Whitehead, Categories, and the Completion of the Copernican Revolution

Abstract

Philosophy is, and has been, many things to many people, and that is fine. Some of those persons who do, or have done, philosophy have engaged in the business of creating categoreal schemes. Were one to ask why these persons set about to construct categoreal schemes, the answer would have to be complex?the conscious motivations, purposes, and goals of system builders are undoubtedly various. And that is fine. So when I suggest, as I am about to, an account of what it is that categoreal schemes are really trying to do, it must be understood that I do not intend my account to be dogmatically a priori. I have simply thought about some of the great systematizers and the categoreal schemes they have concocted, have admittedly done this reflecting from the perspective of Whitehead's process metaphysics, and have arrived at certain conclusions about what might be viewed as a diagnostic tool for un derstanding many of the interesting and historically important categoreal schemes. What then do I see as the fundamental thrust of philosophical system building? I suggest, looking back over the history of philosophy and looking at our present-day debates about what philosophy should be, that it is in teresting and fruitful to consider a categoreal scheme as an attempt to for mulate a set of concepts that enables us to do justice to man as a part of nature. The great gap is always between the concepts that reflect the scientific understanding of nature in a given era and that same era's existential ex perience of the structures presupposed by human being. The history of thought is full of documents that shed much light on our lived experience (one thinks of Augustine and Pascal as well as Heidegger and Sartre to say nothing of the poets, whose names are legion) as well as documents ar ticulating our growing scientific grasp of nature (Galileo and Newton come to mind as well as Planck and Einstein). The problem is to synthesize the two perspectives, and nine times out of ten the great philosophical system-builders who develop categoreal schemes are most fruitfully approached, I believe, if they are understood as searchers for the bridge which, for their times, will span, link, bring together these two domains. Democritus and Hobbes are good examples of interesting and fine thinkers who fall short because their categoreal schemes failed to do justice to man; Heidegger and Sartre are