Whitehead's Philosophy Research Articles

LUST FOR LIFE: PLEASURE UNDER THE REALITY PRINCIPLE AND GROWTH IN EROS

ABSTRACT Drawing on ideas from the psychoanalytic thought of Bion and the philosophy of Whitehead the paper explores the difference between‘prehended lust’and perverse sexuality. Prehended lust is regarded as life-enhancing whereas in perverse sexuality excitement is generated to disencumber the individual of anxiety. This view is illustrated by clinical material and by a more lengthy discussion of the recent British film The Principles of Lust, directed by Penny Woolcock.

History and Historiography in Process

Although in philosophical dictionaries and the like, Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) is often praised as one of the most original thinkers of the twentieth century, his work has been virtually ignored. The articles and books that are concerned with Whitehead's philosophy, with the exception of the work of Dale H. Porter, hardly ever mention the relevance that it has for the philosophy of history and for historiography. I intend to demonstrate this relevance in this article. For this purpose, I will explore three themes: 1) the self-evidence of certain kinds of forgetting by historians; 2) the fallacy of the view that the occurrence of these kinds of forgetting in historiography must necessarily lead to truth-relativism; and 3) continuity in history, which persists even when certain ruptures occur. My treatment of these themes will in part be a response to Frank Ankersmit, who took up some of them from a different perspective in the October issue of History and Theory in 2001.

God, Freedom, and Evil: Perspectives from Religion and Science

This paper develops analogies concerning the evolution of dissipative structures in nonequilibrium thermodynamics to interpret irrational human behavior in which one finds a lack of correspondence between the invested means and the consequences observed. In an attempt to positively explain the process of cooperation between the free human person and interacting God, I use philosophical categories of Whitehead's process philosophy in an aesthetic model that opposes composition and performance in a musical symphony. Certainly, the essence of human freedom can be expressed in neither thermodynamical nor aesthetic terms. The models proposed can, however, facilitate our understanding of the mutual relations between God's action in the world and the drama of human free choice of moral evil.

TOO-BLUE: COLOUR-PATCH FOR AN EXPANDED EMPIRICISM

This essay is in part a response to the rhetoric of the ‘two cultures’ revived by the ‘science wars’ conducted in recent years through the mass media against humanities disciplines, especially ‘post-modern’ art, cultural studies, and non-analytic philosophy. The essay focuses in greatest detail on the relation between science and philosophy, arguing that they are in fact complementary activities effectively partaking of the same reality. Although knowledge practices in the humanities draw from their partaking radically different orders of result from those of science (and from each other), they have claim to an effective connection to a shared reality. Humanities disciplines, and even ‘informal’ or ‘traditional’ knowledge practices, can be argued to be realist, empirical enterprises generating modes of validity specific to their manner of result – provided that the definition of empirical reality is generously broadened. An ‘expanded’ empiricism is a ‘radical’ empiricism in William James's sense of taking relations to be as real and as fundamentally given to experience as discrete objects or sense-data. Recognizing the reality of relation nudges empiricism in the direction of process philosophy. The essay reviews concepts of cause and discovery, nature and culture, affect and virtuality, truth and constructedness, taking the experience of colour as a prime example. It combines elements of James's radical empiricism with Whitehead's process philosophy with the poststructuralism of Deleuze and Guattari with chaos and complexity theory. The resulting perspective converges with Isabelle Stengers' vision of a non-judgemental political ecology of knowledge. An expansive ethics of relationality, of mutual differential belonging, is the natural correlate of an expanded culture of empiricism.

Whitehead's Contribution to Ecological Thought: Some Unrealized Possibilities

The organizers of this conference have given me a difficult task: that of finding heretofore unfound implications of Whitehead's philosophy for environmental thought. The task is not difficult because implications of Whitehead's philosophy for environmental thought are hard to find. They are easy to find. The problem is that so many people have found them that finding something new to say is not easy.

Induction and Cantor's Second Principle of Generation

. . if our critics' philosophy of logic entails that induction cannot be valid, validity of induction equally entails that their philosophy of logic is false. Donald Williams, The Ground of Induction The problem of induction has been summarized succinctly by Max Black as: Why, if at all, is it reasonable to accept conclusions of certain inductive arguments as true-or at least probably true? (Black, 1967, 170). It goes without saying that problem of induction is one of big philosophical problems; equally, it goes without saying that there is little consensus among philosophers as to how problem may be solved, or even as to minutiae of problem. But in my view, a great number of arguments have one thing in common: they draw implicitly on a limited philosophical principle of counting. This is principle termed by Georg Cantor, in his Mannigfaltigkeitslehre of 1883, as the first principle of In present essay, however, I shall be arguing that problem of induction can be solved only by means of taking into account considerations pertaining to Cantor's second principle of generation. My strategy will be, firstly, to look at some key arguments associated with problem of induction; secondly, to show that all of these arguments have been framed with first principle of generation implicitly in mind; and, thirdly, to argue that if a more embracing notion of counting-the second principle of generation-is invoked, problem of induction can be seen largely to disappear. One of my conclusions will be that it is Whitehead's philosophy of induction that is closest to providing a solution to problem of induction, but that Whitehead lacks necessary precision of Cantor's system. The Problem of Induction The philosophical ideas of David Hume provide an obvious starting point for any treatment of problem of induction. The vastness of Hume scholarship, however, makes it impractical for me here to address question of extent to Hume's own writing can be said to deal adequately with problem. Nevertheless, following paraphrase of Hume's position is useful: Hume's problem can be put into modem dress without restriction to causal inference, as follows: An inductive inference from an observed association of attributes (A^sub n^-B^sub n^ can justify inference to another case (A^sub n^+ 1-B^sub n^+1) or inference to corresponding generalization (All A are B ) only if association is somehow known to be lawlike, not merely accidental. Yet how can this be known in primary inductions that do not themselves rest upon assumed truth of other laws? Certainly not by immediate experience, nor a priori, nor, without begging question, by appeal to induction. (Black, 1967, 171). There have, of course, been many replies to Hume. Although it may appear trivial, what I wish to emphasize with regard to passage just quoted is fact that a particular problem arises when attempt is made to pass from knowledge of individual cases to knowledge of all such cases. That is, in some sense number-and, by extension, counting or enumeration-seems crucially involved in problem.1 Could it be, indeed, that, so far as induction is concerned, simple enumeration is irrelevant? John Maynard Keynes, in his A Treatise on Probability, is one who feels that success of induction does not depend wholly on enumeration, that is, number of confirming instances: It has often been thought that essence of inductive argument lies in multiplication of instances. Where is that process of reasoning, Hume inquired, which from one draws a conclusion, so different from that it infers from a hundred instances, that are no way different from that single instance I repeat that by emphasizing number of instances Hume obscured real object of method. If it were strictly true that hundred instances are no way different from single instance, Hume would be right to wonder in what manner they can strengthen argument. …

Whitehead and Weil's Reading of Kant in Moral Philosophy

Whitehead and Weil have both written books which can be interpreted as helping us to better understand Kant's moral philosophy. This paper will discuss this question in the light of considering the relationships in Whitehead's philosophy between cosmological and ethical law and the question of whether or not Kantian morality is thinkable in terms of Whitehead's understanding of ethical law. It will then consider whether Weil's views in Logique de la Philosophie would be helpful in revisiting the concept of moral education. The conclusion of the paper is that the teaching of citizenship is the most urgent task which any and every educator faces today since the ideals of civilization which promote morality cannot be realized without the power of the state.

Precision and Craft in Whitehead's Educational Philosophy

In this paper, the intimate relationship between experience and learning in the cycle of precision is elaborated. I believe this relationship is the foundation of Whitehead's account of the pedagogical relationship, which has intrinsic value, because this understanding is valuable in itself, and is particularly valuable for me as an educator. Whitehead's view is most clearly exemplified in his account of technical education where aesthetic appreciation is its aim just as bodily feelings are its organic foundation.

Spirituality, Curriculum and Education

Spirituality is, of logical necessity, nonsense to the positivist and meaningless to the post‐modernist. The limitations of our Western rationality must be tackled. Curriculum is often assumed to be a synonym of Education and the spiritual is equated with content. This Wittgensteinian “bewitchment of language” severely limits much attempted discussion. The spiritual is not irrational but much of it is non‐rational and it is important to acknowledge this. At root there is a metaphysical fault at the heart of our reasoning. Definitions act as conceptual controls but “the spirit bloweth where it listeth”. Description is more important than definition. Whitehead's philosophy of process offers a way out of our dilemma. It is time to re‐examine his contribution to educational thought through an exploration of the spiritual. This is a severely abridged version of the 1996 Hockerill Lecture delivered at King's College, London on 15th November 1996 under the title, “Spirituality in the Curriculum” and produced here with the permission of the sponsors. The full text may be obtained from The Secretary, The Hockerill Foundation, 51, Pole Barn Lane, Frinton‐on‐Sea, Essex, CO13 9NQ, U.K., price £2.50, cash with order.

Alfred North Whitehead's Informal Philosophy of Education

The objective of this article is to show that Whitehead had a very important philosophy of education both on the formal level. The consistency found is well worth noting. I researched many of Whitehead's major works for his formal views and Lucian Price's Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead. In my opinion Price's book is the best available for the purpose of getting Whitehead's candid informal view of education. The paper is divided into sections according to the particular subject matter. Since Whitehead describes education as the study of “life and all of its manifestations”. It is appropriate to cover some of these areas: the purpose of education, the role of science and speculation, education and civilization, and both the process of education and process education are reviewed. Whitehead's philosophy of education is sweeping in scope. In his philosophy we find the importance of experience, imagination, speculation, generalization, factual knowledge, specialization, relevance, intuition, novelty, curiosity, theory, practice, pleasure, harmony, freedom, discipline, technical and liberal education and unification. He, in fact, unifies all these seemingly different areas into a coherent philosophy of education.

Bridging western and First Nations thought: Balanced education in Whitehead's philosophy of organism and the sacred circle

The sacred circle offers a perspective for interpreting and theorizing about human development valuable in shaping the education of First Nations and non-First Nations students. For those of us in a western materialist culture who are interested in coming to understand what the sacred circle might offer, it is necessary to address assumptions in our own culture. This paper proceeds in four parts to facilitate such an understanding. Part One formulates the importance of a culturally self-critical approach to understanding education based in the sacred circle. Part Two presents the sacred circle as a pattern used to interpret meaning in First Nations education. Part Three examinesinterconnectedness through (a) whitehead's criticism of western scientific epistemology and his idea of education for balanced development, and (b) through the creator, mother earth and the Four Directions reflected in the sacred circle. Part Four interprets aholistic apprehension approach to education based in (a) Whitehead's notion's of intuition and imagination for balanced development from the sacred circle perspective, and (b) through the sacred circle in the vision quest ceremony.

Stubborn fact and creative advance: an introduction to the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead

Chapter 1 Introduction: Whitehead and His Philosophy of Organism Part 2 Part I: Human Experience and Actual Entities Chapter 3 Human Experience and Common Sense Chapter 4 The Theory of Concrescence: Initial Phase Chapter 5 Theory of Concrescence: Responsive and Integrative Phases Chapter 6 The Theory of Concrescence: The Supplemental Phases in Higher Grade Occasions Chapter 7 Societies and Grades of Actual Occasions Part 8 Part II: God and the World Chapter 9 The Primordial Nature of God: The Unity of Actuality Chapter 10 The Ultimacy of God Part 11 Part III: Whitehead and Christian Theology Chapter 12 The Usefulness of Whitehead's Philosophy for Christian Theology

Forms of concrescence: Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy and computer programming structures

Whitehead's affirmation of the processive nature of actual entities, in contrast to his affirmation of the primordial nature of mathematical and other eternal objects, introduced an aspect of incoherence into his philosophy. This book reinterprets his philosophy using a procedural understanding of mathematics that is best expressed in the algorithmic languages of computer programs.

Process Philosophy and Political Ideology: The Social and Political Thought of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 473 hauer explicitly rejected; the key, too, to Nietzsche's critique of the Kantian and Schopenhauerian understanding of beauty, which with its emphasis on disinterest had to divorce beauty from love, thus overturning an older understanding going back at least to Plato's Symposium. I must, however, agree with Young's "Epilogue": despite such attempts, in the end Nietzsche failed to overcome Schopenhauer's pessimism, failed to overcome that ill will against time he named "the spirit of revenge" and in which he located the deepest root of all alienation, a failure that led him, as it did so many aesthetes, to trade reality for illusion. KARSTEN HARRIES Yale University Randall C. Morris. ProcessPhilosophyand PoliticalIdeology:The Socialand PoliticalThought of Alfred North Whitehead and CharlesHartshorne. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991. Pp. xii + 289. $14.95. Morris notes that others (among whom he includes the author of this review) have attempted to discuss the ethical and political dimensions of process philosophy. He complains, however, that all previous attempts proved unsuccessful because each tacitly accepted the liberal democratic underpinnings of process metaphysics. Morris is especially critical of my attempts during the past decade to draw Kant and Hegel into the deliberations of process philosophers, on the grounds that such a historical contextualizing of process philosophy simply preserves the hidden ideological foundations and nuances of the original movement, unexposed and uncriticized. Morris himself is determined, by contrast, to deconstruct these hidden bourgeois-ideological biases in the metaphysical foundations of process philosophy. In order to accomplish this, however , he too turns to the historical background of both Whitehead's and Hartshorne's philosophy. Indeed, he characterizes his work as "at least on one level, a study in the history of ideas..." (1o). This appeal to history in the service of political exegesis proves quite bothersome. Morris pores at length over the voluminous writings of Whitehead and of Hartshorne in search of political pronoucements. He gathers these scattered and relatively unsystematic editorial comments together and declares that both of these prominent process philosophers were "liberals," since in these random opinions both philosophers appear to support the political goals of freedom, equality, and individual rights, and to believe (with some minor differences of emphasis) that such goals are most readily obtainable within the democratic capitalist state. Morris triumphantly declares that such endorsements--and Hartshorne's own stated opposition to Marxism--are no "happy coincidence" (211), but that these "political implications" of process metaphysics proceed directly as a result of the hidden ground of that metaphysics (and of the acculturation of its two distinguished proponents ) precisely in the ideology of modern liberalism that the metaphysics itself is ostensibly marshalled to support. Turning to political theology and to debates between 474 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 31:3 JULY I993 prominent Latin American liberation theologians and process theologian John B. Cobb, Jr., Morris finds for the liberationist plaintiffs (and against Cobb) that process theology is "generally blind to the ideology inherent within [its] philosophical tradition ," and that, in truth, process philosophy and theology constitute "one more 'religious accompaniment of free enterprise, liberal, capitalist democracy'" (2~ 1). The weight of these charges, however, is made to rest upon Morris's account of liberalism in Great Britain in the nineteenth century, and particularly upon his interpretation of the thought of T. H. Green. Morris provides some interesting commentary on that history and discusses the influence of Green and of the "new liberals" on Whitehead (and indirectly on Hartshorne). Ironically, however, he appears to miss the significance of his own account (e.g., 8o ff.) of the dynamic transformation of liberalism during this crucial period in its history. Green, for example, is much more enigmatic than Morris's account suggests. On the one hand, he appropriated large portions of Edmund Burke's thought approvingly , while, on the other, he read Kant in precisely the same fashion as did the young Hegel and the young Marx: subordinating the social contractarian aspects of "republicanism " to an organic and historically progressive conception of what Kant first termed "imperfect duties" (in lieu of what we, following Green, now term "positive rights") to end misery and suffering and to promote...

Whitehead and the New Liberals on Social Progress

Recently there have been a number of attempts, primarily among theologians, to ascertain the contribution which Whitehead's process philosophy might make to social and political theory.1 Unfortunately, when one examines this growing body of literature, one becomes aware that a serious study of Whitehead's own social and political thought has been largely neglected. This neglect is no doubt due in part to the fact that Whitehead never produced a systematic political theory. What explicit comments, analogies, and allusions he does offer are scattered throughout his writings making it less straightforward than it might otherwise be to determine his own political beliefs. I maintain that, while while undeniably difficult, such a determination is in fact necessary if process philosophers and theologians are to assess accurately Whitehead's potential contribution to social and political theory. Failure to undertake such a study and to allow oneself to be guided by its results when extrapolating socio-political ideas from his metaphysics has had negative consequences for process studies. It has led to a variety of inappropriate conclusions such as the claim that Whitehead's images of 'civilization' are more reflective of a liberal gentleman than they are of a serious application of his philosophy of organism to social theory,2 as well as to the location of Whitehead's contribution to political theory precisely in those areas where the new liberalism made its original contribution almost a century ago.3 Such conclusions are the direct result of the lack of awareness among process thinkers of Whitehead's political

A Whiteheadian approach to Bell's correlations

Certain properties of the Bell-type correlations and, in particular, the impossibility of using them to transmit signals faster than light, are investigated from the point of view of the conceptual structure of quantum mechanics and of Whitehead's process philosophy. The collapses of quantum states are shown to correspond to perspectives of different frames of reference on a Whiteheadian process of self-creation of actual entities. The analysis suggests a fundamental limitation on the capacity to describe the propagation of influences among the results of measurements at space-like separation. It is further shown that, if Whitehead's framework is modified in a specific way, it accounts very well for the apparent existence of superluminal influences, and for the impossibility of using them for superluminal communication.

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.

ON IAN HARBOUR'S ISSUES IN SCIENCE AND RELIGION

Abstract. Although Ian Barbour endorses process organicism in Issues in Science and Religion, his rhetoric against vitalism and dualism makes his discussion of life, mind, and the part‐whole relationship sound like relational emergentism and hence like a denial of process philosophy's nondualistic interactionism. Also his rhetoric against a God of the gaps seems to exclude the God‐shaped hole in Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy. A more consistent articulation of Whitehead's postmodern position would lead to greater adequacy and consistency on these issues, and perhaps also to a more radically postmodern view of science—a view which Whitehead himself only sometimes suggested.

Hemostatic regulation and Whitehead's philosophy of organism.

Biology as a scientific discipline has relied heavily upon advances in chemistry and physics. An inherent danger in this relationship is the reduction of living phenomena to physico-chemical terms. Whitehead's 'Philosophy of Organism' is utilized to examine current methodologies within biology and to evaluate their appropriateness for future research. Hemostatic regulation is employed to illustrate the applications of organistic concepts to biological research. It is concluded that understanding of living entities and their properties as well as possibly life itself will require synthesis of the many analytical elements as informational structures.

BOHM AND WHITEHEAD ON WHOLENESS, FREEDOM, CAUSALITY, AND TIME

Abstract. David Bohm's developing postmodern thought (combining precision and wholeness) is seen to contain two tendencies. One is a vision of “underlying wholeness,” in which all causation is vertical, and the implicate‐explicate relation is ubiquitous. This provides a possible solution to certain problems, but creates many others involving freedom, causation, and time. Second, many of Bohm's statements suggest that his deepest intuitions could be formulated without those problems in terms of the distinctions developed in Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy of “prehensive wholeness,” in which the ubiquity of creativity would require a more restricted use of the implicate‐explicate relation.