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special focus section: the harvard lectures of alfred north whitehead, 1925-1927: general metaphysical problems of science (hl2)
1. Process Studies: Volume > 52 > Issue: 2
Joseph Petek, Brian Henning Introduction
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2. Process Studies: Volume > 52 > Issue: 2
Matthew David Segall Standing Firm in the Flux: On Whitehead's Eternal Objects
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Alfred North Whitehead's first book as a professor of philosophy at Harvard University, Science and the Modern World, is not only a historical treatment of the rise and fall of scientific materialism. It also marks his turn to metaphysics in search of an alternative cosmological scheme that would replace matter in motion with organic process as that which is generic in Nature. Among the metaphysical innovations introduced in this book are the somewhat enigmatic "eternal objects." The publication of the first and second volumes of Whitehead's Harvard Lectures on the philosophical presuppositions (HL1) and general metaphysical problems (HL2) of science provides students of his corpus with an opportunity to catch the thinker in the act of creating his concepts. In searching through student notes for glimpses of what Whitehead really meant, I have kept in mind his admonition that "no thinker thinks twice" (PR 29). Whitehead never ceased philosophizing, and surely he intended for us to continue thinking with but beyond the letter of his ideas. In this spirit and in light of HL1 and HL2, this article seeks to elucidate the role of eternal objects as a category of existence in Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism, with the goal not simply of textual exegesis, but of showing how the meaning of the fifth category of existence (as he refers to eternal objects in PR) is exemplified in the gradual ingression of the idea in Whitehead's imagination. My aim is to sustain the effort at constructive thought he began, making his speculative hypothesis as explicit as possible so as to better prepare it for critical improvement (PR xiv).
3. Process Studies: Volume > 52 > Issue: 2
Daniel Bella, Milan Stürmer Whitehead's Ethics: Fill in the Blanks
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The recent publication of the stenographers transcript of Whitehead's guest lecture on "social ethics" has shed new light on the relation between his metaphysics and ethics. Instead of including ethics in his philosophy. Whitehead treats it as a distinct, specialized science that does not share in the universality of metaphysics. The present article argues that an analysis of his lecture shows that a nonindividualist Whiteheadian ethics is possible without rupturing the coherence of Whitehead's system or contradicting the ontological or subjectivist principle. As part of a larger transition in Whitehead's thinking during the years 1925-1927, he reformulates the notion of the environment as inheritance and is therefore able to pose the question of the endurance of values at the level of society, which is the purview of ethics. Reconstructing the metaphysical background may provide a "stimulus to the imagination" for ethical debates today, especially in the field of environmental ethics.
4. Process Studies: Volume > 52 > Issue: 2
Paul A. Bogaard From a Philosophy of Evolution to a Philosophy of Organism
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In this article, Whitehead's transition from a Philosophy of Evolution to a Philosophy of Organism is studied primarily on the basis of the evidence provided by the first two volumes of The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead, especially the second volume that deals with the period 1925—1927 and that is subtitled General Metaphysical Problems of Science.
5. Process Studies: Volume > 52 > Issue: 2
Ronny Desmet Whitehead's 1925-1927 View of Function and Time
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Whitehead's 1925-1927 Harvard lectures (HL2) are too rich in content to easily summarize. Consequently, I limit myself in the present article to giving an account pivoting around Whitehead's functional theory of reality and his epochal theory of time
6. Process Studies: Volume > 52 > Issue: 2
Alessia Giacone The Path to Understanding: Relation and Solidarity in Whitehead s Metaphysics
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In this article, I will respond to questions regarding the ontological status of relations by exploring Whitehead's pivotal notion of solidarity, especially focusing on the recently published Harvard lectures. Particularly, I shall investigate how solidarity become a metaphysical law in the development of Whitehead's thought, also exploiting other Whiteheadian works of the same period, such as Science and the Modern World and Religion in the Making. I will attempt to show that the comprehension of an immediate brute fact necessarily requires its metaphysical interpretation as an item in a world with some systematic relation to it. I will thus provide my interpretation on solidarity through a comparison with Hegel's notion of Wirklichkeit.
7. Process Studies: Volume > 52 > Issue: 2
Brian Claude Macallan Locating Freedom in Bergson's Time and Free Will
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The question of the nature of free will remains a perennial challenge for philosophy. The French philosopher Henri Bergson was one who sought to address this challenge. He argued that traditional conceptions of the free-will debate would not suffice. He suggested that both determinist and libertarian accounts fall foul of spatializing tendencies. Bergson's first major work, Time and Free Will, sought to ground his understanding of freedom, in contrast to traditional understandings, in the concept of duration. Bergson, however, actively resisted attempts to define clearly freedom, which he believed ultimately leads to a spatializing of freedom. By attending to Bergson's concept of duration in Time and Free Will, and how this concept relates to freedom, it becomes possible to articulate a positive conception of freedom. This becomes important when arguing for the validity of Bergsons ideas in the current climate. Thus, a positive conception of freedom for Bergson can be "defined" as "the creation of the new within the flow of duration." It is, however, not something that can be defined, but is something that can be located.
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8. Process Studies: Volume > 52 > Issue: 2
Adam C. Scarfe Lynn Sargent De Jonghe. Starting With Whitehead: Raising Children to Thrive in Treacherous Times
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9. Process Studies: Volume > 52 > Issue: 2
Donald Wayne Viney Patrick Todd. The Open Future: Why Future Contingents Are All False
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10. Process Studies: Volume > 52 > Issue: 2
John M. Sweeney Thomas Jay Oord. Pluriform Love: An Open and Relational Theology of Well-Being
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special focus section: the philosophy of organism and climate change
11. Process Studies: Volume > 52 > Issue: 1
Brian G. Henning Introduction
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12. Process Studies: Volume > 52 > Issue: 1
William Ilan Rubel "The Eye Altering Alters All": Optics, Haptics, and Ecological Modernity in Alfred North Whitehead and Romanticism
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In this article, it is claimed that the current climate emergency requires that we take seriously a "haptic" approach to nature as found in Alfred North Whitehead and the romantic poets (especially William Blake and William Wordsworth) in contrast to the "optic" approach that has dominated modern thinking.
13. Process Studies: Volume > 52 > Issue: 1
Thomas G. Hermans-Webster Cooking and Eating with Love: A Whiteheadian Theology of Meals for Planetary Well-Being
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This article pursues a Whiteheadian association of meals and cooking with an orienting concern for ecological well-being and planetary health. Process thought helps those who eat to recognize the real influences that our meals have upon the emerging world.
14. Process Studies: Volume > 52 > Issue: 1
Keith Robinson Whitehead, Sustainable Development, and Nonanthropocentrism
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In this article I want to put Whitehead to work in the context of the discourse of sustainable development. My argument will be that Whitehead offers a way of thinking about and doing metaphysics that challenges the logic of anthropocentrism that drives much of the thinking around sustainable development. First, I will introduce the idea of sustainable development and give a brief history. Second, I will give an archaeology of sustainable development by exploring one of its fault lines: the divide that separates the anthropocentric from the nonanthropocentric, the human from the nonhuman. I will give examples of each approach and argue that Whitehead provides a metaphysics that attempts to overcome the "bifurcation of nature" and gives us a nonanthropocentric opening onto the ethical that promises new ways to think and practice sustainable development.
15. Process Studies: Volume > 52 > Issue: 1
Juliet Bennett Static in Process: A Key to Applying Process Philosophy for Ecological Civilization
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This article provides a novel inroad to the field of process philosophy and its application. It does this by elucidating the relationship between two modes of thought—static and process thinking—as a key to cocreating ecological civilization. Static and process modes of thought are conceptualized in terms of five "basic orientations": abstract and context, closed and open, isolating and relational, passive and generative, one-dimensional and multidimensional. Inspired by the work of Alfred North Whitehead, Arran Gare, and Julie Nelson, these dynamic dualisms are resolved by nesting static perspectives within process-relational contexts. This article argues that "hegemonic static thinking" is guiding decision-making at root of global crises. While also avoiding "dualistic process thinking," "encompassing process thinking" that includes and transcends static thinking is posited as a mode of thought conducive to more ecological and community-oriented decision-making across multiple scales. This article establishes the philosophical consistency of this nested "static-process framework, "using it to show how process metaphysics underpins interlinking shifts in worldviews, politics, and economics for moving from industrial to ecological civilization.
16. Process Studies: Volume > 52 > Issue: 1
Julien Tempone-Wiltshire, Tra-Ill Dowie Bateson's Process Ontology for Psychological Practice
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The work of Gregory Bateson offers a metaphysical basis for a "process psychology, that is, a view of psychological practice and research guided by an ontology of becoming—identifying change, difference, and relationship as the basic elements of a foundational metaphysics. This article explores the relevance of Batesons recursive epistemology, his reconception of the Great Chain of Being, a first-principles approach to defining the nature of mind, and understandings of interaction and difference, pattern and symmetry, interpretation and context. Batesons philosophical contributions will be drawn into relationship with Wittgensteins philosophy of language as use, Melnyk's theory of causal levels of explanation, Korzybskis account of map and territory, the rejection of the heuristic rigidity of substantialist ontologies, and a cybernetics communication science-informed approach to contextual-bidirectionality of causality. We thereby arrive at an understanding of Batesons process psychology that, given its ecological-systemic nature, is explanatorily applicable across the mind sciences. This process psychology equips us to answer the question: What is mind? Not by explanatory appeal to substantial entities contained within mind, but instead by recourse to the contextually relevant patterns for understanding mind to a particular purpose. We have thereby attended to the gulf between heuristics and fundamentals, between psychological models and an onto-epistemic account of reality. Insufficient attention has been given to characterizing the vital nature of Batesons philosophical oeuvre to psychological practice. This article draws out Batesons relevance to establishing foundational principles for a process psychology capable of reinvigorating psychological thought.
17. Process Studies: Volume > 52 > Issue: 1
Noel Boulting From Here to Eternality
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In the present article, four views of the relationship between time and eternality are explored. The relevant thinkers examined include Plato, Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, Donald Sherburne, Norman Malcolm, and Lee Smolin.
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18. Process Studies: Volume > 52 > Issue: 1
Julien Tempone-Wiltshire Iain McGilchrist. The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World
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19. Process Studies: Volume > 52 > Issue: 1
Adam C. Scarfe Hank Keeton and Yu Fu (Translators and Commentators). Dao De Jing: A Process Perspective
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20. Process Studies: Volume > 51 > Issue: 2
Donald Wayne Viney Something Unheard Of: The Unparalleled Legacy of Jules Lequyer
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This article examines the thought of the nineteenth-century French thinker Jules Lequyery who influenced Charles Renouvier, William James, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Charles HartshornCy who never ceased to promote Lequyer s importance, refers to the Frenchman in all but five of his twenty-one books. Lequyer is especially noteworthy because of his philosophical defense of human freedom against any sort of determinism