Bracken synthesizes Polanyi’s notion of morphogentic field and Whitehead’s notion of societies of actual occasions. These comments emphasize the implications of the metaphors involved in these notions. The rnetaphor of plants growing in afield lies beyond the concept of a morphogenetic field, and the metaphor of a society of interacting persons lies behind the concept of a society of actual occasions. I suggest that one of the implications of this metaphor is that there is not, as Bracken argues, (...) a problem of continuity in Whitehead’s metaphysics of events. (shrink)

In God, Chance and Purpose, David Bartholomew uses probability theory to show how Divine Providence can be active in a world governed by chance and necessity. At the micro-level of Nature God uses a statistical formula to control the outcome of seemingly random events; at the macro-level God influences but does not control the outcome of events. From a Whiteheadian perspective “the common element of form” of a society could be seen as the equivalent of Bartholomew’s statistical formula but generated (...) in each case from the bottom-up rather than imposed from the top-down. Yet Bartholomew’s insistence that statistical formulas only work with large groups of entities suggests that more attention should be given by Whiteheadians to the workings of Divine Providence on societies as opposed to individual actual entities. (shrink)

RECENT THEOLOGICAL SPECULATION ON THE TRINITY HAS CONCEIVED THE DIVINE NATURE AS AN INTERPERSONAL PROCESS. WHITEHEADIAN PHILOSOPHY MAY POSSIBLY BE USEFUL HERE. ON THE ASSUMPTION THAT NOT ONLY ACTUAL ENTITIES, BUT LIKEWISE WHITEHEADIAN SOCIETIES POSSESS AN ONTOLOGICAL UNITY AND EXERCISE AN AGENCY PROPER TO THEMSELVES, THEN THE TRINITY MAY BE VIEWED AS A DEMOCRATICALLY ORGANIZED STRUCTURED SOCIETY WITH EACH OF THE DIVINE PERSONS AS A SUBORDINATE PERSONALLY ORDERED SOCIETY OF ACTUAL OCCASIONS.

During the Middle Ages, philosophers and theologians argued over the extramental reality of universal forms or essences. In the early modern period, the relation between subjectivity and objectivity, the individual self and knowledge of the outside world, was a rich subject of debate. Today, there is considerable argument about the relation between spontaneity and determinism within the evolutionary process, whether a principle of spontaneous self-organization as well as natural selection is at work in the aggregation of molecules into cells and (...) the development of primitive forms of life into complex organisms. In _Subjectivity, Objectivity and Intersubjectivity_, Joseph A. Bracken proposes that what is ultimately at stake here is the age-old problem of the relationship between the One and the Many, universality and particularity on different levels of existence and activity within nature. Bracken rejects traditional models of this relationship, wherein either the One or the Many is presupposed to have priority over the other. He instead suggests that a new social ontology—one that is grounded in a theory of universal intersubjectivity—protects both the concrete particularity of individual entities in their specific relations to one another and their enduring corporate reality as a stable community or environment within Nature. What emerges is a bold reimagining of the sometimes strained relationship between religion and science. Bracken's clear writing, sophisticated philosophical analysis, and exemplary scholarship will lend this new work an enthusiastic appreciation by readers with deep interests in philosophy and philosophical theology. (shrink)

Abstract.Russell Stannard distinguishes between objective time as measured in theoretical physics and subjective time, or time as experienced by human beings in normal consciousness. Because objective time, or four‐dimensional space‐time for the physicist, does not change but exists all at once, Stannard argues that this is presumably how God views time from eternity which is beyond time. We human beings are limited to experiencing the moments of time successively and thus cannot know the future as already existing in the same (...) way that God does. I argue that Stannard is basically correct in his theological assumptions about God's understanding of time but that his explanation would be more persuasive within the context of a neo‐Whiteheadian metaphysics. The key points in that metaphysics are (1) that creation is contained within the structured field of activity proper to the three divine persons of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity and (2) that the spontaneous decisions of creatures are continually ordered and reordered into an ever‐expanding totality already known in its fullness by the divine persons. (shrink)

The author argues that, while logical rigor requires Whiteheadians to emphasize the ontological priority of the notion of actual entity as a self-constituting subject of experience for the proper understanding of physical reality. Whitehead's understanding of the key category of society in his metaphysics, especially the way that societies and their constituent actual entities reciprocally "constrain " one another's existence and activity and the way that societies are hierarchically ordered to one another within the evolutionary process will presumably have more (...) empirical resonance with natural scientists in their own efforts to understand the emergence of life from non-life, the progressive growth of self-awareness among higher-order animal species, etc. So, in dialogue with natural scientists, why not start with what is psychologically more interesting to the listener? (shrink)

Alfred North Whitehead's master work, Process and Reality, is intended to extend the cosmological vision of Whitehead in a new direction. By interpreting societies within Whitehead's scheme as structured fields of activity, the author projects a universe of hierarchically ordered fields of activity, up to and including the all-compassing field of activity constituted by the Christian Trinity.

Traditional Christian belief in the existence of human life after death within a transformed material universe should be capable of rational justification if one chooses carefully the philosophical scheme underlying those claims. One should not have to appeal simply to the power of a loving God to justify one's beliefs. A revision of Whitehead's metaphysical scheme is proposed that allows one to render these classical Christian beliefs at least plausible to a broad range of contemporary thinkers as a consequence of (...) a cosmology based on the principle of universal intersubjectivity and the need for a common ground between opposing subjectivities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dependent Co-Origination and Universal IntersubjectivityJoseph A. Bracken, SJTwo essays in a recent issue of Buddhist-Christian Studies dealt with the topic "Buddhist and Christian Views of Community." The first essay, by Rita Gross, was a careful analysis of the way in which the separation of home and workplace in contemporary Western society has tended to reduce effective community life to the nuclear family and thus pose significant disadvantages to (...) everyone involved (not only mothers, fathers, and their children but also non–family members, friends, and neighbors) within the broader civic community.1 A consumer-oriented culture catering to individual needs and desires has arisen to compensate for the pervasive feeling of loneliness and emptiness created by the relative lack of significant interpersonal relationships. In the second essay Donald Mitchell recounted the origin and unexpected growth of the International Focolare movment of which he is a longtime member.2 He noted how the founder of the movement, Chiara Lubich, and her women friends found inspiration for living together and working for the poor and the homeless around them in what they saw as the self-giving love of the three divine persons of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity both for one another and for all their creatures. This movement over time broadened to include first Protestant members, then Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus, all drawn by the goal of richer life in community along with group efforts to assist the underprivileged of this world.My own contribution to the topic of Buddhist and Christian views of community will focus on the same communitarian model of the doctrine of the Trinity that originally inspired Lubich and her followers in the years during and after World War II, but my remarks will be more philosophically oriented. Following the lead of the late Colin Gunton in his book The One, the Three and the Many,3 I will analyze the communitarian model of the Trinity for its value in setting forth a new paradigm for the relationship of the One and the Many. As Gunton perceptively notes in the early chapters of his book, Western civilization seems to be still preoccupied with a basically Platonic understanding of the One and the Many in which the One enjoys primacy over the Many as their transcendent principle of order and intelligibility.4 As a result, even though freedom and individual self-expression are theoretically prized in Western societies, in point of [End Page 3] fact there is a great deal of uniformity and even repression of individual differences so as to conform to the cultural standards imposed by some dominant individual or minority group within each society. In the end people seem to fear the threat to personal security represented by wide diversity and plurality more than they value their individual liberty.Looking to the doctrine of the Trinity set forth by the Greek-speaking fathers of the Church, however, Gunton finds a new paradigm for the One and the Many whereby the One is emergent out of the interplay of the Many with one another rather than transcendent over the Many as their necessary principle of order and intelligibility.5 The Many are defined by their internal relations to one another rather than by their common relation to an external One. The community thus achieved is a differentiated unity, not only tolerating differences of the Many among themselves, but even fostering those differences so as to produce in the end a more complex form of community. The application to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is obvious. The three divine persons are strictly defined with respect to one another; each of them has no self-identity apart from relation to the other two persons. Yet together they co-constitute the reality of the one God, a richly differentiated rather than blandly homogeneous unity.6The application to human beings and their membership in various communities, of course, is not so obvious. But Gunton believes that three principles or "transcendentals" for the understanding of the relation of human beings with one another and with God are at hand, given careful study of this communitarian model of the Trinity: namely, perichoresis, substantiality or... (shrink)

Using a process-oriented understanding of the relation between actions and agents, the author argues that an ontological agent is the ongoing effect or by-product rather than the antecedent cause of actions. Applied to the relation between natural and supernatural in philosophical cosmology, this allows one to claim, first, that agents (whether natural or supernatural) are not sensibly perceived, but only inferred from the ongoing observation of empirical actions; second, that the distinction between the natural and the supernatural is then conceivably (...) a distinction between interrelated processes rather than between independently existing agents; and third, that a higher order process of supernatural origin could be operative in a lower order empirical process without interference even though its existence and activity could only be established on the basis of a faith commitment, not empirical evidence. What Paul Ricoeur referred to as a “surplus of meaning” over and above the scientific explanation of an event would be in play with the claim of divine guidance for the cosmic process. (shrink)

A superposition of the field ofmeaning or set of concepts proper to process philosophy and theology upon the field ofmeaning proper to contemporary biology (in what Mary Gerhart and Allan Russell call “metaphoric process”) yields some interesting results for both disciplines. Gene mutations within cells can be philosophically explained as a society of actual entities deviating from the normal pattern ofdevelopment within the structured society proper to a cell and the different genes at work in it. The notion of supervenience (...) or emergence within biology confirms that developing organisms exercise a form of causation upon their ultimate constituents (actual entities) that is more than and quite different from what these constituents produce on their own through bottom-up causation from moment to moment. (shrink)

Following a brief examination of some remarks by Paul Ricoeur on the notion of testimony. I provide the outline or an analysis of revelation based upon certain key concepts of process philosophy. This is followed by a more specific interpretation within the context of Whitehead’s philosophy of process.

Polanyi’s vision of the cosmic process as undergirded by a logic of emergence common to both the mental life of human beings and the processes of non-human nature can be vindicated if one is prepared to make certain adjustments in the notion of morphogenetic fields with an active center or organizing principle. Given the author’s field-oriented interpretation of Whiteheadian societies, it should be possible to think of entelechies or final causes in developmental rather than strictly Aristotelian terms. That is, the (...) “common element of form” or organizing principle of a Whiteheadian society depends for its own existence on the spontaneous activity of previous sets of actual occasions and yet serves as the ongoing principle of formal and final causality for the present set of actual occasions and still others to follow it. In Aristotelian language, matter and form thus dialectically condition one another and neither is ontologically superior to the other. (shrink)

In Religion in an Age of Science, Ian Barbour concludes that the contemporary evolutionary worldview with its emphasis on the interplay of law and chance, relationality and autonomy, can be properly accounted for only by something like the process‐relational metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead. At the same time, he expresses serious reservations about certain features of Whitehead's scheme, notably, his perceived inability to account for the ongoing identity of the human self and for the fact of multilevel organization within organisms (...) and in the world of inanimate compounds. In this article, I suggest that both of these difficulties can be resolved if one adopts a revisionist understanding of the Whiteheadian category of society according to which democratically organized societies possess an ontological unity and exercise a corporate agency proper to their own level of existence and activity. Furthermore, if one applies this revisionist understanding of societies to the Whiteheadian doctrine of God, a Trinitarian understanding of God becomes possible within the overall parameters of process‐relational metaphysics. In this way, traditional belief in the doctrine of the Trinity can be reconciled with a scientifically credible worldview. (shrink)

String theory is often depicted as the best chance for natural science to find a Theory of Everything. Whiteheadians may object that only a philosophical cosmology such as Whitehead presents in PR can “frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted” (PR 3). But then they have to show that Whitehead’s scheme and string theory fit together nicely, with each helping to resolve residual problem areas in the (...) other. The present article conjectures that the tiny vibrating strings postulated by string theory and the superjects of individual actual entities might correspond to the “final, real things of which the world is made up” (PR 18). Likewise, the extra spatial dimensions required by the mathematics of string theory might be more intelligible in terms of the interaction of different levels of subsocieties within a Whiteheadian structured society. (shrink)

In this essay I defend two interrelated theses. The first is that Whiteheadian structured societies are best understood as open-ended systems akin to those currently being proposed in the natural and social sciences by Stuart Kauff­man, David Sloan Wilson, and Niklas Luhmann. The second is that an open-ended system is best understood in terms of an ongoing interplay of subjectivity and objectivity, which I derive from a modest rethinking of the workings of a Whiteheadian structured society.