Bergson's integral empiricism is a philosophical approach that aims to harmonize the scientific study of nature with the experience of consciousness. Bergson drew heavily on the basic concepts of calculus in framing his philosophy of intuition. He did not merely use calculus metaphorically to describe processes and organizational patterns of consciousness. Instead, he studied the thought processes actually involved in calculus and showed that they are intimately connected to how we think about change more generally. I propose a distinction between (...) derivative empiricism, i.e., reductionism, and integral empiricism that incorporates the study of the mind by the mind. The method involves the invention of a new kind of knowledge that is not based on generalization or abstraction but rather on the integration of experience. This is predicated on a study of the act of integration in consciousness that underpins our ability to think and do philosophy. (shrink)

This article considers whether process philosophy can provide a more promising basis for understanding the closely related problems of persons and personal identity than more traditional or mainstream philosophical approaches. In particular, the article focuses on whether process conceptions of persons and personal identity provide an approach that offers greater potential for resolving the duplication and fission examples within the literature in this area than the approaches taken by Bernard Williams and Derek Parfit.

My purpose in this article is to defend the goodness of Whitehead's God against two recent critics: Pierfrancesco Basile and Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes. I will both rely on Whitehead's own statements regarding God's goodness and offer a metaphysical interpretation of these statements in relation to his “axianoetic” universe.

This article explains that, why, and how process thinkers and Hartmanian axiologists affirm most, if not all, that Buddhism denies with respect to the positive goodness of ordinary conscious or aware lives, human and nonhuman. According to mainstream Buddhism, all the intrinsic, extrinsic, and systemic values of ordinary human existence are illusions, so we should avoid being involved with or attaching ourselves to any of them. By contrast, process thought and axiology affirm, cultivate, nurture, and encourage involvement with and attachment (...) to all positive human values. Buddhism insists on the illusory nature of all intrinsic values (e.g., individual human selves, including ourselves), all extrinsic values (e.g., the everyday practical, useful, and sensory objects, processes, and activities of life), and all systemic values (e.g., all human thoughts, beliefs, and systems, except for the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path). Process thinkers and Hartmanian axiologists insist that such things are very real and should be taken with utmost seriousness. By “illusory,” Buddhists may mean nothing more than that all such things are temporal, fleeting, transient. For this reason, they claim, all attachment to or positive valuation of such things leads to suffering. I fully agree with the transience of all momentary actualities, but I react to and deal very differently with the positive values involved in such transience. (shrink)

What makes this a beautiful book? Concision and depth provide a rich contrast for beauty. Indeed, the distilled chapters are patterned for meditative rhythms: personal connection to a particular Psalm, interpretation, invitation for reflection, even an original psalm written by Blair Gilmer Meeks that is included in each chapter. Here psalms are more than ancient voices; they are relevant voices in the contemporary period. Feeling, relevance, and creativity make this little book a powerhouse meditative tool for those in the Judeo-Christian (...) tradition.Suchocki has always been adept in her writing tone. Her words convey her felt experience. “Reading Psalm 139 is like being a little child, wrapped in a feather quilt of delectable warmth, on a cold winter night. Safe... warm... loved” (29). With the strength of this tone, we are invited to engage the psalms experientially. This is an essential grounding for those who approach faith from a process perspective.Historical or literary interpretation nested within each chapter provides analytic space. The psalms have their own past and ground of experience that intersects with our own. Any such intersection holds the possibility of novelty and emergence. Meeks's contemporary psalms contribute to such novelty and demonstrate a creative response to ancient texts. All this impresses upon the reader what a remarkably ambitious project this is within the economy of 108 pages.This short work is nonetheless ambitious because it is a process project. It is a process project that has some standards to meet; standards of experience, relevance, and creativity as essentials for the process community are clearly met. One disappointment of the book is the continual reference to God as an object about whom many declarations are made. This happens throughout the interpretive, reflective, and creative sections of each chapter. This default to a more traditional theological perspective of subject/object relationship is perhaps a consequence of keeping things concise. There is, after all, only so much work that can be accomplished in any given book. Even so, process thought is set apart from other theological approaches in its commitment to divine-human relationship. The timbre of that relationship is the extent to which one speaks from one's own perspective without speaking for another.To be sure, the biblical imagination of the psalms often speaks about God or makes declarations about what God is like. It is exactly in this place that process thought can help us move more carefully and thoughtfully. Assertions about God's character run the risk of diminishing God to an object captured. Process theology has the unique metaphysic to elaborate a robust image of the God we long for without overstating God's actions and thus limiting God's own becoming.A meditative tool that is as generous to God's becoming as to human experience would make this book unique. Attention to God's becoming, limiting our language about, but not our experience of, God is a critical spiritual discipline for congregational leaders. As a local church works within a scientific and antiauthority milieu, local clergy and congregational leaders can get themselves into tight theological corners by asserting what God intends or does. On the other hand, if local clergy and congregational leaders are asserting the human longing for God, we can be honest and even tenable about our experience of God. Therein we might find greater congruence and grounding in process thought as we take up Suchocki's project for meditation within our interrelational existence. (shrink)

This article argues for a version of sacred naturalism within the framework of a processual metaphysics that characterizes the cosmos as an interplay between Chaos (disunity) and Logos (unity). I argue that although creativity is highly valuable from the perspective of life and humanity, at a cosmic scale it is overshadowed by the universal tendencies toward conservation and destruction. Within this metaphysical picture I develop a naturalist notion of the sacred as a phenomenological object inspiring particularly intense feelings of inner (...) harmony but functioning eudaemonically to strengthen mind, body, and soul against forms of Chaos, whether anomie, stress, or personal conflict. After developing some criteria for a sacred but immanent meta-unity in contrast to the transcendental unities of traditional religion, I describe how the unity of the cosmos might be experienced as a sacred object by emphasizing its heterarchical, aesthetic and life-affirming dimensions. (shrink)

In this article, I argue, contrary to a noticeable trend in Whitehead scholarship, that in Whitehead's system propositions and their truth-values are objective in the sense that their own identities are independent of any particular subjects feeling or knowing them. This stance reinforces a core value of Whitehead's philosophy: his realism. As part of this argument, I examine Whitehead's analysis of an actual entity's determination and provide a more precise definition of what it means for a proposition to be true (...) or false. (shrink)

Can a bridge be constructed between Whiteheadian process metaphysics and Aristotelian-Scholastic substance metaphysics? I ask this question in the context of physical change, using the chemical transformation of molecules as the quintessential exemplar. While both metaphysical systems describe nature as dynamical and relational, each sees change differently: for process metaphysics, change is constitutive of all actualities, while for substance metaphysics, change is secondary and something that happens to actualities. My analysis concludes that these two systems of thought have fundamental metaphysical (...) differences that do not permit a reconciliation. Rather than reconciliation, what might be possible is the development of a new way to speak about the actualities of world, not as substances or processes but a way that subsumes both. (shrink)