics. In this effort I hope to show that Hartshorne’s thought is an …
Continue reading “Hartshorne, Metaphysics and The Law of Moderation”
Article
In this essay I shall offer some critical reflection upon Charles Hartshorne’s neoclassical conception of God from the perspective of black theology. I. Black Theology and Classical Theism The term “black theology” is here used to refer primarily to those contemporary African-American and native African systematic theologies which understand that the Christian witness to the …
Continue reading “Hartshorne’s Neoclassical Theism and Black Theology”
Article
If one wishes to dialogue with, say, Islam, the thing to do is to talk with a Muslim. Depending on where one lives, this task is either difficult or easy; but in any case one knows whom one seeks. For Muslims are theologically and sociologically identifiable: they visit a mosque, hold certain beliefs about Allah …
Continue reading “Hauerwas Represented: A Response to Muray”
Article
Just as Margaret Fuller, at the risk of grandiosity, once decided to "accept the universe," process theologians and philosophers have decided, with the same risk, to "accept history;" When informed of Fuller’s decision, Thomas Carlyle said, "By God! she’d better." Equally but without Carlyle’s dismissive irreverence, process theologians decided that they had better accept history. …
Continue reading “Historical Process Theology: A Field in a Map of Thought”
Article
In the past twenty years, several books and articles have been written which are critical of process theology. This literature contains some stimulating intellectual responses as well as several ad hominem pieces which are more concerned with rhetorical flourish and pietisms than critical reflection.1 There are some who want to rid the church of process …
Article
Mainstream process thinkers have clearly repudiated the traditional Christian view that God created our universe out of nothing, ex nihilo, at some point in the finite past. They affirm instead that God created our universe out of the chaotic remains of some prior universe or cosmic epoch, which in turn was also created out the …
Continue reading “How Process Theology Can Affirm Creation Ex Nihilo“
Article
This article grows out of several attempts to respond viva voce to those who did me the honor of asking me to enlarge upon the view of the human agent set forth in my Meditation on a Prisoner: Towards Understanding Action and Mind (MP). The act of speaking itself suggested to me certain examples that …
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‘Coercion’ is a somewhat ambiguous term within process theology. In their standard metaphysical discussions, process theists usually define coercive power as the power to bring it about that another entity is totally devoid of any degree of self-determination. But they uniformly agree that every entity always possesses some degree of self-determination (freedom). Thus, process theists …
Continue reading “Human Coercion: A Fly in the Process Ointment?”
Article
William R. Jones, Theodore Walker and Henry James Young share a worldview which is not readily apparent. This essay will identify their common vision and demonstrate that much of their vision cannot be interpreted by process categories. Most process theologians are unaware of this worldview. Reminiscent of Gertrude Stein’s comment about Oakland, many process theologians …
Continue reading “I’ve Known Rivers: Black Theology’s Response to Process Theology”
Article
(I am grateful to Professors Thomas Flynn, George Lucas, Jr., and Richard Patterson for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.) Since the publication of Karl Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery, it has become commonplace in Anglo-American philosophy to cast a disparaging eye on induction. Much of the contemporary interpretations of science based …
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In his fair and generally sympathetic review of my book Bergson and Modern Physics, David Sipfle raised some important and significant questions which clearly show how extremely complex the questions concerning the nature of time are and how difficult it is to agree on their solutions even for those who share a basic philosophical view. …
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(Note: this essay was translated by James W. Felt. James W Felt is Professor of Philosophy at Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA 95053. Independently of Fetz’s book he had published in Process Studies 14/4 (Winter 1985) an essay along some of the same lines: “Whitehead’s Misconception of ‘Substance’ in Aristotle.”) At the conclusion …
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A great deal of the interest which has recently developed concerning the thought of Alfred North Whitehead has come from the Christian theological community. Studies on the relations of various aspects of Whiteheadian thought to elements of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition continue to appear. On the other hand, little research has ken done concerning the …
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"Prior to the science of geometry, there is a natural geometry whose clearness and evidence surpass the clearness and evidence of other deductions."1 In this paper I take it as prima facie established that Professor Gunter is correct. Bergson placed a high importance on the role of the calculus for grounding contemporary science in …
Continue reading “Influence as Confluence: Bergson and Whitehead”
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This is a programmatic essay for a comprehensive comparative analysis of phenomenology and process philosophy.1 The central concern of this project is the relationship between the major doctrines of these two philosophies: intentionality and prehension. In his “analytic phenomenology” Stephen A. Erickson has ably established a solid relationship between Heidegger’s version of intentionality and the …
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Where is God? Process theologians debating God’s relation to space-time have focused on the theories of relativity and regional inclusion, grounding their speculation in Whitehead’s escape from traditional theism to Process and Reality.1 That extended essay on organic cosmology with its interpretation of “God and the World” is an obvious quarry for ideas. Yet Whitehead’s …
Continue reading “Interpoints: A Model for Divine Spacetime”
Book Chapter
The gathering of scholars is concerned to see how philosophy, with an emphasis on Whitehead, might contribute to new developments in science. Dr. Emmet gives her personal impression of the ways in which these Dialogues fasten on some features of Whitehead’s thought during his middle period.
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Hartshorne’s theory of divine relativity asserts that God is thoroughly related to human experience through a process of the feeling of feeling.1 Divine relativity means just that: “In the depths of their hearts all creatures . . . defer to God because they sense him as the one who alone is adequately moved by what …
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William Lane Craig has authored a well-informed historical account and sophisticated modern defense of the cosmological argument for God’s existence which has its origin in the medieval Arabic practitioners of kalam (sometimes translated ‘scholastic theology’). The work (K) should be of special interest to process thinkers since the kalam cosmological argument challenges an important tenet …
Continue reading “Is the Past Finite? On Craig’s Kalam Argument”
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In the present paper I attempt to make two different but intimately related cases. One of these is a substantive case, and the other is a terminological case. I want to make a substantive case to the effect that Whitehead has a more fluid understanding of existence than his interpreters sometimes realize. That is, I …
Continue reading “Is Whitehead’s Actual Entity A Contradiction in Terms?”
Article
True religion, according to the Biblical literature, is elusive. No sacred institution can assure its presence. A persistent problem is the tendency of the Word of God to harden into a parody of itself; the prohibition of images in the decalogue is, according to the Deuteronomic commentator (Dt. 4), laid down lest Israel be lulled …
Continue reading “Justice and Class Struggle: A Challenge for Process Theology”
Article
The work of Justus Buchler is systematic philosophy akin to that of Aristotle, Spinoza, Whitehead, and Hegel. By systematic we mean not that some traditional set of problems has been covered, but rather that the philosophical product is the deliberate and methodic interrelation of its constituents, viz., its concepts, categories, and principles in a structure …
Continue reading “Justus Buchler: Nature, Power, and Prospect”
Article
When I was a student at the Hebrew University, Mordecai Kaplan lived in Jerusalem. Always interested in young people, it was his custom to host occasional evenings in his living room with university students. The discussions would meander over a variety of contemporary Jewish issues but in some way always return to some central theme …
Continue reading “Kaufman on Kaplan and Process Theology: A Post-Positivist Perspective”
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In “The Incoherence of Whitehead’s Theory of Perception” (PS 9:94-104), Robert H. Kimball tries to show how Alfred North Whitehead’s account of perception is a failed attempt to reconcile two traditional theories of perception: phenomenological (or sense-data) theory and causal (or physiological) theory. Whitehead fails, Kimball argues, in two main ways. First because his notion …
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Frank Kirkpatrick’s “Subjective Becoming: An Unwarranted Abstraction?” (Ps. 3:15-26) portrays the Whiteheadian problematic with an impressive accuracy; hence his critique deserves thoughtful response. Some Whiteheadians, I am afraid, may be tempted to evade the issue by this sort of reflection: Kirkpatrick charges, “The fundamental difficulty which the process model faces is trying to retain language …
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In reading Elizabeth M. Kraus’s The Metaphysics of Experience, A Companion to Whitehead’s Process and Reality, I was particularly disappointed by her concluding chapter on “God and the World,” for there it becomes apparent that she has been reading Whitehead’s remarks on theological topics through the jaundiced eyes of Boethius, St. Thomas Aquinas, and classical …
Continue reading “Kraus’s Boethian Interpretation of Whitehead’s God”
Article
Traditionally many Christian theologies have recognized that humans are called by God to care for the world. Theologies of ecology emphasize that such care rightly includes among its subjects animals, plants, and the land. Philip Joranson and Ken Butigan, the editors of Cry of the Environment: Rebuilding the Christian Creation Tradition, a multi-authored theological study …
Continue reading “Land Ethics, Animal Rights, and Process Theology”
Article
In "The Approach to Whitehead: Traditional? Genetic? or Systematic?," Jorge Luis Nobo offered what is, to date, the most articulate critique of Lewis S. Ford’s genetic approach to Whitehead’s metaphysics. On the basis of some remarks made by Whitehead himself about his thought and writings, Nobo proposes to refute Ford’s claim that the views expressed …
Continue reading “Lewis S. Ford and Traditional Interpretations of Whitehead’s Metaphysics”
Article
1. A Personal and Affectionate Portrait of Lewis S. Ford Process philosophy in the United States — indeed, in the world — today is unimaginable apart from the enduring contributions of Lewis S. Ford. The picture that I chose to illustrate this special issue came from a portfolio of photos that I shamelessly tricked Lewis …
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Lewis Ford stands at the head of the line of many distinguished philosophical theologians who find creative inspiration in the work of Alfred North Whitehead. This is a high compliment, because that list includes such thinkers as Charles Hartshorne, Lionel Thornton, Daniel Day Williams, Norman Pittenger, William Ernest Hocking, Henry Nelson Wieman, Schubert Ogden, John …
Continue reading “Lewis S. Ford’s Theology: A Critical Appreciation”
Article
Introduction In inviting me to participate, Professor Joseph Bracken asked that I present some of the foundational elements in contemporary Christian liberation theologies relative to the issues of social justice. In this lecture I shall first outline the major social justice issues to which various forms of liberation theology are responding. Then I shall sketch, …
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Editor’s Note: The following “Extract from the speech of A. N. Whitehead, Esq., Sc.D., at the Annual Meeting of the Cambridge Women’s Suffrage Association, Nov. 5, 1906” was published as a four-page pamphlet by the Cambridge Women’s Suffrage Association (Mrs. J. Ward, 6 Selwyn Gardens, Hon. Sec.). At the time 50 copies could be obtained …
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Whiteheadian ontology and epistemology illuminate many areas of debate. One such area concerns critical evaluation of literature, particularly when the standards involved have differing philosophical implications. The three critics R. P. Blackmur, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Cleanth Brooks, although varying in the explicitness with which they affirm the criteria and their philosophical bases, all make value …
Continue reading “Literary Criticism and Process Thought: Blackmur, Brooks, Sartre, and Whitehead”
Article
It is a commonplace that creative thinkers are often unskilled in the historiography of philosophy; indeed, a penchant for distortion is all too common among the most outstanding intellects, as witness Bertrand Russell in his History of Western Philosophy. It would be wrong, however, to underestimate a priori the historical acumen of all luminaries in …
Continue reading “Lockeian Roots of the Ontological Principle”
Article
The aim of this essay is to raise some questions concerning the relation between logic and metaphysics in the philosophies of Hegel and Whitehead. Of paramount importance to the Hegelian perspective on this relation is the well-known distinction between understanding and reason as two levels of thinking, for involved in this distinction is the view …
Continue reading “Logic and the Metaphysics of Hegel and Whitehead”
Article
Since the 1970s, the relation of the mind to the body has increasingly been discussed in the philosophical community in terms of “supervenience.” This term, which has been closely related to physicalist views, is a variant on the older concept of “emergence.” The use of this new term, however, has not brought with it a …
Article
“O man, how true are thine instincts, how over-hasty thine interpretations of them!” — Matthew Arnold Schubert Ogden’s proposal, that Bultmann’s demythologizing project be carried to its logical conclusion and applied to the Christology of the New Testament, has been attacked from several perspectives, among them Heideggerian existentialism and the process perspective Ogden himself shares. …
Continue reading “Matthew’s ‘Undercurrent’ and Ogden’s Christology”
Article
In this essay the term “ethics” will be used in a broad sense, roughly equivalent to “the study of how best to act as a human being.” The terms “morals” and “morality” will refer to a definite program of principles or directives enjoined as “the way to live.” Thus a moral code is a species …
Article
Editor’s Note: Although R. W. Sperry does not write from the perspective of process philosophy, his research on brain functions has led him to an emergent, interactionist view of mental phenomena which is highly congenial to Whitehead and Hartshorne. In April, 1974, and February, 1975, he has discussed these views in meetings sponsored by the …
Continue reading “Mental Phenomena as Causal Determinants in Brain Functions”
Article
Contemporary language theorists have isolated several philosophically provocative linguistic components, portions of language which are logically and/or epistemologically problematic. One such category is that of metaphorical expression. Philosophers of language, specifically nonellipsis theorists of metaphor, have zeroed in on a type of expression they refer to as “vital” or “irreducible” metaphor; i.e., metaphor that is …
Article
Whitehead’s method of the working hypothesis, according to which philosophy begins with the observation of particular experience and the tentative formulation of its general features, testifies to the fact that the Category of the Ultimate is Whitehead’s initially provisional statement of the ultimate or most general conditions for experience. These conditions are exemplified by that …
Continue reading “Metaphysical Principles and the Category of the Ultimate”
Article
In recent discussions of induction it has been fashionable to distinguish at least two problems of induction. A distinction which seems to me to be quite valuable is one made by Professor Mary Hesse. She distinguishes (I) the “problem of validation of induction which Hume found to be insoluble” and (II) the problems of the …
Article
A view held by many contemporary metaphysicians is that the problem of induction, so much discussed by philosophers of science, arises only because of mistaken metaphysical views; in particular views (deriving from Hume) about the nature of the causal relation and/or about the internal relations among different entities.1 Contrary to this view, I will try …
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Whitehead’s fall into metaphysics, it has been observed, began with his biting into the apple of induction (2). Has even this turned mealy and sour in his mouth, as Professor Gutting implies? Illuminating as Gutting’s criticisms are, I do not think they quite succeed in making the case he supposes. The key to Whitehead’s understanding …
Continue reading “Metaphysics and Induction’: Reply and Rejoinder”
Article
Introduction The term “process theology” covers a variety of viewpoints and interests. This is true even when the term refers exclusively to contemporary Christian theologians whose thinking draws on the philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne. The work of these Christian process thinkers focuses variously on such topics as the question of God, …
Continue reading “Methodological Alternatives in Process Theology”
Article
Although it has been remarked that the moral philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead bears a resemblance to utilitarianism (WMP 85), it is surprising that no one, to my knowledge, has explored the nature or extent of the resemblance between process philosophy and utilitarianism. In fact, process philosophers have written relatively little about ethics in general; …
Article
Hermeneutics means interpretation. There are two ways to define the term “hermeneutics.” In a narrow sense, hermeneutics means the analytic methods for the exegesis of any text, especially when interpreting an ancient or classical document for our life situation. In a broad sense, it denotes the understanding and interpretation of our life in content as …
Article
Mordecai M Kaplan (1881-1983), one of the major figures in contemporary Jewish thought and founder of the Reconstructionist movement in Judaism, exerted a profound impact on Jewish theology in the twentieth century.’ Kaplan’s major contribution to Jewish theology is his theory of transnaturalism. The purpose of this theory is to develop a philosophical theology that …
Continue reading “Mordecai M. Kaplan and Process Theology: Metaphysical and Pragmatic Perspectives”
Article
Dialog between Buddhists and Westerners moves back and forth between two levels: the conceptual and the religious, valuational, or existential. On the conceptual level Buddhists insist on nothingness while Westerners characteristically speak of being and think of things as having substantial reality. Associated with this conceptual difference are profound religious ones. However, the traditions of …
Continue reading “Mosa-Dharma and Prehension: Nagarjuna and Whitehead Compared”
Article
“Bertie thinks I am muddleheaded; but then I think he is simpleminded” — A N. Whitehead The title of this paper is taken from this famous viva voce remark by Whitehead. Purportedly this was the final line of Whitehead’s brief introduction of Russell during the latter’s series of William James Lectures at Harvard in 1940. …
Continue reading “Mudddleheadedness and Simplemindedness – Whitehead and Russell”
Article
(This article is a revised version of a lecture given on September 30, 1991 in Claremont, California, during a conference celebrating Charles Hartshorne and the publication of The Philosophy of Charles Hartshorne, Vol. XX in The Library of Living Philosophers Series, edited by Lewis Edwin Hahn [La Salle, IL: Open Court Press, 1991]). What …
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In a well-known lecture on "The Prior Actuality of God," Austin Farrer argued already in 1966 for something like a mediating position between "the scholastic absolutism," on the one hand, and "process theology," on the other (RF 178-91). "Our evidence," he allowed, "is that God can concern himself with the actions of his creatures in …
Article
If you like to phrase it so, philosophy is mystical. For mysticism is direct insight into depths as yet unspoken. (MT 174) The words "mystical," "mystic," and "mysticism" have had such a very colorful and diverse history of usage in both the East and the West that it is not an easy matter to determine …
Continue reading “Mystical Consciousness in a Process Perspective”
Article
An organic philosophy calls forth an organic approach to teaching. Teaching organically certainly would require more than one educational methodology, simply to draw from the fullness of human inventiveness. The focus here, however, will be on one particular form of organic teaching that is unusually full in itself — narrative teaching. Teaching narratively calls forth …
Continue reading “Narrative Teaching: An Organic Methodology”
Article
In Warrant and Proper Function (WPF), Alvin Plantinga argues that the probability of human cognitive faculties “being reliable (producing mostly true beliefs)” must be regarded as quite low, if “metaphysical naturalism” is taken as valid and “human cognitive faculties arose by the mechanisms to which contemporary evolutionary thought directs our attention” (WPF 219). Since the …
Continue reading “Naturalism, Theism, and the Origin of Life”
Article
In his review article of Hartshorne’s Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method (PS 2:49-67), Robert Neville remarks that “one of Hartshorne’s most important contributions” has been his concern to deal “with problems as formulated by public discussion, usually that of analytical philosophers.” The general effect of Neville’s review, however is to cast doubt on the justifiability …
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The concept of God provided in the writings of Charles Hartshorne is one of the most influential and widely discussed notions in contemporary philosophy of religion and theology. Not only is Hartshorne’s God significantly different from the traditional concept of God, but Hartshorne also provides a revised version of the ontological argument to prove this …
Continue reading “Non-Being and Hartshorne’s Concept of God”
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In opposition to many Western epistemologies, Whitehead maintains that most experience is not conscious, that language, while crucial to thought, is not essential to it, and that feeling is the fundamental mode of disclosure of the world (PR 36/54). Whitehead also has a strongly empirical side, expressed in his insistence that a system of metaphysical …
Continue reading “Nonhuman Experience: A Whiteheadian Analysis”
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In Jerusalem, 1964, at the International Congress for Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, Abraham Robinson said: "As far as I know, only a small minority of mathematicians, even of those with Platonist views, accept the idea that there may be mathematical facts which are true but unknowable."1 In a 1971 expository article "New Models …
Continue reading “Nonstandard Mathematics and a Doctrine of God”
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The relationship between Whitehead’s concept of God and traditional religious and theological views has been much discussed, but the relationship between his account of God and his conception of the foundations of science has not. Briefly, Whitehead initially (in works published circa 1919-1924) objected to Einstein’s formulation of the theory of relativity on the grounds …
Continue reading “Note on Whitehead and the Order of Nature”
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In “The Human Self: An Actual Entity or a Society?” (PS 5:195-203) Rem B. Edwards proffers a provocative polemic against Whitehead’s theory of the self as a society. He rightly sees that the social-self theory is an inevitable outcome of the epochal theory of time. Thus, he wishes to exempt the human self from that …
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Some thirty years ago Charles Hartshorne raised two questions concerning the Whiteheadian understanding of the temporal structure of God.1 He asked first if, in spite of relativity physics, there must not be a cosmic present, a divine immediacy in which the de facto totality of simultaneous actual entities exist. This question has received a …
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In the interesting and stimulating book, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, the authors John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler compare passages from two of Whitehead’s works — The Concept of Nature and Science and the Modern World — and declare them to be mutually incompatible (ANC 216). (Barrow and Tipler assumed that I reached the …
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F. Bradford Wallack (ENP 7) has called for a revolution in Whitehead scholarship. She argues that it has been a serious mistake for interpreters of Whitehead "to limit the application of his basic ontological category of existence — his actual entity — to just two kinds of existents: subatomic entities, such as electrons, protons, photons …
Continue reading “On Applying Whitehead’s First Category of Existence”
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Werth’s attack on the tenability of Whitehead’s theory of extensive connection (PS 8:37-44) constitutes a serious challenge to the coherence of the philosophy of organism and therefore demands serious consideration. At the same time, both the attack and the doctrine attacked are so arcane and abstruse as to render them inaccessible and/or uninteresting to all …
Continue reading “On Behalf of the Unhappy Reader: A Response to Lee F. Werth”
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In my response, I raised many questions about Hasker’s claim to have shown that traditional free will theism is on par with process theism in relation to the problem of evil. Hasker quite rightly points out that I made more criticisms than he could answer in the space allotted. Having recently faced the same problem,1 …
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While John Locke’s admonition against the “blind precipitancy” of passion should always guide the serious philosopher, an excess of zeal may well be forgiven when it involves the kind of innocent fallout that inevitably accompanies genius — as is the case with Karl Popper. Sir Karl’s The Open Society and Its Enemies has become by …
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The focus of this essay is the process in which an actual entity arises out of its actual world. In particular, I want to suggest a paradigm which renders intelligible the notion of an “actual occasion prehending its past” in its primary phase of concrescence. I am obviously assuming that this notion needs to be …
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I. Aspects of Processes The present deliberations have two distinct phases or stages, the first dealing with processes as such and the second with process philosophy as it has evolved in the work of people like Peirce, Whitehead, and Hartshorne. The natural course of events will make it clear why this is so — and …
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Translated by Carolyn Wolf Spanier and John M. Sweeney The present paper is an attempt to investigate connections between Whitehead’s work on ontological theory and Piaget’s genetic theory of cognition. Although Whitehead’s philosophy of organism is an explicitly metaphysical theory and Piaget’s genetic theory of cognition is markedly a naturalistic theory, the first part of …
Continue reading “On the Formation of Ontological Concepts: the Theories of Whitehead and Piaget”
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Time and again, process theology has been accused of reducing theology to metaphysics, thereby eliminating the genuine source of theology, i.e., the experience of God’s revealing reality. In this regard, one recalls Langdon Gilkey who deplored this collapse of all problems to metaphysical problems.1 According to Gilkey, the problem with “metaphysics” occurs when it loses …
Continue reading “On the Unique Origin of Revelation, Religious Intuition, and Theology”
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For a number of years now, a debate has been underway in the Whiteheadian academy about the method we should adopt to interpret Alfred North Whitehead’s metaphysical writings. Many specialists, if not most, contend that those writings express a single point of view, that is, the same metaphysical system. It is their claim, consequently, that …
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Henri Bergson is credited with a pertinent critique of the mechanistic determinism usually associated with nineteenth- century classical physics. However, his depiction of the nature of things has come to be considered too unsystematic and “loose,” even by later philosophers sympathetic to his thought. He laid the foundations of what has come to be called …
Continue reading “Ontological Hermeneutics: An Overlooked Bergsonian Perspective”
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"Openness to the New" is a very general pattern of response, and yet one which is not easy to understand. In this article we shall be looking for some structures of response which can be facilitated by apocalyptic and by process thought respectively, and which can illuminate our own situation and what it is …
Continue reading “Openness to the New in Apocalyptic and in Process Theology”
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As we approach the end of the twentieth century, it becomes both possible and appropriate to identify pathfinding figures and schools of thought which have contributed significantly to the spirit and style of the times. Since the recognition of change or process is a prominent feature of the intellectual pursuits of the century, one would …
Continue reading “Organization and Process: Systems Philosophy and Whiteheadian Metaphysics”
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Sin has fallen on hard times. We exist in the paradox of a time with a profound realization that our problems are systemic, far exceeding individual is-tic consent or solutions, but the fundamental approach to sin in our society remains a litany of personal failures. Yet ecological disasters, fearsome instruments of war, vast systems of …
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It is sometimes urged that Whitehead presents doctrines without giving supporting reasons. I wish here to consider one important defense of psychicalism, what might be called “the argument from parsimony,” which may be approached via some remarks of Whitehead’s on “Philosophic Method” in Adventures of Ideas. I shall argue both that the defense fails and …
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The examination of human experience for factors which could be used to account for other natural occurrences presents itself as a normal method of procedure for one who rejects the Cartesian type of dualism. This, of course, was Whitehead’s chief approach in the establishment of his speculative cosmology. The analysis of human experience, or to …
Continue reading “Perception and Causality: Whitehead and Aristotle”
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In my judgment the grouping together of Whitehead’s Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (PNK) and The Concept of Nature (CN) by such scholars as Victor Lowe and Nathaniel Lawrence, coupled with the dramatic impact of Whitehead’s attack on theories of the bifurcation of nature in the later of the two books, has almost …
Continue reading “Perception and Externality in Whitehead’s “Enquiry””
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Personal identity is a special form of genetic identity and is very different from the more strict identity dealt with in logical systems (since Leibniz first defined it as complete equivalence of predicates). My view of personal identity can be cumulatively built up in the following steps. (On this issue my view is, so far …
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In a recent article two nontheists, Peter H. Hare and Edward H. Madden, chide process theists for failing to understand that “a certain amount of coercive power is morally required” (PS 2:45). They strongly disagree with John Cobb when he writes, “The only power capable of any worthwhile result is the power of persuasion” (GW …
Continue reading “Persuasive and Coercive Power in Process Metaphysics”
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[Editor’s note: This response to David Pailin’s review of Ford book, Transforming Process Theism, was commissioned by the editor of Process Studies after David Pailin had written his review of Ford’s book. (see Reviews, this issue)] Transforming Process Theism examines an indispensable element in Whitehead’s thinking which apparently cannot be fully integrated with the rest. …
Continue reading “Philosophical Growth, Future Subjectivity, and David Pailin”
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The assessment of a philosopher’s importance by his or her contemporaries is a risky business, for future generations have a way of unmaking the judgments of their predecessors.1 Yet, by standard measures, Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000) was one of the premiere philosophers of the twentieth century. At the celebration of Hartshorne’s centenary, George R. Lucas, Jr. …
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Capek: Their Incompatibility In his article “Becoming: A Problem for Determinists?” (PS 6:237-48) J. Brenton Stearns raised some objections against the basic thesis of contemporary process philosophy according to which strict determinism, when consistently thought through, implies a complete elimination of becoming or, at best, a relegation of succession to the realm of appearances. The …
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In his “Materialist and Panexperientialist Physicalism” Professor David Griffin gives both a judicious and illuminating exposition and critique of the contemporary “mainstream” physicalism and a brief but clearly articulated synopsis of his own alternative approach which he calls “panexperientialism.” Although Griffin’s discussion focuses on my own work, many of his points are applicable, more or …
Continue reading “Physicalism and Panexperientialism: Response to David Ray Griffin”
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Any power of doing or suffering in a degree however slight was held by us to be a sufficient definition of being. And, O heavens, can we ever be made to believe that motion and life and soul and mind are not present with perfect being? Can we imagine that being is devoid of life …
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The term “liberation theology” is used in two senses. Sometimes it refers specifically to the work of Latin American theologians committed to showing how the gospel is good news for the poor. Sometimes it refers to black theology and feminist theology as well, and it can also include various Asian and African theological developments. It …
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I borrow my title from Harvey Cox’s well known The Secular City, the aim of which was to map out and defend the relevance of religion for “the post-literate man of the electronic image” (TSC 11) whose urban, technological culture seemed to many so inhospitable for such an endeavor. Whether or not one agrees with …
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In recent issues of Process Studies there has been a spirited discussion among several contributors about whether or not God can be prehended by finite actual entities either in terms of the divine consequent nature or in virtue of a somewhat revised understanding of the divine primordial nature. In "The Enigmatic ‘Passage of the Consequent …
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I Both in colloquial and in methodic discourse the idea of nature has functioned in a large number of ways, and the variety of these ways makes it seem impossible to find significant relatedness among them. Nature has been distinguished from man, from art, from mind, from chance, from purpose, from history, from eternity, …
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Whitehead’s philosophy aims to approach the accurate expression of final generalities; his metaphysical categories are conceived as tentative formulations of the ultimate generalities. His candidate for the notion which best expresses this final or ultimate generality is “creativity.” It is the “ultimate metaphysical conception,” the “universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact” (PR 31). …
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Theological inquiry in the process tradition has normally been pursued in a context of close association with developments in philosophy and the sciences. Taking its cue from Whitehead, it has been especially attentive to work in these fields that has recognized and appropriated the relational and processive nature of thought and experience. In this country, …
Continue reading “Process and Religion: The History of a Tradition at Chicago”
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This paper will compare the respective potentials of the thought of Hegel and Whitehead as philosophical supports to the theology of liberation. A first section argues the need for such support, and the second part considers a recent influential reading of process theology as political theology.1 In the third section attention is directed to Hegel, …
Continue reading “Process and Revolution: Hegel, Whitehead, and Liberation Theology”
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For this essay I shall select one issue from the roster of problems which comprise the nation’s education agenda: that of the intellectual canon. The dispute is over whether there is one, and what the ramifications are of this for curricular coherence and hence for pedagogical effectiveness. The dispute is loudest at the college and …
Continue reading “Process Philosophy and the Educational Canon”
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Belief that God is tripersonal (i.e., that Father, Son, and Spirit, though three distinct persons, are nevertheless one God) is one of the oldest and most distinctive beliefs of the Christian religion. Yet for many centuries this article of faith, for a number of reasons not to be discussed here, has had relatively little impact …
Continue reading “Process Philosophy and Trinitarian Theology”
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I. Landing the Plane in the Field of Psychotherapy "The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization, and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation" (Whitehead 5). Process …
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I. An Image I will present a simple and playful image which has been helpful in bridging the disciplines of philosophy, theology, and psychology. The image emerged in my professional office as I experienced counseling through the perspective of process thought. This essay describes the clinical implications of the image, suggests hypotheses growing from it, …
Continue reading “Process Relational Psychotherapy: Creatively Transforming Relationships”
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The four articles that follow comprise a special issue of Process Studies devoted to social philosophy. Despite their vast difference in theme, style, and metaphysical commitment, these essays share certain broad concerns that are endemic to doing process philosophy from a Whiteheadian perspective. The most basic of these is the problem of analogy. Whitehead provided …
Continue reading “Process Social Philosophy: The Continuing Conversation”
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Here is a common situation: a house catches fire and a six-month old baby is painfully burned to death. Could we possibly describe as "good" any person who had the power to save this child and yet refused to do so? God undoubtedly has this power yet in many cases of this sort he has …
Continue reading “Process Theism Versus Free-Will Theism: A Response To Griffin”
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If “X is omnipotent” means “X possesses the logical limit of power,” I suspect that the view most in accord with what Whitehead says in his later writings on metaphysics and religion is that no being is omnipotent. Should we then conclude that the God of Process and Reality is something less than deity, i.e., …
Continue reading “Process Theodicy and the Concept of Power”
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The testing ground of metaphysical truths lies in their applicability to what is found in practice or experience. The attempt in Whitehead’s philosophic method is to construct a metaphysical scheme that is consistent with reality. His contention is that the reality being described should not be coerced into conformity with a metaphysical scheme already constructed. …
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The primary purpose of this essay is to defend the “s” word — speculation. My thesis is that for Christian theology to do its job in our day it must not only seek to be both fully empirical and fully rational, but that it must also be speculative, partly because speculation is inherent to Christian …
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I Background and Context Several preunderstandings inform my approach and participation in this welcome dialogue between process and liberation theologians. First my understanding of the context of this journal issue. We are engaged in a self-conscious effort to enlarge the dialogue between process theology and liberation theology. This constitutes, for me, phase two of the …
Continue reading “Process Theology: Guardian of the Oppressor or Goad to the Oppressed”
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Process thought clearly rejects Cartesian matter-mind dualism and thereby rejects the monistic alternatives of materialism and idealism which depend upon Cartesian concepts of matter and mind. There is neither any unknowable material or mental substances to which the experienceable properties of things belong and which give absolute self-identity through time, nor any enduring essences of …
Continue reading “Process Thought and the Spaciness of Mind”
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Since the theme of this symposium is the meaning of process thought for us, my paper will discuss the use that I have made of this mode of thinking to articulate and develop my views, especially in the philosophy of religion. In addition to focusing on specific areas in that discipline which have been of …
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In 1924 Whitehead retired from a long and distinguished teaching career in mathematics, mathematical physics and logic, first as a Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge (1884-1910), and subsequently at the Imperial College of Science and Technology and in the University of London. Remarkably, however, Whitehead essentially began a second career in philosophy at Harvard University …
Continue reading “Process Thought From a European Perspective 1”
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I learned a good deal about process theology and philosophy when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the late 1940’s. Also, Charles Hartshorne and later, Ivor Leclerc, were colleagues at Emory University, where I taught, for a number of years. But early in my career my own interests as a …
Continue reading “Process Thought On the Borders Between Hermeneutics and Theology”
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The title of this contribution has a double meaning: one is existential, the value of process thought in my life; while the other is philosophical, the meaning I find in process thought. I begin with the first, meaning, which inevitably involves an excursion back to when the light began to shine in my darkness. I …
Continue reading “Process Thought: Its Value and Meaning to Me”
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David Wheeler presents us with an interesting, thought-provoking discussion on a topic of obvious importance to any Christian. His basic objective is to correlate the “revealed and experienced Christ of the evangelicals” with the process world view in such a fashion that the evangelical perspective “might illuminate” the process world view and the process world …
Continue reading “Process-Relational Christian Soteriology: A Response to Wheeler”
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In two recent works, The Uncertain Phoenix and Eros and Irony, David L. Hall presents a systematic and radical critique of the Western cultural and philosophical tradition, and (in The Uncertain Phoenix) a provocative vision of a future which might result front a movement away from certain aspects of that tradition. Hall’s perspective, with its …
Continue reading “Process, Creativity, and Technology: Reflections on The Uncertain Phoenix”
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Whitehead is frequently characterized as holding an ontology of events. This is not an unhappy characterization, if what is meant is that all other entities can be defined, or constructed, in terms of events and their properties, especially relations. In fact, in The Concept of Nature Whitehead tells us "the final conclusion" is "that the …
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More and more, physicists dare to say that all nature is in some sense life-like, that there is no absolutely new principle of life that comes in at some point in cosmic evolution. (Charles Hartshorne, OOTM 62) Bertrand Russell said that either life is matter-like or matter is life-like. A proposition of process thought is …
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"Consciousness is a sort of public spirit among the nerve cells." — Peirce, quoted by Hartshorne I have been preoccupied for a long time with the question, "How is our conscious experience related to our bodies?" The answer I am looking for involves more than knowing what experiences are correlated with what physiological events. …
Continue reading “Psychological Physiology From the Standpoint of a Physiological Psychologist”
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In section two of the chapter of Process and Reality which Whitehead called, "Organisms and Environment" he announced that. "the philosophy of organism aspires to construct a critique of pure feeling, in the philosophical position in which Kant put his Critique of Pure Reason" (PR 113/172-73). Such a critique of feeling would, he insisted, ". …
Continue reading “Purposive Organization: Whitehead and Kant”
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(This essay was edited by William B. Jones, who teaches philosophy at Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia.) I. Science and Quantum Theory Science can be pragmatic or fundamentalistic. The aim of pragmatic science is to make predictions about what will be observed in different situations. The aim of fundamentalistic science is to understand the fundamental …
Continue reading “Quantum Mechanics, Local Causality, and Process Philosophy”
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Whitehead, of course, was well aware of the problem of historical knowledge, of the impossibility of “mere knowledge”, without taking into account the presuppositions or standards of the historian. But Whitehead did not dwell on it, as Collingwood did, or let it warp his overall view. (F.L.Baumer, Modern European Thought Continuity and Change in Ideas, …
Continue reading “R.G.Collingwood and A.N. Whitehead on Metaphysics, History, and Cosmology”
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Is the separatism of radical feminism as “radical” as it could be? What is feminist separatism? How might Whiteheadian philosophy complement radical feminism and enhance the revolutionary promise of separatism? In light of the diversity among feminists, separatism is variously understood and occasionally carries the vagueness of an intuition rather than the precision of a …
Continue reading “Radical Relatedness and Feminist Separatism”
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Abortion is a recurring theme in Charles Hartshorne’s later works. He discusses aspects of abortion in Wisdom as Moderation, (1987), Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (1984), and in his autobiography, The Darkness and the Light (1990). In 1981 he published “Concerning Abortion: An Attempt at a Rational View” in The Christian Century; it drew a …
Continue reading “Rationality, Contributionism, and the Value of Love: Hartshorne on Abortion”
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I. Ford’s Contribution Lewis Ford has made many contributions to Whitehead scholarship. His founding of Process Studies and editing it for a quarter century retained for a Whiteheadian form of process thinking a visibility it would otherwise have lost in an unfavorable philosophical environment. His interactions with those who offered contributions to the journal not …
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Contemporary reflection on the theme of God and change is divided into two quite diverse schools or traditions. On the one hand, process philosophers have made important advances under the inspiration of the writings of Alfred North Whitehead, while on the other a group of thinkers has pursued the developmental implications of the classical Christian …
Continue reading “Recent Classical/Process Dialogue on God and Change”
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In 1922, some nine years after Einstein had published his first paper on General Relativity, Whitehead was compelled by the differences he had with Einstein’s view to come forward with his own work, The Principle of Relativity, in which he formulated a theory of gravitation more in keeping with his own philosophical outlook. The resulting …
Continue reading “Recent Empirical Disconfirmation of Whitehead’s Relativity Theory”
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Ford: Professor Weiss, I understand you undertook graduate study at Harvard in order to study with Whitehead in the late twenties. Weiss: Yes, I did. I had just read Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World, which I found very exciting. I was struggling with the ideas of extensive abstraction, which I couldn’t understand, and there …
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Sherburne: Those who have followed our debate concerning Sherburne: "Whitehead without God" [PS 1/2 (Summer, 1971), 91-113] and "Regional Inclusion and the Extensive Continuum" [PS 2/4 (Winter, 1972), 277-95] will recall our differences concerning regional inclusion. Whitehead does not develop such a theory, but our problem is whether such a theory would be compatible …
Continue reading “Regional Inclusion and Psychological Physiology”
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Cobb: It is a pleasure to debate Professor Sherburne. Not only does he take clear positions and argue for them vigorously, but also the debate makes progress! Sherburne’s rejoinder [in PS 1, 2 (Summer, 1971), 101-13] is much more sharply focused than his original essay on “Whitehead Without God.” (PPGT 305-28). It pushes more deeply …
Continue reading “Regional Inclusion and the Extensive Continuum”
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Introduction None of us is wholly the creation of his past, but each creates something new on the basis of what he receives. This statement summarizes an important aspect of the views and teaching of Professor Hartshorne; but, interestingly, it also provides a key to the understanding of his own place in the tradition. Hartshorne …
Continue reading “Rejection, Influence, and Development: Hartshorne in the History of Philosophy”
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I Let us follow John Wilcox in defining temporalistic or process theism as any theism which portrays God as an experiencing subject, the knower of temporal processes, whose knowledge is itself subject to growth, expanding along with the growth in temporal reality which is the object of that knowledge (2:295a). Recent discussion of the bearing …
Continue reading “Relativity Physics and the God of Process Philosophy”
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Most of what the Basinger brothers say seems to me both sound and sensible. They are quite right, for example, in pointing out that I enthusiastically reject what David Griffin calls "I-omnipotence." According to Griffin, if God has I-omnipotence, then he "can unilaterally effect any state of affairs, if that state of affairs is intrinsically …
Continue reading “Reply to the Basingers on Divine Omnipotence”
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I Schubert Ogden’s sharp eyes have caught a number of terminological inconsistencies in my book. However, the confusion he finds goes far beyond variations in wording, and I am disturbed by the extent to which I have justified his complaint. I prize clarity and yet see that over the years my thought has become conceptually …
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According to Robert Brumbaugh, Whitehead’s mature philosophy has important implications for education. With his criticism of current commonsense ideas of space and time and the influence of seventeenth-century physics on twentieth-century metaphysics, Whitehead pointed the way toward a new realistic theory of education. "It is an obvious but important theme in his writings," says Brumbaugh, …
Continue reading “Robert Brumbaugh: Towards a Process Philosophy of Education”
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On April 8, 1914, A. N. Whitehead read a paper entitled “The Relational Theory of Space” to the First Congress of Mathematical Philosophy in Paris.1 A French translation of this paper was subsequently published in the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale [23 (1916) 423-54], but the English original never appeared in print. It may …
Continue reading “Russell, Poincaré, and Whitehead’s ‘Relational Theory of Space’”
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Among the major distinctive contributions of Mordecai M. Kaplan (1881-1983) to twentieth-century religious thought is his creative synthesis of modern Jewish nationalism with spiritual naturalism, religious humanism, and process theology. Kaplan’s earlier published essay (1909) dealt with "Judaism and Nationalism" and his last book, consisting of conversations with existentialist theologian, Arthur A. Cohen, was entitled …
Continue reading “Salvational Zionism and Religious Naturalism in the Thought of Mordecai M. Kaplan”
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Nature abounds in compound individuals. Discrete, functioning entities are made up of components which are, in some sense, also individuals. Scientists sometimes need to be concerned with whether aggregates (e.g., species of plantsl) or components (e.g., quarks2) are ‘real’, but such questions are not generally regarded as having great importance for science. It has often …
Continue reading “Self-Organization and Agency: In Chemistry and In Process Philosophy”
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Many interpreters read Whitehead as maintaining in PR that sensa and patterns are distinguishable in terms of their modes of ingression. This view holds that while patterns cannot ingress without some sensa, sensa can ingress independently of any pattern. For example, John Lango writes: Sensa can ingress separately from patterns, whereas patterns must ingress together …
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In 1927, Henry Nelson Wieman began nearly 20 years of teaching at the University of Chicago Divinity School, commissioned, in part, to interpret the thought of Alfred North Whitehead for his colleagues and students. Bernard Meland, a member of Wieman’s first class on the philosophy of religion there, recalls that Wieman used only two texts …
Continue reading “Sharing a Vague Vision: Wieman’s Early Critique of Whitehead”
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I. Whitehead’s Theory of Social Differentiation In AI 58-60 Whitehead distinguishes between Instinct, Intellect, and Wisdom. Instinct is "the mode of experience directly arising out of the urge of inheritance . . . ." Intellect is the mode of experience arising from the entertainment of ideals. Wisdom "determines the mode of coalescence of instinct with …
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Some of Professor Morris’ characterizations and criticisms of my political views seem fairly reasonable. Human political relations are complex and subtle indeed. There are, however, some serious failures of communication in one specific passage. For such failures, both parties may be partly at fault. I allow myself to think that I have usually written with …
Continue reading “Some Comments on Randall Morris’ Process Philosophy and Political Ideology”
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This symposium is the 5th, in which I’ve been asked to comment on comments of other philosophers about me. To have Cobb’s frank, critical comments on my work is a fine reward for longevity. (see The philosophy of Charles Hartshorne by John B. Cobb, Jr. at www.religion-online.org.) When I passed my 80th birthday, I began …
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Although many of us find in Whitehead’s philosophical achievement a system nearly unparalleled for its balance, intricacy, and tight coherence, it cannot be gainsaid that many of his books leave much to be desired with respect to the order of presentation. The unity of the four parts of Adventures of Ideas is not fully apparent, …
Continue reading “Some Proposals Concerning the Composition of Process and Reality“
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I begin with two flat statements. (1) None of the recognized great philosophers has been more widely underrated (or more misinterpreted) than Plato, unless it is Bergson; moreover, the two have important beliefs in common. (2) None of the recognized great philosophers has been more widely overrated than Aristotle, unless it is Kant; these two …
Continue reading “Some Under-and Some Over-rated Great Philosophers”
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Historically, process philosophers have been fascinated by time, and rather bored by space. There are reasons for this: spatially oriented models and plans lead naturally to philosophies which “spatialize” time and change. It is a mistake, however, to overlook the notions of space and location: it is not necessary to leave these concepts to the …
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In the final paragraph of his recent study of the philosophies of G. W. F. Hegel and Alfred North Whitehead, George Lucas concludes that they represent "two schools or variations of one tradition of process philosophy" (TVF 136). With that judgment I basically concur, since I agree with Lucas that both men were ultimately guided …
Continue reading “Spirit and Society: A Study of Two Concepts”
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The problem of the subject is a provocative one in the thought of Alfred North Whitehead. In an earlier paper1 I raised some objections to what I took to be some implications of his process or organic model for self-identity and agency. There I criticized the process model for its inability to provide an abiding …
Continue reading “Subjective Becoming: Unwarranted Abstraction?”
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In "A Whiteheadian Reflection on Subjective Immortality" (PS 7:1-13) Lewis S. Ford and Marjorie Suchocki lose sight of the meaning of "subject." My subjectivity is mine alone; my feelings may become part of your real internal constitution, but they are objectified in the process. You cannot literally be the subject of my experience. You may …
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Ordinarily, we think of subjectivity in terms of consciousness. It pertains to our own conscious experience both of the external world and our own inner feelings, and by extension to the conscious experience of others. Although we know what we mean, further analysis seems impossible. Consciousness seems quite sui generis. Perhaps we can get at …
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“The principle of universal relativity directly traverses Aristotle’s dictum, ‘ (A substance) is not in a subject.’ On the contrary, according to this principle an actual entity is present in other actual entities. . . . The philosophy of organism is mainly devoted to the task of making clear the notion of ‘being present …
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Discussions of time frequently echo Augustine’s perplexity: he knew perfectly well what time was until someone asked him what it was. The reasons for the difficulty in answering what time is are several, including the paradoxes of being and non-being; the experiential and emotional weightiness of the subject (consider, for example, the temporal character of …
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In Process and Reality Alfred North Whitehead dealt extensively with God as an indispensable part of his metaphysical system, as that without which there would be no order or novelty and, hence, no world. He also insisted that God as an actual entity is not an exception to the metaphysical categories. God is actual by …
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I am concerned here not with particular interpretations of Whitehead’s metaphysics, but with certain contrasting assumptions guiding how different interpreters, or different groups of interpreters, have approached, or are currently approaching, that interpretative task. These assumptions are such that, to a lesser or greater degree, they constrain or dictate the overall interpretative strategy used by …
Continue reading “The Approach to Whitehead: Traditional? Genetic? or Systematic?”
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I Commentators on Whitehead’s philosophy often mention his mathematical background as a foundation for his metaphysics. Rarely, however, do they explain just how the rigorous and technical expertise of his early work finds its relevant applications in his later cosmological framework. Nor do they explain his strenuous objections to philosophers following the pattern of mathematical …
Continue reading “The Axiomatic Matrix of Whitehead’s Process and Reality”
Article
Recently in these pages David and Randall Basinger discussed the classical and the process theologians’ indictments of each other with respect to the relation between evil and divine omnipotence. According to them, the classical theologian indicts the process theologian with “forfeiting a meaningful notion of divine omnipotence,” while the latter indicts the former with “proposing …
Continue reading “The Basingers on Divine Omnipotence: A Further Point”
Article
This essay traces the course of a correspondence between Edgar Sheffield Brightman (1884-1953) and Charles Hartshorne (born 1897) over a ten year period beginning in 1934. Brightman taught philosophy at Boston University and Hartshorne philosophy at the University of Chicago. This correspondence is significant for two main reasons. First, it has not been documented before. …
Continue reading “The Brightman-Hartshorne Correspondence, 1934-1944”
Article
God and the World stand over against each other, expressing the final metaphysical truth that appetitive vision and physical enjoyment have equal claim to priority in creation. But no two actual entities can be torn apart: each is all in all. Thus each temporal occasion embodies God, and is embodied in God. In God’s nature, …
Continue reading “The Buddhist Ground of the Whiteheadian God”
Article
The Choice Today, at the portals of the 21st century and the dawn of the third millennium, we have the freedom to choose our destiny. The alternatives before us are evolution with distinction — or devolution, ultimately to extinction. The choice is real and it is ours. The responsibility for making it can be neither …
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In "A Whiteheadian Christology" John Cobb suggests that the classical problem for Christian theology remains "to explain how we can intelligibly affirm the unique presence of God in Jesus in such a way as to avoid detracting from his humanity and yet explain his strange authority" (PPCT 383). Our concern will be whether we can …
Article
Whitehead’s cosmology is rich with meaning and relevance to the theory and practice of psychotherapy.1 His categories bear upon some of the most fundamental issues of the field, serving to clarify and unify the debated issues in this diverse and fragmented profession. This paper tackles twelve areas relevant to psychotherapy, looking briefly at how process …
Continue reading “The Clinical Use of Whitehead’s Anthropology”
Article
I. Introduction The four fundamental abstract dimensions of physics are mass [M], length [L], time [T], and charge [Q]; all physical parameters are built out of products of these and their inverses. Indeed, measurement systems derive their names from the choices of corresponding units. Thus the MKSQ system fixes upon meters, kilograms, seconds, and coulombs …
Article
“For the perfected actuality passes back into the temporal world, and qualifies this world so that each temporal actuality includes it as an immediate fact of relevant experience” (PR 351). The action of this fourth phase, however, requires that actual occasions prehend the consequent nature of God. Yet it would seem that the consequent nature …
Continue reading “The Consequences of Prehending the Consequent Nature”
Article
(Presented as the Annual Lecture for the Center for Process Studies. Claremont, California, February 1991.) I ended my book, Philosophers as Educators, with a call for philosophers to join in a conversation. This was to be an edifying discourse of the sort proposed by Richard Rorty, in which we joined with other researchers and educators …
Continue reading “The Conversation Continues: Rorty and Dewey”
Article
If Charles Hartshorne is correct that “the intellect’s self-understanding . . . is the innate, a priori, or metaphysical” (CSPM 31), then, provided “intellect” is taken as it evidently is in the dictum nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu, namely, as the human intellect, I do not see how all metaphysical …
Continue reading “The Criterion of Metaphysical Truth and the Senses of ‘Metaphysics’”
Article
It has rarely been remarked that the very title of Whitehead’s major work contains a more or less explicit reference to that of F. H. Bradley’s: Bradley’s Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay (1893) becomes Whitehead’s Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929).1 Such an obvious and prominently placed allusion is perhaps already enough …
Article
In A Christian Natural Theology, John B. Cobb, Jr., has provided a number of interesting applications of Whitehead’s systematic categories to anthropological problems and concepts. Among the problems he explores is the question of life after death, understood in terms of the disembodied soul (CNT 63-70). Cobb correctly notes that Whitehead gave no extended attention …
Article
A persistent problem Whitehead bequeathed to his followers concerns the interaction of God and the world. In particular, how does his consequent nature affect the provision of initial aims? Various promissory notes are given (PR 32/ 47), such as the sole explicit discussion of "the ‘superjective’ nature of God" (PR 88/ 135; but see PS …
Article
The question of the nature of religious experience and its critical interpretation has been an underlying issue in the ongoing effort to assess the religious adequacy of Whitehead’s conception of God. Relatively neglected in these discussions has been the question of the adequacy of the Whiteheadian conception of God to the more general methods and …
Continue reading “The Emergent Paradigm and Divine Causation”
Article
One way of viewing the religious crisis of our time is to see it not in the first instance as a challenge to the intellectual cogency of Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, or other traditions, but as the gradual erosion, in an ever more complex and technological society, of the feeling of reciprocity with nature, organic interrelatedness …
Continue reading “The Empirical Dimension of Religious Experience”
Article
In the penultimate paragraph of Process and Reality,1 Whitehead introduces2 a new feature in his concept of God, making thereby possible a fourth phase, never mentioned before in the book,3 in the universe’s accomplishment of its actuality: “But the principle of universal relativity is not to be stopped at the consequent nature of God. This …
Article
Some Whiteheadians have sought to affirm a subjective survival of death by defending the notion of a disembodied soul. Such a concept is fraught with difficulties, and this is no less true when it is considered within a Whiteheadian framework. John B. Bennett (PS 4:131f) has called attention to some of these. In Whitehead’s view, …
Article
As I understand my assignment for this conference, it is to represent a “methodological alternative in process theology” that has been given the name “rationalist” so as to facilitate its distinction from two other such alternatives, the empirical and speculative so-called. Instead of attending to features that might be thought to distinguish particular theological approaches, …
Continue reading “The Experience of Value and Theological Argumentation”
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Professor Plamondon’s contribution to the discussion of induction is interesting and fruitful, but I am not content with her representation of Whitehead’s notion of the ‘valid inductive inference’ pattern. I think she has left something out, and what she has left out is of key metaphysical importance. True, she tells us she did not intend …
Continue reading “The Feeling for the Future: A Comment on Ann Plamondon’s Essay”
Article
The crisis of the classical philosophy of the New Age has generated strong criticism of its foundations and different, new tendencies and developments of Western thought. It culminated, on the one hand, in the total deconstruction of the traditional vision of the universe and humanity, and, on the other, in the attempts to build a …
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Having had both Charles Hartshorne and John B. Cobb, Jr. as teachers at Emory University, I have been for many years intrigued and even convinced by the Whitehead-Hartshorne-Cobb thesis that the human “soul” is the dominant society of actual occasions in the human body. However, I have finally come to share the discontent expressed by …
Continue reading “The Human Self: An Actual Entity or a Society?”
Article
In reading The Liberation of Life by Charles Birch and John B. Cobb, Jr., I was impressed by the precision of concept of their ecological model and its adequacy to be a guide for science, ethics, and philosophy. I was not so impressed by their characterization of the competing mechanical model. For historical and expository …
Continue reading “The Image of a Machine in The Liberation of Life”
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Transcribed and edited by Dean R. Fowler. Transcriber’s note: The following essay is the transcribed version of an address given by David Bohm at a conference organized by the Center for Process Studies. As the transcriber, I have employed my editorial discretion in two primary ways. First, I have tried to make the written word …
Continue reading “The Implicate Order: A New Order for Physics”
Article
In his theory of perception, Whitehead attempts to do justice to all our various and apparently conflicting perceptive experiences. By reconciling two seemingly incompatible traditional accounts of perception, he hopes to cut through the Gordian knot of problems which have bound the theory of perception since the seventeenth century. Unfortunately, the boldness of his aims …
Continue reading “The Incoherence of Whitehead’s Theory of Perception”
Article
Most significant and profound is the teaching of the ultimate path of Mahayana. It teaches salvation of oneself and others. It does not exclude even animals or birds. The flowers in the spring fall beneath its branches; Dew in autumn vanishes before the withered grass. ango shiki (Indications of the Goals of the Three Teachings) …
Article
“Speculative Philosophy” Whitehead defines at the outset of Process and Reality as “the endeavor to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted” (PR 4). Our experience includes both elements ordinary and elements extraordinary. I want to examine in Whiteheadian terms some …
Continue reading “The LSD Experience: A Whiteheadian Interpretation”
Article
David E. Roy’s article “The Value of the Dialogue Between Process Thought and Psychotherapy” (PS 14:158-74) ably suggested a number of significant areas where process thought and psychotherapy might interact to their mutual advantage. This essay attempts to make a contribution to that ongoing dialogue by corroborating some of the central features of Harry Stack …
Article
Surely one of the strangest twists in the adventures of Whiteheadian ideas is that a concept of God developed under the dictum that God must be the chief exemplification of metaphysical principles should find itself revised precisely on the grounds that it leads to an arbitrary disconnection of these principles. In A Christian Natural Theology …
Continue reading “The Metaphysical Ground of the Whiteheadian God”
Article
A common interpretation of Whitehead’s creativity is that creativity refers to the clement of self-creation and self-determination, characterizing every concrescence. Creativity means, according to this interpretation, that every actuality is a free, creative act of unification, determining its own being, i.e., its own becoming. Interpretations like those of William Christian, Ivor Leclerc and even Charles …
Continue reading “The Metaphysical Significance of Whitehead’s Creativity”
Article
That Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism has generated much scholarly interest since its inception is well established, according to one measure at least, by the wealth of serious commentary devoted to the explication, criticism, and/or revision of his work. The mainstay of that research, however, has concentrated primarily on only three areas of Whitehead’s philosophy: the …
Continue reading “The Metaphysical Status of Civilized Society”
Article
Professor Steve Odin’s “A Metaphysics of Cumulative Penetration: Process Theory and Hua-yen Buddhism” (PS 11:65-82), is a highly stimulating and challenging essay not only for Whiteheadian and Buddhist studies, but also for its comparative value.1 He has presented a searching analysis of Whiteheadian metaphysics of cumulative penetration, but his treatment of Buddhism in general and …
Continue reading “The Metaphysics of Cumulative Penetration Revisited”
Article
I Thanks to the political theologies and theologies of liberation the question of faith and justice has now become a, if not the, central question of Christian theology. For all the discussion recently devoted to it, however, whether the question has as yet been adequately answered is far from certain. One reason for this …
Article
One cannot undertake the performance of a great work without first sorting out its principal trends, its architectural sense and the relation between the different elements which make up its structure. It is not that reason should be in command. It is at the basis of inspiration, which becomes, as one might say, a sort …
Continue reading “The Method of Abstraction: A Musical Analysis”
Article
In Adventures of Ideas Whitehead says: But physiologist and physicist are equally agreed that the body inherits conditions from the physical environment according to the physical laws. There is a general continuity between human experience and physical occasions. The elaboration of such a continuity is one most obvious task of philosophy. (AI 244, italics …
Continue reading “The Misapprehension of Presentational Immediacy”
Article
“The letting be of Being is for the religious consciousness grace. — John Macquarrie H. N. Wieman agreed with the American critical naturalists Santayana and Dewey in rejecting the supernatural metaphysical vision, but he did not adopt their religious humanism. Among those who accepted the naturalism and pragmatism dominant in American thought in the second …
Continue reading “The Moral Stance of Theism Without the Transcendent God”
Article
Earlier, and until about two centuries ago, there had been a main field of inquiry known as philosophia naturalis, the philosophy of nature. Then this field of inquiry fairly abruptly ceased being pursued. It is interesting, and as I shall show, important to us today to determine how and why this happened. It is indeed …
Continue reading “The Necessity Today of the Philosophy of Nature”
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1 In the beginning, philosophers claimed to offer knowledge, or at least to look for it. That knowledge, they said, was about things, or beings. But the most perceptive of them were aware that knowledge of a vast number of diverse things, or beings, concerns not just their diversity and multiplicity but also what they …
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1. Introductory Remarks In The Emergence of Whitehead’s Metaphysics,1 Lewis S. Ford describes Process and Reality as the result of a complex redactional procedure in which an original manuscript from the summer of 19272 has been repeatedly supplemented by additions from renewed perspectives. As a matter of fact, Ford contends, Whitehead’s metaphysical outlook kept shifting …
Continue reading “The Original Version Of Process And Reality, Part V. A Tentative Reconstruction”
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I. Introduction The most substantive portion of the Brightman-Hartshorne correspondence took place from November 1933 through the summer of 1944.1 The major events in Europe and Asia during this time are well known, including the rise of Nazi Germany and the expansion of the Japanese Empire, culminating in World War II. Since Hartshorne and Brightman …
Continue reading “The Pacifism Debate in the Hartshorne — Brightman Correspondence”
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(COMPLETE SYMPOSIUM) This special issue of Process Studies reproduces discussions conducted by the Ephiphany Philosophers group in Pardshaw, West Cumbria, England, and continued in Cambridge, during 1984. The concern of the participants was to see how philosophy might contribute to new developments in science.
The scholars listed in the section on "The Participants" discuss various aspects of Whiteheadian concepts, particularly those from his Process and Reality.
Book Chapter
This is a list of those participating in the dialogue which follows: R. B. Braithwaite is a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, and former Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Cambridge. His publications include Scientific Explanation (1953), An Empiricist Looks at Religious Belief (1955). Christopher Clarke read mathematics at Cambridge where he …
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Charles Hartshorne has defined his philosophy as the “social view of reality.” Elsewhere he has termed it “Realistic Idealism.” Two fundamental principles underlie this philosophy: the plurality of events and the primacy of subjectivity or inclusion. Intrinsic to these principles are Hartshorne’s view of internal and external relations. In this paper we shall be principally …
Continue reading “The Peirceian Influence on Hartshorne’s Subjectivism”
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Alfred North Whitehead, the author of the monumental and tortuous Process and Reality, is our century’s foremost philosophical cosmologist. His speculative thinking is marked by a keen sense for aesthetic experience and art. In particular, he has a love for philosophy in art and for that rare phenomenon, the philosopher’s poet. For example, Whitehead finds …
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(This article is a revised version of a lecture given on September 30, 1991 in Claremont California during a conference celebrating Charles Hartshorne and the publication of The Philosophy of Charles Hartshorne, Vol. XX in The Library of Living Philosophers Series, edited by Lewis Edwin Hahn [La Salle, IL Open Court Press, 1991].) …
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Whitehead defines philosophy as “the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity” (PR 15/22). Whitehead’s own effort in its intention fully conforms to this conception of the philosophical enterprise. Quite ironically, however, in conceiving process in the sense of concrescence as subjective immediacy (PR 29/43) he undermines his own purpose. Whitehead tells …
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As process thought continues to be preoccupied with the category of the future, even to the point of identifying "God" with "the activity of the future" (PS 11:169-79), it seems important to recall Whitehead’s own texts which give an equal analytic balance to the power of the past. A focus on the future which ignores …
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A. Introduction to the Problem Nowhere in his work does Whitehead give an explicit account of the question: how can God’s consequent nature, which he himself characterizes as “incomplete” (PR 345), influence the temporal world? “To be able to have influence” means that God’s consequent nature must be prehensible for temporal (or “worldly”)2 occasions, but …
Continue reading “The Prehensibility of God’s Consequent Nature”
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One of the great philosophical mysteries is that of time. What are past, present, and future? One of the great Christian mysteries is the “real presence in the Eucharist. How can Jesus Christ be present today? The two mysteries are connected, for in the Eucharist an event of the distant past is re-presented or made …
Continue reading “The Presence of the Past and the Eucharist”
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No topic in the philosophy of religion seems to be so universally engaging as the problem of evil. This problem can be counted on to hold the attention of practically any audience, regardless of their degree of philosophical sophistication. During the past several decades there has probably been more writing on the problem of evil …
Continue reading “The Problem of Evil in Process Theism and Classical Free Will Theism”
Article
I When in the seventeenth century the revolutionary new metaphysics of materialist mechanism was introduced, it retained two most significant features from the Thomistic Aristotelianism which it replaced, namely the doctrine of God as prime mover, and the doctrine of locomotion as the fundamental motion. Indeed in the new metaphysics of the physical as matter, …
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Alfred North Whitehead posits that the “actual occasions are the final actual entities in our cosmic epoch” (PR 18/27). Given Whitehead’s words “final” and “actual”, his statement can be interpreted to mean that occasions are res verae, really real, more real than people. Whitehead also writes that “the real actual things that endure are all …
Article
Like Voltaire, who was ready to vouch for the sincerity of his professed belief in God, but who added "as for Monsieur the Son and Madame His Mother, that’s a different story," more and more Americans are giving lip service to belief in God, while adopting the discourse of "spirituality," and treating conventional religious doctrine …
Continue reading “The Process Paradigm, Rites of Passage, and Spiritual Quests”
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(Originally presented at the meeting of the Association for Process Philosophy of Education in Chicago, April 1989) This symposium, like its title, has two parts. That title is: "Educational Evaluation in Process Perspective." It is my task to focus on the second half of the title, on the character of that process perspective which our …
Continue reading “The Process Perspective as Context for Educational Evaluation”
Article
Feminists have entered a productive period in which constructive attempts at post-patriarchal theories of relations are being formulated and imaged in light of women’s experience and ideas. The thesis of this essay is that a promising feminist theory of relations may be based upon the organic philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. The basis of this …
Continue reading “The Promise of a Process Feminist Theory of Relations”
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Modern moral and political thought has often focused on the question of human rights: What rights, if any, belong to all human individuals solely because they are human? Within the past two centuries, theoretical address to this question has been marked by a dominant consensus. It holds that a principle or principles of human rights …
Article
The reformed subjectivist principle, that the primary togetherness of things is their togetherness in experience (PR 189/288), is mentioned but rarely in Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality. Nevertheless many have intuitively appreciated its centrality to his endeavor. The theologian Schubert Ogden sees it as "the starting-point for a genuinely new theistic conception" (RG 57). …
Continue reading “The Reformed Subjectivist Principle Revisited”
Article
Most of Whitehead’ s publications prior to 1911 were intended exclusively for the world of professional mathematicians. This was especially the case in his Treatise on Universal Algebra (1898) and in Principia Mathematica (published together with B. Russell in 1910 ff.). In some minor publications he in addition had mathematical physicists in mind.1 This, however, …
Continue reading “The Relevance of An Introduction to Mathematics to Whitehead’s Philosophy”
Article
It is the purpose of this paper to show how Jesus as a man was capable of becoming alive after death in himself and for his followers. The primary reason for my attempt to relate the resurrection to Jesus simply as a man is soteriological: if it is only Jesus’ divinity which explains and guarantees …
Article
This inquiry seeks to answer several questions. One is this: Does the revelation in Christ, when rightly understood, expose the one and only being that can bring my whole self into action to the measure I commit myself to it? Is this true not only for me but also for every human person? Am I …
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For many, the riddle is how to make sense out of chapter three. The other chapters of Alfred North Whitehead’s Religion in the Making (1926) are quite straightforward, but this metaphysical sketch is practically impenetrable, particularly if one has a good grasp of Process and Reality (1929). Yet this riddle may be of our own …
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I. Ecclesiology In recent Whiteheadian process thought, the technical category of “proposition” has come into prominence. Donald Sherburne used the category in his exploration of the ontological status of art (WA, ch.5). William Beardslee used it to elaborate the formal structure of the christological character of Jesus, (HH, ch.8). John Cobb’s christology in Christ …
Article
The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis is a collection of fictitious epistles from a suave, professional, and insidious devil to a younger, inexperienced, but just as insidious fellow demon. The purported author of the letters is Screwtape, a self-described undersecretary in the Department of Temptation, who offers sagacious advice to his young nephew …
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Whitehead describes a form for the realization or actualization of a concrete occasion as an object which is abstracted from time. This phenomenon, in his terminology, is an ‘eternal object’ which ‘ingresses’ into an actual occasion. The focus of this paper will be on the nature of this primary structure by which experience is unified, …
Article
The thought of Susanne K. Langer is becoming increasingly important in the field of aesthetics. More and more departments of art and philosophy are turning to her work as a basis for understanding the arts. She recently published the second part of a projected three volume work entitled Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling,1 indicating …
Continue reading “The Status of Artistic Illusion in Concrescence”
Article
Introduction From a purely textual standpoint, there is a sound basis for arguing that Henri Bergson is a rationalist as much as an intuitionist. He attempts to explain rather than merely describe the facts which confront him. His explanation is a cohesive structure resembling in some respects an axiomatic system. Bergson, of course, assumes throughout …
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James Lindsey’s essay on the subjectivist principle (PS 6:97-102) first came to my attention in an earlier version in Connection with my role as co-editor of the Corrected Edition of Process and Reality. Lindsey’s essay contains some proposals for textual changes; insofar as my essay is a response to his, it is limited to the …
Continue reading “The Subjectivist Principle and Its Reformed and Unreformed Versions”
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Some years ago Richard M. Rorty argued that in order “to understand the needs which Process and Reality was intended to satisfy, one must understand Whitehead’s diagnosis of the state of modem philosophy” (WEP 134). While this thesis is certainly correct, Rorty’s account of the needs Process and Reality was intended to satisfy requires reexamination. …
Continue reading “The Subjectivist Principle and the Linguistic Turn Revisited”
Article
“I will love them freely, for my anger has turned from them.” (Hosea 14:4.) A chief attraction of process philosophy for Christian thinkers has been its ability to articulate in a new way the relationship of God to the world. By contrast, traditional philosophy tends to emasculate texts like the above, construing them as mere …
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What follows are reflections on two marvelously rich and suggestive sets of essays, one dealing with “New Testament Interpretation from a Process Perspective’ (JAAR, March, 1979) and the other dealing with Old Testament Interpretation from the same perspective. It is important, I think, to set candidly into the record (what will be clearly enough revealed …
Continue reading “The Theological Use of Scripture in Process Hermeneutics”
Article
I. Introduction A conception of time is fundamental to Whitehead’s metaphysics in Process and Reality. The creative advance of actual occasions is inherently temporal. Each actual occasion is a temporally novel act of becoming. When it comes into being, it feels only those actual occasions that have already come into being, i.e., those that are …
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In a recent article, "The Untenability of Whitehead’s Theory of Extensive Connection" (PS 8:37-44), Lee F. Werth argues that Whitehead’s definition of a straight line "contradicts a derivable theorem that no geometrical element a is ever incident in a geometrical element b" (PS 8:37). Werth goes on to maintain that "from this theorem we can …
Continue reading “The Untenability of Werth’s Untenability Essay”
Article
Whitehead’s account of the perceptive mode of presentational immediacy, as he explicitly states, is dependent upon a definition of straight lines in terms which make no appeal to measurement (unlike the definition, ‘the shortest distance between two points’): "It is to be noted that this doctrine of presentational immediacy and of the strain-locus entirely depends …
Continue reading “The Untenability of Whitehead’s Theory of Extensive Connection”
Article
The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation (PR 5/ 7). In Process and Reality Whitehead produced a cosmology …
Continue reading “The Value of the Dialogue Between Process Thought and Psychotherapy”
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Alfred North Whitehead has an established and central position in the history of American poetry, and the American poet who has made the most profound use of Whitehead’s thought is Charles Olson. On this occasion, when I am to mull over the interchange between them, I am reminded of John Russell’s remark as he begins …
Continue reading “The Violets: “A Cosmological Reading of a Cosmology””
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[Editor’s note: Late in 1991 Hartshorne sent two articles to me for submission to The Midwest Quarterly, a journal on whose editorial board I serve. One of the articles was accepted for publication; the other, published here, was considered by the editor-in-chief to be too long. Hartshorne apparently guessed that the article might be too …
Continue reading “Thomas Aquinas and Three Poets Who Do Not Agree with Him”
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Editor’s note: This review article deals with Robert C. Neville’s recently published Creativity and God: A Challenge to Process Theology (The Seabury Press, 1980; 156 pages). Hartshorne: I begin by acknowledging the considerable merits of Professor Neville’s book. His discussion of my philosophy in particular is well written, reasonably fair and accurate, and in some …
Continue reading “Three Responses to Neville’s Creativity and God”
Article
The brief Galilean vision of humility flickered throughout the ages, uncertainly . . . But the deeper idolatry, of fashioning God in the image of the Egyptian, Persian, and Roman imperial rulers, was retained. The Church gave unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar. — Alfred North Whitehead (PR 520) The creation …
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This essay “Zeit und Zeitlosigkeit in der Philosophie A. N. Whiteheads,” in Natur und Geschichte: Karl Löwith zum 70. Geburtstag (Kohlhammer: Stuttgart, 1967), 373-405, was translated By James W. Felt, S.J Translator’s note: All unbracketed italics occur also in the original text. I wish gratefully to acknowledge the assistance afforded me in this translation by …
Continue reading “Time and Timelessness in the Philosophy of A. N. Whitehead”
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If “derived time” follows from something more primordial (for Whitehead, creative advance as constituted in the subjective immediacy of concrescing actual entities; for Heidegger, the truth of Being as disclosed in the ‘openness’ which pervades Dasein on the basis of its ecstatic-horizontal temporality), that something must not itself be time-like, or talk of “derivation” is …
Continue reading “Time in Whitehead and Heidegger: A Response”
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Among the increasing number of persons who are persuaded of the importance of the thought of either Whitehead or Martin Heidegger few have tried to appropriate the thought of both. Only in the rarest instances have scholars seen fit to explore the possibility of a fruitful interchange between the fundamental ideas of these two seminal …
Continue reading “Time in Whitehead and Heidegger: Some Comparisons”
Article
“Education is the guidance of the individual towards a comprehension of the art of life and by the art of life I mean the most complete achievement of varied activity expressing the potentialities of that living creature in the face of its actual environment.” (A. N. Whitehead; AE 39) Alfred North Whitehead enjoyed two major …
Continue reading “To and Fro: Education for the Art of Life”
Article
The progress of religion is defined by the denunciation of gods. The keynote of idolatry is contentment with the prevalent gods. (AI 12) We often hear it said that there exists a basic human need for some sort of deliverance, salvation, release, liberation, pacification, or whatever we may wish to call it, and that this …
Continue reading “Toward a Definition of Religion as Philosophy”
Article
The Christian vision of reality sweeps from creation to consummation. The story line is that God’s good creation fell away, that God entered into creation to restore and renew it, and that this restoration will be accomplished in the end of history when Christ comes again. (WCB 415) This pithy summary of doctrine comes from …
Continue reading “Toward a Process-Relational Christian Eschatology”
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Introduction Scholars such as John B. Cobb and David R. Griffin have developed the Christological implications of Whiteheadian process-relational thought in a number of widely read works in recent years.1 “Evangelical” Christians, holding the Christian scriptures to be the uniquely inspired and authoritative charter documents of their faith, and finding in these scriptures a Christ …
Continue reading “Toward a Process-Relational Christian Soteriology”
Article
In the foregoing essay, which represents a continuation of a conversation that Professor Hasker and I began in Searching for An Adequate God,1 he reconsiders the idea, conceded by many traditional theists, that process theism enjoys an advantage with regard to the problem of evil. Hasker was one of those.2 Having now given the matter …
Continue reading “Traditional Free Will Theodicy and Process Theodicy: Hasker’s Claim for Parity”
Article
I. Stage Setting: Historicity Process philosophy represents a philosophical approach that is of substantial interest and value in its own right. However, the object of this present discussion it to exhibit its substantial instrumental value. For, as will be argued here, it is also of great utility for the clarification and resolution of philosophical problems …
Article
Editor’s note: Bernard Loomer’s essay was presented as the Inaugural Lecture of the D. R. Sharpe Lectureship on Social Ethics, given at Bond Chapel of the University of Chicago on October 19, 1975, and is reprinted with the permission of the Dean of the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. The complete proceedings of …
Article
Whitehead’s position on unmediated prehensions of the past is at best unclear. Some passages in Process and Reality suggest that there is prehension of the distant past only through the mediation of intervening contiguous occasions. Others indicate that there can be direct, unmediated feeling of a noncontiguous occasion in the distant past. In this paper …
Continue reading “Unmediated Prehensions: Some Observations”
Article
What, then, is time? I know what it is if no one asks me what it is; but if I want to explain it to someone who has asked me, I find that 1 do not know. (C 277) Augustine expresses well the bafflement experienced by anyone who reflects on time. It is utterly ordinary, …
Article
I. Introduction Though an outgrowth of Western philosophy, process philosophy has many affinities with the Chinese tradition. Whitehead himself, as well as Hartshorne, Cobb, and others, pointed out certain parallels with Mahayana Buddhism regarding their common denial of an underlying substantial substratum for enduring objects.1 The Taoist strand of Chinese thought has an even more …
Continue reading “Wang Yang-Ming’s ‘Inquiry on the Great Learning’”
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A lecture delivered at Xavier University, October, 1983 for the purpose of introducing the audience to basic elements of feminist and process thought. We women are weavers — makers of things from the stuff at hand. The image is an old one, calling up visions of women with spindles and looms, taking raw …
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A response to David Kelsey s review of the two essay collections on Biblical interpretation from a process perspective must begin with a word of appreciation for this labor of love. Coming as it does from one who considers himself an outsider and an amateur in regard to process thought, his essay nevertheless, or precisely …
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Henry Simoni-Wastila argues in a recent issue of this journal (28.1-2) that Charles Hartshorne’s dipolar theism is plagued by inconsistencies that Hartshorne himself obliquely recognizes but which he has never successfully resolved. According to Hartshorne, God has direct experiential acquaintance with the feelings of every actuality. Yet, as Simoni-Wastila points out, there is a “radical …
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In his study of three educational philosophers, Dewey, Russell, Whitehead, (Southern Illinois University Press, 1986) Brian Hendley pointed out that Whitehead’s approach to educational reform was different from that of the other two thinkers he treated. Where Russell aimed at an experimental school that would be a demonstration of his ideas, and Dewey set up …
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(This article was originally published as pages 100-120 in the book Die Gifford Lecutres und ibre Deutung: Materialien zu Whiteheads Process und Realität, Band 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1991), edited by Michael Hampe and Helmut Maassen. It was translated into English by Michael Hampe and is used here with permission.) A. N. …
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Although Whitehead’s theory of propositions has received treatment in many general studies of Whitehead’s philosophy, it has received little attention as a topic by itself. Our contribution is a general comparative study of the central differences among Whitehead’s and Aristotle’s theories about propositions. Specifically, we intend to show that the crucial point of difference, demanded …
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As developed through the writings of Charles Hartshorne, Whitehead’s process conception of God has had an important influence on natural theology as taught in the seminaries. But in the secular philosophical discussion dominated by analytical thought in the English-speaking world he has suffered the worst fate that can befall a philosopher. This is not to …
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Ever since the publication of Ely’s The Religious Availability of Whitehead’s God in 1942, Whitehead’s solution for the problem of evil has been repeatedly subjected to the charge that it does not allow for the actuality of genuine evils. Ely’s charge was echoed by Madden and Hare in their Evil and the Concept of God …
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In his “Autobiographical Notes” Whitehead remarks about his direct contacts with Hegel: “I have never been able to read Hegel: I initiated my attempt by studying some remarks of his on mathematics which struck me as complete nonsense. It was foolish of me, but I am not writing to explain my good sense.”1 It was …
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I. Introduction The present paper promotes a basic thesis: Locke, as he presents his main epistemological theory in his celebrated An Essay on Human Understanding, is transformed into a metaphysician by Whitehead in his Process and Reality. Anyone familiar with the traditions in Western philosophy, particularly with British empiricism, will find my contention somewhat …
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In a recent article Nicholas F. Gier announced a project which would involve “a comprehensive comparative analysis of phenomenology and process philosophy” (PS 6:197-213). My own article is not intended to introduce such a grand program, but only to derive from Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty in dialogue and comparison a sharpening of the question of commitment. …
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Some years ago, Paul Weiss posed a well-known objection against Whitehead’s thesis “that actual occasions perish when and as they become.” “Held to too tenaciously,” Weiss writes, “the view would prevent Whitehead from affirming that there were any beings, other than God, which actually persist. As a consequence he would not be able to explain …
Continue reading “Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty: Some Moral Implications”
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I. Introduction The construction of a theory of space-time structure is clearly a fundamental concern of Alfred North Whitehead in his early writings in the philosophy of natural science (see, for example, the “Prefaces” to PNK, CN, and R). There are important modifications in Whitehead’s theory in his later, more metaphysical, writings; but these modifications …
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Whitehead and Nietzsche, indefatigable process philosophers, march to decidedly different philosophic drums. Yet at a striking junction, they cross paths. Both find human life and the temporal world of becoming plagued by an ultimate evil that is deeply involved with the nature of time — in particular, with the essential passage of time and the …
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If my studies of Whitehead and Russell are, as Lucas says, “intellectual biographies,” such an approach has very recently been given its greatest boost in Russell: The Journal of the Bertrand Russell Archives with the publication of Whitehead’s “To the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge”1 preceded by an analysis by Paul Delany of …
Continue reading “Whitehead and Russell: Origins of Middleheadedness, Simplemindedness”
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George Santayana (1869-1952) and A.N. Whitehead (1861-1947) were almost precisely contemporary philosophers each of whom elaborated a complete metaphysical or ontological system, the affinities and contrasts between which are of considerable interest (I am not distinguishing here between metaphysics and ontology as the terminologies of our two thinkers diverge on this in ways attention to …
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Modern philosophy is an experiment in dualism. One of its principle problems has been that of making sense of the whole in a way that does justice to the particular character of its parts. For it seems that whenever we attempt to make sense of the whole in a rational, systematic way, we end up …
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Presented to the Symposium “Whitehead’s Metaphysics” Canadian Philosophical Association, UPET, 24 May 1992 Twenty years ago this year, Ivor Leclerc published The Nature of Physical Existence (NPE). This was not to be one further elucidation of Whitehead’s “philosophy of organism,” but Leclerc’s own detailed recounting of how we must recover a few basic presuppositions …
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Introduction In the previous essay, Justice and the Class Struggle. A Challenge for Process Theology,” George Pixley has put decisively before all process thinkers a host of issues arising from the struggle for justice and humanization which are at the heart of the conflict within the world today. He raises three issues, mainly involving justice, …
Continue reading “Whitehead as Counterrevolutionary? Toward Christian-Marxist Dialogue”
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I In the first chapter of Modes of Thought, Whitehead states that it is no less the task of philosophy to set out what he calls “…notions of large, adequate generality” (MT 3) than it is to construct complex systematic theories. The former approach he calls the . . .”philosophical process of assemblage” (MT 2). …
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In an article which appeared some time ago Frank M. Doan sought to determine the precise nature of Whitehead’s revised metaphysical language and to appraise its effectiveness both as a mode of explanation and as a vehicle of philosophic imagination. Included in that discussion was a presentation in four steps of Whitehead’s method of deriving …
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Alfred North Whitehead’s critique of modernism is similar to what are now considered "postmodern" critiques. In particular, Whitehead’s philosophy and critique of modernism parallels many of Derrida’s epistemological and contextual concerns. Although the philosophies of Whitehead and Derrida are similar in some respects, there is nothing to link them beyond a few references to common …
Continue reading “Whitehead, Deconstruction, and Postmodernism”
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Much philosophical thinking in the twentieth century is characterized, on the negative side, by a critique of philosophy as inextricably entangled with the concept of “ground.” On the positive side, this is matched by an extensive elaboration of what may be called “self-realization” as the principle of analysis, where whatever is taken to be the …
Continue reading “Whitehead, Heidegger, and the Paradoxes of the New”
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Since the appearance of The Principle of Relativity in 1922, Whitehead’s departures from the traditional Einsteinian interpretation of the special and general theories of relativity have been discussed and criticized. Throughout most of this discussion, however, the central issue has been perceived to be whether Whitehead’s 1922 interpretation is superior to or inferior to Einstein’s …
Continue reading “Whitehead, Special Relativity and Simultaneity”
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We must end with my first love — Symbolic Logic. When in the distant future the subject has expanded, so as to examine patterns depending on connections other than those of space, number, and quantity — when this expansion has occurred, I suggest that Symbolic Logic, that is to say, the symbolic examination of pattern …
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I. The Pythagorean traditions of four kinds of harmony: musical harmony the root metaphor "Harmony" is a word now used only in metaphorical senses.1 In the long and complicated history of this word, which we cannot here trace, the literal sense has been forgotten. The ancient Greek a r m o z . meant …
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Whitehead’s process metaphysics is also a relation metaphysics. For instance, one of the categories in his categoreal scheme in Process and Reality is the "principle of process," and another is the "principle of relativity." Most significantly, prehensions are "Concrete Facts of Relatedness" (22-23). Although it is customary to classify him as a process philosopher, it …
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We examine Whitehead’s early philosophy of mathematics in this article because it was his only explicit philosophy of mathematics. After Principia Mathematica, Whitehead let major new mathematical developments pass him by, and he never returned seriously to a philosophy that considered those new directions in mathematics.1 In looking for a work of Whitehead that singularly …
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Editor’s Introduction A large set of class notes, papers, clippings, etc., compiled by the late George Bosworth Burch, for many years Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University, has been donated to the Harvard University Archives by his widow, Betty Brand Burch. The set consists of twenty-nine bound books, organized into forty-eight volumes. Each volume …
Continue reading “Whitehead’s Harvard Lectures, 1926-27, Compiled by George Bosworth Burch”
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Alfred North Whitehead indicates in the preface of Process and Reality that his whole metaphysical position is essentially a repudiation of the doctrine of "vacuous actuality" (PR xiii, viii). By "vacuous actuality’’ he means an actuality which is "void of subjective experience" (PR 167/ 253), or, as he say’s elsewhere, a "res vera devoid of …
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(The Canadian symposium on Whitehead’s Metaphysics was held May 25, 1992, at the annual meeting of the Canadian Philosophical Association, Prince Edward Island, Canada.) 1. In Process & Reality, Whitehead defines the task of “Speculative Philosophy” as “the endeavor to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every …
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And indeed the question which was raised of old and is raised now and always, and is always the subject of doubt, viz, what being is, is just the question, what is substance? Aristotle’s memorable sentence1 seems as true today as when it was written. Far from settling among themselves on a metaphysical description …
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Lynne Belaief’s discussion, "Whitehead and Private Interest Theories," in the July 1966 Ethics purports to present the foundational elements of a Whiteheadian ethical theory. In the course of so doing, Belalef offers refutations of the complementary charges that Whitehead reduces ethics to aesthetics and adheres to a private-interest theory of morality. Here I contend that …
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In Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy there are two ways of describing beauty, or aesthetic experience. Whitehead scholars, with damaging effects, have overemphasized one and underemphasized the other. They have so emphasized the rationalistic way, which concentrates on the intellectual organization of the past, that the meaning of aesthetic experience has been exaggerated. They have so …
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According to Whitehead, the positive doctrine of his philosophy “is concerned with the becoming, the being and the relatedness of ‘actual entities’” (PR viii). Because it succinctly characterizes what is most basic in his philosophy, I would normally assume that this statement had been very carefully worded by Whitehead. I certainly would find the statement …
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Fifty years after the publication of Process and Reality, process scholars have yet to recognize that the principle of relativity — the principle on which Whitehead founded his metaphysical system (PR 76) — asserts, in effect, the repeatability of all entities of all sorts: the repeatability, that is, of particulars as well as of universals. …
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Whitehead’s doctrine of the atomicity of occasions of experience raises many problems when it is applied to human mental life. In a recent issue of Process Studies (3/1 [Spring, 1973], 27-40), John Cobb and Donald Sherburne debate whether the unity of human mental experience is better understood if the relationship between the dominant society of …
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Whitehead’s writings are liberally sprinkled with quotations from, and references and allusions to biblical passages. The following list of these has been accumulated over a number of years and is believed to be substantially complete for the works covered. These include PNK, CN, R, SMW, RM, PR, FR, AI, and MT as well as the …
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1 Not enough attention has been paid to Whitehead’s theory of causal objectification in the growing corpus of Whitehead literature. In view of the importance which Whitehead himself attaches to this theory, the need for clarity about it becomes so much the more urgent. I think it can be plausibly maintained that the concept of …
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Near the beginning of Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect. Whitehead introduces the problem of perception in terms which would have seemed very natural in the era of Bertrand Russell and C. D. Broad and H. H. Price. We look up and see a colored shape in front of us. and we say, “There is a …
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I During a time of conflict, crisis, and revolution in the scientific community, when the world witnesses the emergence of a new scientific theory, the philosophical community is placed in a period of uneasy ambiguity, which is heightened when the "truth" or "falsity" of the new theory has not been established. In such a period …
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Whitehead came to his mature philosophical position in Process and Reality after many years of wrestling with problems in the foundations of logic and mathematics. His doctrine of eternal objects in both his earlier and later philosophy can be understood as a description of the ontological nature of pure logic and mathematics (EWP 14-28). Eternal …
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Skier “The experience starts as that smelly feeling… — Alfred North Whitehead The eye hails its friends far off: the cone of the mountain, gradations of white and violet in the snow, and barely moving against the distant cold, the bluejacket and green cap of a skier. Information only, or so the eye supposes. But …
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Metaphysics should avoid statements about what God cannot do. Statements such as “God cannot” do thus and so, and “Not even Gad can” do this or that, should be avoided for two reasons. One reason is that such statements invite accusation of trying to limit God’s power. Charles Hartshorne has been protesting against this charge …
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Hurtubise and I agree on many things. We both find ample evidence for a different concept of God in Process and Reality prior to the final chapter. Besides the familiar concept having both primordial and consequent natures, there is also a more purely non-temporal approach. We agree on the use of compositional analysis for ferreting …
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Professor Keeling proceeds with a good deal of care and lucidity. He does some justice to my presentation of the case for psychicalism (the term I now prefer to “panpsychism”). With many of his sentences I have no quarrel. However, I have a correction to what he says in the third paragraph of section I. …
Continue reading “Why Psychicalism? Comments on Keeling’s and Shepherd’s Criticisms”
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Ideas applied from process thought, A. N. Whitehead’s in particular, suggest that our contemporary view of education is framed in a far too narrow philosophic context. The result is a misplaced emphasis on proposed practical reform which will, unfortunately, have an effect just the opposite of what is intended. Meant to develop socially effective technicians …
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Some years ago Victor Lowe stressed the importance of understanding William James’s philosophy and psychology in order to understand the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead (3:125). Lowe’s point is well founded, for William James’s works contain many insights which have important affinities to Whitehead’s philosophy of organism. This becomes evident upon reading chapter IX of …
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In this paper I shall investigate the interpretive method which Wolfe Mays brings to Whitehead’s later philosophy as well as the resultant interpretation, particularly in The Philosophy of Whitehead (PW). According to Mays (RSW 429, RL 284) there are two approaches to the interpretation of Whitehead’s later writings: (1) the aesthetic-religious and (2) the logico-mathematical. …
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I. Feminist Theology as Process Theology Feminism and process theology have “trafficed together” (to borrow Bernard Meland’s description of the relation of ultimacy and immediacy; see CST 15) since the earliest days of contemporary feminist theology. Perhaps the best summary of that dialogue was the conference and subsequent book, edited and introduced by Sheila Greeve …
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When one attains enlightenment in Zen Buddhism, at least two things are realized. First, one realizes that the deepest level of one’s life — what in Zen is called the “true self” — is always here-and-now. And second, one understands that this true self, even though here-and-now, is always changing. The aim of this essay …
