Alfred North Whitehead

_A highly accessible reading of Whitehead's writings on education and their connection to his metaphysics._.

A highly accessible reading of Whitehead's writings on education and their connection to his metaphysics.

The aim of this essay is to explore similarities between Whitehead’s stages of education and two of the “ultimate notions” he discusses in Modes of Thought. I hope this exploration will shed light on what Whitehead means when he opens the Epilogue of that book by saying: “The task of a university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought, and civilized modes of appreciation, can affect the issue” (171).

Whitehead’s process metaphysics, as developed in Process and Reality, is harmed by the incoherence of his notion of eternal objects as timeless and essentially unrelated entities, which therefore need a primordial agent as their ontological ground and the source of their relatedness and relevance. Such nontemporal entities undermine what is supposed to be a thoroughly temporalist metaphysics. Eternal objects can be understood solely as functions of Creativity, however, as features of a purely temporal process. A notion of God is not (...) required. Whitehead’s Categoreal Obligations specify the necessary conditions for this process, including how the novelty is possible that is needed to account for temporal change and the increased complexity that value enhancement presupposes and makes possible. Adventures of Ideas, especially through the notions of Art and Peace, develops at the level of human civilization this same secular interpretation of the capacity of entities to fashion novel and progressive outcomes. (shrink)

This collection of original essays explores the connections between the philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead and the classical American pragmatists.

Whitehead claims there is only one type of individual in the universe—the actual entity—but there are necessarily multiple tokens of this type. This turns out to be paradoxical. Nevertheless, a type of individuality that is necessarily plural because, for each token, relations to other tokens are constitutive is something familiar from ordinary language, everyday politics, and, not least, 19th century German social thought. Whitehead’s actual entity generalizes the notion of species-being we find in Fichte, Feuerbach, and Marx. The rationale for (...) the concept of species-being brings to light important social and political implications of Whitehead’s cosmology. (shrink)

We need to distinguish systematically what is culturally creative from the degenerative forces that now rule the world. Whitehead comes closest to defining the creative when he identifies it as freedom on the human side and peace on the divine. Buddhist meditation can go deeper to realize the zero-dimension of the communal life-as-such, which corresponds to Whiteheadean freedom-and-peace as the ultimate wellspring of cultural creativity.

This book introduces a new category, in-between, that will have a far-reaching impact on classic ways of thinking. Husserl's description of consciousness and Whitehead's criticism of the prejudice of simple location are two starting points. Relativity theory's radical changes in the conception of space and time also motivate some of the lines of thought.

A comparative study to determine the significance of essence in the doctrine of three philosophers. By his method of reduction husserl disclosed his version of essence and used it to establish phenomenology as a rigorous science and to see phenomena solely as phenomena. Whitehead identified essence with his "eternal objects" and this identification protected his "actual occasions" from the limitations of empiricism. By means of essence seen exclusively as appearance and relations, Santayana supports his ingenious thesis that nothing given exists. (...) Conclusion: essence is a cardinal element in the philosophy of all three men. (shrink)

While efforts to frame a Whiteheadian response to problems of quantum interpretation have looked primarily to the later metaphysical writings, a powerful potential in this regard is contained in the ideas of the philosophy of nature period.

While efforts to frame a Whiteheadian response to problems of quantum interpretation have looked primarily to the later metaphysical writings, a powerful potential in this regard is contained in the ideas of the philosophy of nature period.

Jason Brown started his career as a neurologist specializing in language disorders, perceptive illusions, and impaired action. But beyond his activity as a physician he is a man of genuinely theoretical appetite. As satisfying as it is to help improve the situation of sick fellow humans, this alone does not characterize him well. Those who know him closer know his insistent urge to find a philosophical framework for his clinical practice and research, together with his desire for a more humane (...) society. Those who do not know him will see this immediately when they read his most recent book Process and the authentic life (Brown 2006). This is, in a nutshell, how and why Brown came to look into process philosophy, as an alternative to philosophical systems focusing on substances such as the Cartesian res cogitans and res extensa, on which science and technology are essentially based. Process philosophy holds some radical deviations from these systems, and may be regarded as complementary to them (Roemer 2006), although any such convergence is hotly contested (e.g., Bickhard 2004). Best known among adherents of a process worldview is Whitehead with his opus magnum Process and Reality. Brown’s approach is clearly in the spirit of Whitehead’s. However, due to his medical and psychological background it differs in motivation, and consequently it differs in the way it is carried out. While Whitehead, originally a mathematician, tried to be as precise and detailed as possible in his definitions, arguments and conclusions, Brown strives for his humanistic goal more directly. His accounts are based on examples rather than formal inferences, everyday experiences rather than abstract constructions. (shrink)