If one believes the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, Alfred North Whitehead's work is one of the most important events in the exploration of the universes of thought in recent times. Whitehead's text confronts us with the feeling of existing in a world that cannot be defined by any creed or method, but offers us unexpected friends: ideas--ideas that unleash and alleviate, play and mitigate despair, swim in the rough waters, but without effort let go of us if we cannot fathom (...) them. For adventurers who risk the encounter with Whitehead's text, its treasures feel like balm on the overheated, burning sensation of wounds of division. A way out. A new way. A revolution--not of violent overturning, but of gentle reorientation in which compassionate thinking breathes. It is not about systems, but permeated with musical rhythms and harmonics, composing significance with impermanence. It does not arrive at a promised land, but perhaps is a harbinger of things to come, sensing a universe that will surprise our descendants. It does not reveal a mind in which we can live, but one that challenges all rest. (shrink)

Paradigms of unity and plurality -- Unity or plurality of religions? -- The healing and poisonous fruits of the unity of religions -- The synthesis and aporia of religious pluralism -- The promise of mysticism -- Polyphilic pluralism -- Negotiations of multiplicity -- Convergences and divergences: juncture or bifurcation? -- Pluralism of pluralisms? -- Horizontal and vertical pluralism -- An experiment in incompatibilities: green acre -- The mystery of distinction and unity -- Transreligious horizons -- The transreligious discourse -- Other (...) religions: from coinherence to coinhabitation -- The earth and other worlds: a story of cosmic magnitude -- The future of religions -- One with all religions. (shrink)

Alfred North Whitehead’s interpreters usually pay less attention to his later monographs and essays. Process and Reality is taken to be the definitive center of the Whiteheadian universe and the later works, thereby, appear to many only as applications or elaborations of themes already introduced earlier. Yet, is it also possible that the dominance of this perspective has obscured or even distorted further creative developments of Whitehead’s thought? This volume offers a sort of Copernican revolution in Whitehead interpretation, methodologically and (...) conceptually inviting its contributors to observe Whitehead’s work from the perspective of his later works. The aim of this preferencing is meant not to invalidate earlier approaches to Whitehead’s thought nor is the inference that the later works are more authoritative. Yet, just as the first space-based images of our planet forever changed humanity’s understanding of its place in the universe, shifting the alleged center of, or even decentering of the view on, Whitehead’s “philosophy of organism” to the later works, we might discover previously obscured ideas or new vistas of thought relevant not only to our current philosophical landscape, but also to the pressing issues of our fragile and endangered world. This volume invites its contributors and readers to consider whether one thereby also moves beyond metaphysics? (shrink)

The essays from the conference have been substantially rev. and new material has been added.

This book examines the process philosophies of Whitehead and others against current discussions of astrobiology, extraterrestrial life, and their engagement by theological and religious systems.

Considered together, Butler and Whitehead draw from a wide palette of disciplines to develop distinctive theories of becoming, of syntactical violence, and creative opportunities of limitation. The contributors of this volume offer a unique contribution to and for the humanities in the struggles of politics, economy, ecology, and the arts.

This book brings together experts from different religious traditions and spiritual persuasions to suggest ways in which the living wisdom traditions might contribute to, and transform themselves into, a universal conviviality among the people, cultures and religions of this world for a common future.

Rather than a “logical assertion,” Whitehead described a proposition as a “lure for feeling” for a collectivity to come. The unique contributions in Propositions in the Making articulate the newest reaches of Whiteheadian propositions for a postmodern world.

11 essays by leading Whitehead scholars re-examinae Whitehead's Barbour-Page lectures, published as the book Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect in 1927, to give you exciting insights into the contemporary implications of Whitehead's symbolism in an era of new scientific, cultural and technological developments.

In an intricate play on Dante’s Divine Comedy, this book engages questions of religion and philosophy through the aporetic dynamics of love and power, locating its discussions in the midst of, and in between the spheres of a genuine philosophy of multiplicity.

In complex philosophical ways, theology is, should, and can be a "theopoetics" of multiplicity. The ambivalent term theopoetics is associated with poetry and aesthetic theory; theology and literature; and repressed literary qualities, myths, and metaphorical theologies. On a more profound basis, it questions the establishment of the difference between philosophy and theology and resides in the dangerous realm of relativism. The chapters in this book explore how the term theopoetics contributes to cutting-edge work in theology, philosophy, literature, and sociology.

The Garden of Reality addresses urgent questions around the relativity of religious truth, religious pluralism, transreligious discourse, postmodern cosmology, and interspiritual mysticism in order to argue that relativity and multiplicity are inevitable for the multireligious conviviality and peace of the humanity of the future.

This article was originally delivered as a lecture at the Library of Congress, February 17, 2011, to commemorate the installation of a letter from Whitehead to his student Henry Leonard in the collection of that institution. See the Appendices to Phipps for a copy of the letter and Leonard’s response. The present article summarizes the history, development, and importance of Whitehead’s work for the present and delineates perspectives for potential Whitehead research in the future.

This article continues a long history within process thought of multi-religious engagement and analysis of the concept of God. Specifically, this article will move beyond the classical "big five" religions of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism so as to explore in detail the relationship between Whitehead's philosophy/theology and several thinkers and concepts in the Bahἄí faith, especially the concept of the "Manifestation" of God.

This collection of essays, drawn from the latest generation of Whitehead scholars, explores how, in the deconstruction of certain concepts, an unceasing invitation of possibility and change is released, both in relation to ongoing philosophical conversations, and as applied to lived experience. The essays make a significant intervention in the field of Whiteheadian scholarship by creating new intersections and paths that extend Whitehead's thought in novel, and often unexpected, directions. The philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead proposes a radical reconceptualization of (...) experience-one in which we, and all other things, are composed of mutually implicated series of events in an infinite universe of interaction, generating and regenerating experience. Far from indicating a new superlative of holistic integrity, Whitehead prefers the always incomplete movement of all realities, which is the source of vitality for every new generation. This volume applies Whitehead's philosophy to superlatives-those valued concepts that limit and define our categories amid the flux of experience. The first half of this book probes the superlatives that have historically defined philosophical method in the West. These essays trace the adventures of concepts like substance, novelty, system, and truth. Ossified oppositions that define these superlatives are fractured, indicating new directions for growth. The essays in the second half of the book reflect on the influx, fragility, and impossibility of superlatives like care, tragedy, love, and loss in human experience, generating new matters of philosophical discourse. Superlatives abound. But Whitehead cautions us to attend to their multiplicity. The mutual immanence of events constantly generates new constellations of importance, and so superlatives, because they are contingent upon unstable modes of togetherness, cannot be taken for granted. Any of these concepts may have a particular significance today, but as events coalesce into new constellations, those ideals will continue to take on new meaning. (shrink)

Over the last fifteen years, the largely American tradition of process theology has moved in new directions as it has been lured into sustained engagements with French poststructuralism. Roland Faber’s The Divine Manifold is perhaps the most impressive example of this new shape that process thought is taking on in the twenty-first century. For those who would dismiss Whitehead’s philosophy as outdated or irrelevant to our present context, Faber’s Manifold offers a startlingly novel interpretation of the great (...) metaphysician and a series of complex arguments for his continuing importance. By entangling Whitehead’s metaphysics with the poststructuralism of Gilles Deleuze, Faber reveals what process thought could... (shrink)

This volume grew out of a conference held in 2016 at the Claremont School of Theology, while the conference itself grew out of "innovative conversations between philosophers, Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, and process philosophers, Roland Faber and Michael Halewood". Its title in effect conjoins a Whiteheadian conception of propositions and a Jamesian understanding of "things.". As such, a proposition is set forth on behalf of "a collectivity...

Writing an accessible introduction to process theology is no easy task. As Roland Faber notes, “Process theology is a quite complex phenomenon”. Yet this is the task he sets out for himself in The Becoming of God: Process Theology, Philosophy, and Multireligious Engagement. While Faber describes his book as an introduction to process theology, it would perhaps be better described as an introduction to the thought of Alfred North Whitehead and its theological implications.In typical Faber fashion, (...) this poetic introduction to Whitehead is thorough, complex, and insightful. Ranging across issues of science, religious studies, theology, and philosophy, Faber tackles some of the most complicated thought problems... (shrink)

Charkiw in der Ukraine war in den 1920er-Jahren ein aktives Zentrum der Avantgarde, das mehrfach an Peripherien gelegen war: Räumlich abseits der Machtzentren und zeitlich in der letzten Phase der Avantgarde positioniert, differierten auch die künstlerischen Praktiken des Panfuturismus und des Konstruktiven Dynamismus von tonangebenden Erscheinungen. So wurden etwa in der späten Phase der Avantgarde überholte Konzepte der Abstraktion mit funktionalistischen Ansätzen vereint. Die Formationen Nova Generacija (1927-1931) und Avanhard (1925-1929) mit Mychajl' Semenko und Valerijan Poliscuk an der Spitze interagierten (...) dabei rege mit den Avantgarden in Ost und West.0Vera Faber analysiert nun erstmals umfassend die dabei zum Einsatz kommenden polemischen Praktiken der Aus-, Ab- und Eingrenzung - anhand von Programmtexten und literarischen sowie künstlerischen Arbeiten -- Cover page [4]. (shrink)

This paper explains conceptual modeling within the framework of Frame-Based Terminology (Faber, 2012; 2015; 2022), as applied to EcoLexicon (ecolexicon.ugr.es), a specialized knowledge base on the environment (León-Araúz, Reimerink &, Faber, 2019; Faber & León-Araúz, 2021). It describes how a frame-based terminological resource is currently being restructured and reengineered as an initial step towards its formalization and subsequent transformation into an ontology. It also explains how the information in EcoLexicon can be integrated in environmental ontologies such as (...) ENVO (Buttigieg, Morrison, Smith, Mungall & Lewis, 2013; Buttigieg, Pafilis, Lewis, Schildhauer, Walls & Mungall, 2016), particularly at the bottom tiers of the Ontology Learning Layer Cake (Cimiano, 2006; Cimiano, Maedche, Staab & Volker, 2009). The assumption is that frames, as a conceptual modeling tool, and information extracted from corpora can be used to represent the conceptual structure of a specialized domain. (shrink)

Der Jesuit Erich Przywara (1889-1972) war in den 1920er Jahren ein gesuchter Redner und Autor. 1932 legte er die berühmte 'Analogia entis' vor. 1938-1940 erschien ein umfangreicher Kommentar der ignatianischen Exerzitien. Kommentierend wandte er sich auch biblischen Schriften zu. Die hier vorgelegte Studie wählt einen werkgenetischen Ansatz, um die tiefgreifenden Entwicklungen dieses facettenreichen Werkes zu analysieren. Im Fokus stehen Zusammenhänge und Umbrüche zwischen den religionsphilosophischen Perspektiven und dem theologischen Schrifttum unter Beachtung der ignatianischen Einflüsse. Zugleich erschliesst sich so das theologische (...) Schaffen Przywaras, das trotz seiner Originalität zu Unrecht wenig bekannt ist. Seine kreative Sprache schafft neue Zugänge zu wichtigen Themen ebenso wie zu biblischen Texten. Dargestellt werden andererseits die Grenzen seines typologisierenden Ansatzes, die nicht selten ungerechten Urteile über andere Positionen sowie das Problem einer sich apokalyptisch verdüsternden Geschichtsschau. Przywaras Denken ist - mit einem augustinischen Wort formuliert - unterwegs im 'Suchen, um zu finden, und finden, um zu suchen.'"-- Back cover. (shrink)

This book presents one of the first systematic assessments of aesthetic insights into world politics. It examines the nature of aesthetic approaches and outlines how they differ from traditional analysis of politics. The book explores the potential and limits of aesthetics through a series of case studies on language and poetics"--Provided by publisher.