Process Philosophy Research Articles

Psychology as Space: Embodied Relationality

AbstractThe relationship between bodies and space is not one that often concerns social psychology, or for that matter, the social sciences more broadly (cultural geography being an exception). This is largely due to bodies and space being facets of the world that are not usually considered as psychological. The former are traditionally seen as biological whilst the latter are thought of as geographical. In this paper, I will explore the idea that bodies and space are intrinsic to social psychological living, and as such, both should enter the list of key concerns for the discipline. Moreover, I will suggest that bodies and space are best thought of as products of inter‐connecting processes, rather than separate entities each with their own inherent properties. In doing so, the work of relational process philosophy will be drawn upon to ground the arguments made. The aim of the paper is to offer an understanding of social psychological experience as grounded in processes that are at the same time, embodied and spatialised.

Religion in the Making: Metaphysics & Religion

]Alfred North Whitehead’s book, Religion in the Making sets out to present a comprehensive method for understanding religion. His use of the term metaphysics denotes the science that explains the most relevant understanding about absolute phenomenon, while the term religion is often used to imply the force of belief and action that transforms character and ultimately the universe. Whitehead is particularly interested in employing “process philosophy” or “process metaphysics” to elucidate a general understanding of religious experience. Central to Whitehead’s purpose in addressing the issue of religion is his efforts to show that religion cannot avoid metaphysics and metaphysics is dependent upon religion.

The Last Dualism: Life and Death in Goddess Feminist Thealogy

This essay is a reflection on Valerie Saiving's statement that the "last dualism," the dualism between life and death, is the root of all the other dualisms and will be the most difficult for feminists to overcome. Carol Christ agrees with Saiving that the fear of death is at the root of all the dualisms and that the assumption that the enduring individual is of the highest value is reason that death is not accepted. She suggests that rituals of giving and receiving in ancient and traditional Crete embody an understanding of the self as embedded in a matrix of interdependent relationships. This insight is also expressed in the symbols of the spiral and the circle dance. Analysis of their burial rituals suggests that ancient Cretans affirmed the death of the individual while celebrating the continuation of life for others. An understanding of the self as interdependent in the matrix of life combined with an acceptance of individual death is also found in process philosophy. Carol Christ, like Saiving, argues that process philosophy provides an appropriate undergirding for feminist philosophies and theologies. Goddess symbols and rituals of ancestor connection celebrate the interdependence of life. From this standpoint, individual death can be embraced and the survival of life for future generations can be promoted. The "last dualism" is overcome.

Law, Process Philosophy and Ecological Civilization

The call by Chinese environmentalists for an ecological civilization to supersede industrial civilization, subsequently embraced by the Chinese government and now being promoted throughout the world, makes new demands on legal systems, national and international. If governments are going to prevent ecological destruction then law will be essential to this. The Chinese themselves have recognized grave deficiencies in their legal institutions. They are reassessing these and looking to Western traditions for guidance. Yet law as it has developed in the West, particularly in Anglophone countries, which has crystallized as the tradition of ‘liberal legalism’, is in a state of crisis. Rather than being taken as a cause for despair at the legal traditions of East and West, this challenge could be taken as an opportunity to fundamentally rethink the basis of the law and its role in society and civilization. To overcome the deficiencies in the theory and practice of law in so-called ‘liberal democracies’ I will argue here that it will be necessary to revive and develop the philosophies of law associated with the ‘Radical Enlightenment’. This is the tradition of thought that identified freedom and liberty with ‘autonomy’; that is, people giving themselves their own laws rather than having laws imposed upon them. To revive this tradition it is necessary to entertain a far broader perspective on the place of law in society than has been customary among legal theorists. It is necessary to understand the emergence and evolution of law from the beginnings of civilization. From this much broader perspective it will be shown that to achieve autonomy, as Aristotle and his followers argued, law cannot be separated from the cultivation of the virtues. To overcome the failures of ‘liberal legalism’ in the modern world, however, it will be necessary to look beyond Aristotelian virtues to the virtues cultivated in Chinese civilization. Reviving the Radical Enlightenment, a new synthesis is emerging in legal philosophy based on process metaphysics, a tradition of philosophy that has always been concerned to fuse Western and Eastern traditions of thought. Overcoming the deficiencies in the theory and practice of ‘liberal legalism’ to address the global ecological crisis while providing China with a framework for its legal system, is part of the process of creating an ecological civilization.

Analysis on Service Engineering Innovation of Tourism Based on Process Metaphysics

The travel service quality means that the tourist enterprise can meet visitor's level of enjoying tourist service. The quality of travel service is essential for the development of tourist industry. It is an important decisive factor of the visitor's travel destination. Therefore, carrying out tourist service engineering innovation, improving travel service engineering is very elasticity to the development of tourist industry. This article uses process metaphysics to analyze tourist service engineering innovation process in order to promote the further development of tourist industry.

Lonergan and Process Philosophy

Lonergan and Process Philosophy

Some Consequences (and Enablings) of Process Metaphysics

The interactivist model has explored a number of consequences of process metaphysics. These include reversals of some fundamental metaphysical assumptions dominant since the ancient Greeks, and multiple further consequences throughout the metaphysics of the world, minds, and persons. This article surveys some of these consequences, ranging from issues regarding entities and supervenience to the emergence of normative phenomena such as representation, rationality, persons, and ethics.

Epistemic Objects as Interactive Loci

Contemporary process metaphysics has achieved a number of important results, most significantly in accounting for emergence, a problem on which substance metaphysics has foundered since Plato. It also faces trenchant problems of its own, among them the related problems of boundaries and individuation. Historically, the quest for ontology may thus have been largely responsible for the persistence of substance metaphysics. But as Plato was well aware, an ontology of substantial things raises serious, perhaps insurmountable problems for any account of our epistemic access to such things. Physical things are subject to change, and as such, they are poor objects of knowledge—if knowledge is to be more reliable than mere opinion. There is a reading of Plato’s Theaetetus on which knowledge may be understood as a relation between an epistemic subject and a logos, where logoi are intrinsically dialectical, and where dialectic is a kind of intersubjective activity. Insofar as this epistemology may be attributed to Plato, the project of this paper is Platonic in spirit. It is also, in a sense, Kantian, in that it divorces ontology from the search for things-in-themselves, redirecting our attention from things to objects: epistemic objects. Such objects can be understood, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty proposed, as shared by multiple subjects by virtue of their participation in an intersubjective world, constituted by what Shaun Gallagher calls “participatory sense-making.” On an epistemology constructed in this way, the fact that both epistemic objects and their subject are mutable is no obstacle to knowledge. Far-from-equilibrium systems are forever mutable; at thermodynamic equilibrium, there would be neither subject, nor object. Epistemic objects, on this picture, are metastable loci of interactive potential.

Zhu Xi`s Thought and Yangming`s Thought Compared with the Process Philosophy

Zhu Xi`s Thought and Yangming`s Thought Compared with the Process Philosophy

Process Philosophy: History and Contemporaneity (in Bulgarian)

Process Philosophy: History and Contemporaneity (in Bulgarian)

Toward a Dynamic, Relational Judaism

Toward a Dynamic, Relational Judaism Sandra B. Lubarsky (bio) In evaluating Process Thought as "a speculative philosophy worthy of our engagement," Rabbi Artson joins a cadre of Jewish thinkers who, over the last several generations, have found process philosophy to be a sound philosophical framework on which to construct modern Jewish thought.1 Artson beautifully draws out the vibrant possibilities that such engagement might yield. "God is found in the steady relational love that invites creation into diverse becoming" (Artson, p. 22 above)—in one elegant brushstroke, Artson illustrates his main theme: that in Process Theology Judaism can find affirmation of its central theological intuitions and a way to coordinate them with important cosmological insights. Artson is drawn to those aspects of Process Philosophy that redress the influence of Greek philosophy on the development of Jewish thought and he makes a cogent case for moving beyond the Greek philosophical and theological limitations once accepted by the great Jewish medievalists. To speak of God as involved in "relational love" and "diverse becoming" depends on this. So, too, does the effort to speak meaningfully of covenant. What Artson makes clear is that the theological integrity of Judaism as a covenantal tradition requires a reconsideration of the dominant model of divine power. The notion of omnipotence destroys relationality and leads directly to the problem of evil. It thus makes covenantal theology an untenable proposition, except for those who can sustain their convictions in the face of unresolved paradox. Here is the heart of the matter: in the Jewish tradition, it is God's love that arouses loyalty and faithfulness, not God's [End Page 58] power. Both the notions of divine omnipotence and divine impassibility severely undercut any meaningful talk about covenant, as covenant requires freedom, power, and care on the part of both partners, asymmetrical though the relationship may be. One of the principle reasons why Process Theology is of such value to Jewish thought is because it carefully deconstructs the notion of omnipotence and equally carefully constructs the notion of divine concern. Importantly, Artson argues that the idea of an omnipotent god is unbiblical and untalmudic. In those sources, God is incomprehensibly powerful but not all-powerful. Other creatures, particularly human beings, are treated as having what Process Philosophy considers the threefold powers of being: to act on others (including God); to be responsive to others (including God); and to be self-creating. Indeed, the drama of the Hebrew Bible is the suspense and uncertainty over whether the Israelites will be appropriately responsive to God's overtures. Up to and including the moment of matan torah, the narrative is thick with anticipation. Will the Israelites accept the Torah? Will they realize what they have been given? Will they reorient their lives with God at the center? God is mighty, but nonetheless vulnerable to the small powers that animate individual lives. The significance of this can hardly be overstated. Though God is able to act supernaturally—parting waters, bringing plagues, supplying manna, etc.—in relationship to human beings, God's supernatural powers neither include nor necessitate omnipotence. God is not the singular cause of human events, but awaits the decisions of the individual, made in relation to but not compelled by God. This is not to say that people don't fear God's response to their decisions; after all, God's power so exceeds that of any other being that it can be felt as overwhelming. (Process theologian David Griffin uses the language "most powerful" to describe God.) But this emotional reaction itself stands as evidence of the human power to be responsive; being overwhelmed is a response given by an active subject. Responsiveness requires a decision to be open to God's presence and to engage with it. It is not the same as being compelled—and that is a difference that makes great theological difference. In the case of Judaism, it is the ontological ground for covenantal partnership. With Hans Jonas, process thinkers maintain that omnipotence is a logical error. As a relational term, power requires two or more subjects, each [End Page 59] with some degree of power; if omnipotence is a relationship of something to nothing, then...

Focusing on Existence: Five Facets of an Experiential—Existential Model / Auf die Existenz fokussieren: Fünf Facetten eines experienziell-existenzialistischen Modells / Enfocarse en la existencia: Cinco facetas de un modelo experiencial-existencial / Focusing sur l'existence: Cinq aspects d'un modèle expérientiel-existentiel / Focusing e existência: Cinco facetas de um modelo experiencial-existencial /

This paper presents basic features of a model that is emerging as a specific form of focusing-oriented therapy (FOT). This experiential—existential model of FOT results from the application of Eugene Gendlin's philosophy of implicit process to the therapeutic practices of the British school of existential analysis. The model emphasizes the contributions of Gendlin's philosophical thought, including but not primarily based upon the practice of focusing, while also incorporating the ethos of existential—phenomenological practice as it has emerged over the past 25 years in the United Kingdom. The subsequent preliminary model illustrates how Gendlin's influence has expanded beyond its original association with person-centered theory, adding a greater diversity to the ways that focusing is incorporated into the therapeutic setting.

Introduction to the Proceedings Issue of The Pluralist 5.3 Fall 2010

Introduction to the Proceedings Issue of The Pluralist 5.3 Fall 2010 Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley, President, California State University Outstanding Professor of Philosophy On behalf of the society for the Advancement of American Philosophy and with pride and pleasure, I offer to the readers of the journal a selection of papers presented at the 37th meeting of the society, sponsored by the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and Queens University of Charlotte and held in Charlotte, North Carolina, on March 11-13, 2010. This Proceedings Issue represents the first of such issues to be published in The Pluralist, which is now the official journal of our society. The Pluralist and the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy share a similar mission, namely to focus on pluralism and inclusion in philosophical conversation of many different points of view. In carrying out this focus, our meetings not only explore the deep roots of America's philosophical history, bringing to fore the interpretation of human experience, the critiques of American society, and the emphasis on the intimacy between thought and action contained in the work of such figures as Emerson, Thoreau, Peirce, James, Royce, Dewey, Addams, and Dubois, but also seek conversation and interaction with contemporary problems and philosophical themes and with various philosophical movements and groups as well as with international colleagues and societies. Thus, this year, our meeting included sessions presented by the Cologne Constructivist Group, the Associazione Pragma (Italy), the Society for the Study of Process Philosophy, the Society for the Study of Africana Philosophy, the Santayana Society, and the Jane Collective. There was also a panel entitled "What Is American about American Philosophy?" which featured philosopher-colleagues from Japan, Finland, and Brazil. This Proceedings issue includes the Coss Dialogue lecture, which brings in a scholar from another discipline area, in this case, from history. The response papers to the lecture are also represented. Four papers were designated [End Page 1] prize papers, respectively, the Douglas Greenlee prize, the Illa and John Mellow prize, the Joseph L. Blau prize, and the Jane Addams prize. Finally, there is the Presidential Address given by James Campbell, Professor of Philosophy, the University of Toledo and SAAP President 2008-2010. The Coss lecturer this year was Donna R. Gabaccia, Fesler-Lampert Chair in Public Humanities and Director of the Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota. Her article "Nations of Immigrants: Do Words Matter?" explores the question "What does it mean for a nation to call itself 'a nation of immigrants'?" This paper brings to light the fact that the United States alone makes this claim, though other nations surpass the United States in the number of immigrants who have come to their counties. This leads Dr. Gabaccia to an analysis of key phrases such as "immigrant," "emigrant," and "nation of immigrants," to discover what these central and evocative terms reveal about the society and cultures that use them. Gabaccia traces the history of these phrases as used in the United States and several other nations and concludes that "Even if 'nation of immigrants' serves to hide a long history of American restriction and exclusion, . . . it nevertheless also asserts the importance of celebrating inclusion." There were three respondents to Dr. Gabaccia's lecture. Marilyn Fischer, University of Dayton, titled her response "Keywords: What's an Advocate to Do with the Words She's Given?" Fischer gives some examples of how keywords led her to new insights about classic texts, and then discusses how Grace Abbott and Jane Addams talked about and advocated for immigrants. She asserts: "When the words the culture gave them carried messages of denigration, restriction, and exclusion, they found strategies to subvert these messages." Jose Jorge Mendoza, in his response to the Coss paper, focuses on differing ways human population movements figure in nation building. He argues that immigration is an important topic for philosophical analysis and discussion because it is an issue that "lies at the heart of the intersection between political philosophy and philosophy of race—an intersection that shows, more than anywhere else and in particular the debate surrounding the use of the word illegal. Celia Bardwell-Jones, Towson University, in her response, explores the politics...

Something new under the Sun: forty years of philosophy of religion, with a special look at process philosophy

Looking back over the last 40 years of work in the philosophy of religion provides a fascinating vantage point from which to assess the state of the discipline today. I describe central features of American philosophy of religion in 1970 and reconstruct the last 40 years as a progression through four main stages. This analysis offers an overarching framework from which to examine the major contributions and debates of process philosophy of religion during the same period. The major thinkers, topics, positions, and controversies are presented, analyzed, and critiqued. In the concluding section I offer a critical appraisal of the state of the field today based on the results of these historical analyses.

Ecological world view in the A. N. Whitehead' Philosophy of Organism and the teaching-learning methods in moral subject

Ecological world view in the A. N. Whitehead' Philosophy of Organism and the teaching-learning methods in moral subject

The Social Self of Whitehead’s Organic Philosophy

Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy has commonly become known as process philosophy. Whitehead himself regarded his philosophy as the philosophy of organism. His organic philosophy is understood through various types of process that occur in the becoming of actual organic entities in relationship with one another. Whitehead’s conception of the self is one that provides an alternative foundation for psychology, helps to make sense of personal identity over time amidst a series of changing expe...

Rebecca West and the Meaning of Exile

Rebecca West was a protean artist (author of, among other works, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon [1941]), a leading public intellectual, and a visionary commentator on the twentieth century. This paper shows the connection between her major philosophical, spiritual, and political ideas and her attitude towards exile. Following a brief historical overview of the main kinds of responses to the state of exile, from Ovid's laments to modernist celebrations, I document Rebecca West's fear of exile, so powerful that it could override even her dominant philosophy of process, her revisionist thinking, and her love of metaphor. Twentieth-century artists and thinkers tended to associated the state of exile with heightened artistic creativity, linking it with epistemological "privilege" (Simmel), or seeing it as instrumental to self-invention (Olsson). For West these ideas were not acceptable. Her patriotism, determinism, existentialism, and essentialism combined with her encounters with refugees during the 1940s and the 1950s to bring about a powerful conviction regarding the misery of exile, one that challenged other parts of her own belief system.

Evolutionary aesthetics: rethinking the role of function in art and design

In the first half of the twentieth century there was a remarkable convergence of art and design in De Stijl, Constructivism and the Bauhaus. But in the second half of the twentieth century fine art relinquished its liaison with design due to the influence of Dada and Surrealism's postromantic antagonism to practical-functionalism. Dada and Surrealism and postmodern fine art are characterized by a critique of the dominant social discourse of functionalism and the demand for a sublime poetics to be brought into everyday life. This article argues that the apparent antipathy between postmodern fine art and design can be ameliorated if we critically analyse interpretations of evolutionary theory by postromantic philosophers such as Nietzsche, Bergson, and Deleuze and Guattari. When Bergson notes that practical-functional reasoning was created by evolution he reveals a flaw in the pursuit of an aesthetics that is totally opposed to commonsense and practical-functionalism. And when we turn to Deleuze and Guattari we find another valuable concept in the form of their notion of the machinic, which assists further in reconciling the postromantic emphasis on the sublime with the practicality of mechanism. Moreover, Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the machinic is informed by chaos theory, which allows further elaboration in terms of complexity theory. Complexity theory can be understood as a process philosophy that has no need to figure the sublime in terms of a mysterious force of nature because the mystery is located within complex interactions among a manifold of components, what one might refer to as a cosmic, machinic, combinatoire that arises out of what Christopher Langton has called the edge of chaos. This makes it possible to replace the emphasis on desire as the fundamental force of nature evident in Nietzsche, Bergson, Deleuze and Guattari with a complexity-theoretical concept of a cosmicmachinic combinatoire. It is then possible to formulate a machinic, evolutionary aesthetics that can reconcile the postromantic demand for sublimity with the demand for practical-functionalism that lies at the heart of the discipline of design. In place of the modernist machine aesthetic that informed De Stijl, Constructivism and the Bauhaus we would have a postmodernist machinic aesthetic.

All Causality Occurs in a Present: G.H. Mead’s Proposal to Process Philosophy

Abstract G.H. Mead and A.N. Whitehead agree that all causation occurs in a present, that the self is social, and that philosophical description of the new physics of relativity and quantum mechanics is a complicated task. I explore this complexity in relation to the knowledge of events unable to be observed here and now, especiallypast historical events. The integration of the two philosophers’ views is shown in reference to Whitehead’s criteria of respect for facts and coherence. By reference to the work of Palmyre Oomen I show the inconsistency of Whitehead’s treatment of the prehensibility of God’s consequent nature with his claim that God is not an exception to the metaphysical principles. The integration of Mead’s and Whitehead’s views permits plausible talk about past, present, and future consisent with our scientific knowledge.

“Trusting in the ‘Efficacy of Beauty’

Although debates over carbon taxes and trading schemes, over carbon offsets and compact fluorescents are important, our efforts to address the environmental challenges that we face will fall short unless and until we also set about the difficult work of reconceiving who we are and how we are related to our processive cosmos. What is needed, I argue, are new ways of thinking and acting grounded in new ways of understanding ourselves and our relationship to the world, ways of understanding that recognize our fundamental interdependence and interconnection with everyone and everything in the cosmos, ways of understanding that recognize the intrinsic beauty and value of every form of existence. What is needed, I suggest, is a moral philosophy grounded in Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy of organism. It is the primary aim of this essay to defend the value of a moral philosophy inspired by Whitehead's organic, beauty-centered conception of reality.