Whitehead's Metaphysics Research Articles

Whitehead's metaphysics of creativity

Whitehead's metaphysics of creativity

Critical individualism: Whitehead's metaphysics and critique of liberalism

Whitehead's metaphysics contains an accurate portrayal of concrete human existence - one which can serve as a ground for criticizing the abstractions into which liberalism has fallen. His critical individualism, his insistence both on the individual as the seat of all value and on our essential connectedness to one another in modern society, is a call for liberalism to restore concrete meaning to its fundamental notions of individuality and freedom. However, his suggestions that the core values of liberalism can be actualized if we but reaffirm Plato's ancient equation of knowledge with virtue rests on an optimism that is difficult to sustain apart from a compensatory metaphysical dogma. We can appropriate Whitehead's criticism of liberalism, but if we can no longer convince ourselves of a metaphysical vision that supports faith in Plato's equation, we must look elsewhere for suggestions as to how liberalism can be revitalized.

Metaphysics and the vision of health

Whitehead's philosophy of organism provides the most comprehensive and adequate basis for the transformation of contemporary health care. In contrast to the reductionist and fragmentary medical models supported by Cartesian dualism, materialism, and idealism, Whitehead's metaphysics serves as the foundation for a holistic health care system, inclusive of the dimensions of spirituality, emotions, physical existence, and environment as they relate to health and illness. Whitehead's understanding of the relationship of mind and body and the role of the divine in the creative process encourages the inclusion of pastoral care, imaging, and meditation in responding to illness.

Book Reviews

Book Reviews Get access The Emergence of Whitehead's Metaphysics, 1925–29. By Lewis S. Ford. State University of New York Press, 1984. 351 pages. $39.50. Jack R. Sibley Jack R. Sibley Texas Woman's University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume LV, Issue 1, Spring 1987, Pages 148–149, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/LV.1.148 Published: 01 March 1987

The Emergence of Whitehead's Metaphysics. 1925-1929 (review)

The Emergence of Whitehead's Metaphysics. 1925-1929 (review)

Perspective in Whitehead's Metaphysics. By Stephen David Ross

Perspective in Whitehead's Metaphysics. By Stephen David Ross

Life After Death in Whitehead's Metaphysics

What life lies beyond the death of a human person according to the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead? How does objective immortality, the stubborn fact in the universe, the resulting satisfaction of an actual occasion, relate to the possibility of personal immortality? If personal immortality is possible, what are its characteristics? In Whitehead's metaphysics, a viable possibility of personal immortality exists within the context of two notions: the valuation enacted by an actual occasion, and the way valuation of a temporal occasion has ongoing importance for God in God's nontemporality. Can what perishes in the concrescence, the subjective immediacy of the occasion, be saved from total elimination from the process universe? If so, a synthesis whereby both the subjective immediacy and the objective immortality of an occasion persists in God's prehension of the temporal world is possible in the intersection of God's non-temporality and the temporality of the world.

Whitehead, Categories, and the Completion of the Copernican Revolution

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

The Epochal Nature of Process in Whitehead's Metaphysics.

The Epochal Nature of Process in Whitehead's Metaphysics.

Religion and Solitariness

Religion is what individual does with his own A. N. Whitehead ventured this description of in his Lowell Lectures of 1926,2 and since that time it has been frequently quoted, usually disparaged, and seldom understood in anything like way Whitehead intended. I propose in what follows to interpret meaning of this statement in some depth, trying to give it its proper setting within Whitehead's metaphysics and his theory of and to show that it is neither as one-sided, sentimental, or vacuous as it might appear to be on casual encounter. The description is not immune from criticism, and I shall try to bring out some of its weaknesses, but my main intent shall be to present its meaning as fully and sympathetically as possible. While social side of is important for Whitehead, it is not primary. The essence of is to be discovered, not in public dogmas, practices, or institutions, but in confrontation with the awful ultimate fact, which is human being, consciously alone with itself, for its own sake (RM 16). And although had its historical origins in collectivist rituals, emotions, and beliefs, these served merely as springboard for emergence of in its final nature as what man does with his own solitariness. We can best get at some of Whitehead's reasons for coming to this conclusion by contrasting communal religion, as he conceives it, with which grows out of solitariness. He calls latter purified religion or rational religion,

Whitehead's Metaphysics: A Critical Examination (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 99 Whitehead's Metaphysics: A Critical Examination. By Edward Pols. (Carbondale: Southern 111. Univ. Press, 1967. Pp. v-ix+195. $6.50) Edward Pols's book is a worthy addition to Whitehead scholarship despite my disagreement with his interpretation of crucial parts of Process and Reality. It was a delight to me to dip into his book and find myself carried beyond Whitehead into a penetrating analysis of the concept of freedom ingredient in Process and Reality. In this respect, the title of the book is a little misleading, since Pols's critical examination concerns Whitehead's concept of freedom . He ferrets this out of the text with great care, which leads him into some of the crucial doctrines of Process and Reality. He reads Whitehead with sympathy and understanding , and students will benefit from his analysis. The basic question of the analysis is to what degree Whitehead's metaphysics allows a genuine place to freedom. Clearly Whitehead intended to do so. Some of the crucial passages bearing on this question are: Categorical Obligation IX, which asserts, "the concrescence of each individual actual entity is internally determined and is externally free" (PR 41); "whatever is determinable is determined, but that there is always a remainder for the decision of the subject-superject of that concrescence" (PR 41); and "however far the sphere of efficient causation be pushed in the determination of components of a concrescence.., beyond the deterruination of these components, there always remains the final reaction of the self-creative unity of the universe" (PR 75). Pols quite properly, in dealing with this question, gives a wider sense to freedom, what he calls the "factor of freedom," including: "a) indetermination; b) as a correlate of indetermination, novelty, which, reflecting perhaps an optimistic bias, is sometimes identified with creative advance; c) self-causation (or self-creation) in the sense of an aim at a certain 'subjective intensity' of feeling" (p. 21). It is important, I think, at the outset to remind ourselves that creativity, novelty indetermination, origination, and chance need not be the same as freedom. It is a common error to slip from one to the other, and some metaphysical systems depend on moving from one to the other. I believe that Whitehead's Category of Creativity includes freedom in his special sense, but we could have novel creative origination without freedom. Freedom is almost too vague or ambiguous to be of much use to a metaphysician, and Whitehead wisely avoids its frequent use. Pols argues that Whitehead cannot give a proper place to freedom in his system. First, the internal constitution of an actual entity is not free because it is determined by the subjective aim of that actual entity and the subjective aim is derived from a hybrid physical feeling of God's primordial nature, a feeling that occurs in the initial phase of concrescence. Second, the phases of concrescence of an actual entity generate an incompatibility between the hybrid physical feeling of God, providing the subjective aim in the initial phase and the subjective aim as a feeling of a proposition, which could only occur in a late phase of concrescence. Third, also stemming from the phases of concrescence, the internal selfcausation of an actual entity, which brings about modification of the subjective aim, is the result of determinate components or of creativity. But creativity contributes no active power, according to Pols, and the internal constitution of an actual entity is completely governed by a network of internal relations among eternal objects playing various roles, leaving no room for the decision of subject-superject in its final creative reaction which closes concrescence. Fifth, eternal objects are the ultimate ontological elements in Whitehead's system despite Whitehead's repeated claim that actual entities are fundamental (pp. 98-99, 141-142, 157-158, 193-195). Weaving in and out of the entire fabric of Process and Reality, Pols carefully collects his passages to give the evidence for these criticisms. The marshalling of evidence is carried out with due caution, always allowing for subtle differences of meaning, indicating a close reading of the text. This analysis makes the book worth reading regardiess of whether one agrees with...

Whitehead's Metaphysics: A Reply to A. H. Johnson

Whitehead's Metaphysics: A Reply to A. H. Johnson

Whitehead's Metaphysics: A Critical Examination of Process and Reality.

Whitehead's Metaphysics: A Critical Examination of Process and Reality.

Whitehead's Metaphysics: A Critical Examination of Process and Reality. By Edward Pols. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, 1967, pp. v-ix, 3–2O5.

Whitehead's Metaphysics: A Critical Examination of Process and Reality. By Edward Pols. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, 1967, pp. v-ix, 3–2O5.

Whitehead and Private-Interest Theories

ALTHOUGH Whitehead did not write a systematic ethics, I nonetheless believe that a philosophically tenable ethics can be derived from certain of his metaphysical and religious doctrines. There has been relatively little scholarly attention given to such a project-affirmative or otherwise. Of the few relevant articles that have appeared, several suggest that ethics derived from Whitehead's doctrines would be a private-interest theory.1 Although value categories are recognized as central to Whitehead's metaphysics, the critics note, and rightly so, that the categories are aesthetic and contain no specifically ethical values. Concluding further that in Whitehead's philosophy ethical categories would therefore be reduced to categories of aesthetics, the critics judge that the imputation of a private-interest theory to Whitehead is legitimate. I will first argue that this imputation is a mistake and attempt to uncover its possible origins; finally I will construct the foundation of a more plausible Whiteheadian ethics, a task deserving of serious and detailed attention. Although this estimation of importance cannot be fully defended here, it is this conviction rather than the demands of the merely preliminary polemic that has motivated the present study. As a first contention I briefly note that it is not argument in favor of the position of the alleged private-interest theory proponents to indicate that Whitehead did not specify any values peculiar to ethics or, indeed, write ethical theory. Ethical values would be a special case of generic values. And Whitehead, as is well known, was philosophically interested in the analysis of generic principles that apply to all actualities.2 Consequently he would not find it of initial importance to discuss specifically ethical values, for clearly this would require a separate categoreal analysis of human conduct. It would be sophistical, however, for the critics to argue that not having intention implies that the intention could not be fulfilled. Fortunately or unfortunately, intentions and abilities are linked with no exhaustive reciprocity in human activities. The major part of the dispute must confront the opposing interpretations on the substantive rather than the methodological level by considering the alleged basis of their position in Whitehead's metaphysical principles. These critics take the theory of feelings, meant by Whitehead to apply to, and be generically descriptive of, all actuality, to be of central relevance. The suspect doctrine is Whitehead's claim that all feelings are rooted in aesthetic experience: an actual fact is a -fact of aesthetic experience. All aesthetic experience is feeling arising out of the realization of contrast under identity (PR, p. 427). A feeling is a component in the concrescence of every actual entity, productive of the process toward completed unity, the 'satisfaction' in Whitehead's particular meaning of that term. In short, feelings aiming at satisfaction contribute to the generic and fundamental activity of every actual entity. The primary characteristic of the generic valuation is its determination by what individual takes to be important in actualizing its subjective aim. Valuation is dependent upon the individual's interest. In describing this generic experience, Whitehead uses various value concepts, for

REVIEW

Book reviewed in this article:Whitehead's Metaphysics: An Introductory Exposition. By Ivor Leclerc.The Philosophy of Whitehead: By W. Mays.An Interpretation of Whitehead's Metaphysics: By William A. Christian.Understanding Whitehead. By Victor Lowe.

Whitehead's Philosophy and a Christian Doctrine of Man

GOOD deal has been written in the last few decades on Whitehead's doctrine of God, and more has been written that shows its influence. One thinks of Christian, Hartshorne, Temple, and Ferr6. However, thus far Whitehead's doctrine of man has received little attention. Indeed, even admirers of Whitehead's metaphysics are likely to affirm that in the area of the understanding of man he has little to offer.

An Interpretation of Whitehead's Metaphysics.

An Interpretation of Whitehead's Metaphysics.

An Interpretation of Whitehead's Metaphysics.

An Interpretation of Whitehead's Metaphysics.

An Interpretation of Whitehead's Metaphysics.

An Interpretation of Whitehead's Metaphysics.