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special focus section: the philosophy of organism and climate change
1. Process Studies: Volume > 52 > Issue: 1
Brian G. Henning Introduction
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2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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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8. 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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9. 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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10. 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
11. Process Studies: Volume > 51 > Issue: 2
Alessandro Gongalves Campolina Performing Flights: Perspectivism and Shamanic Epistemology in the Amazon
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Alfred North Whiteheadfamously compares the philosophical method of knowledge acquisition with the process of flying an airplane. Likewise, "shamanic flight" marks stages of cognitive processing in navigation through perceptible and imperceptible worlds. This article focuses on the cosmovision of the Amazon people Huni Kuin, the Whiteheadian method of imaginative rationalization, and the concept of Amerindian perspectivism. This study also investigates shamanism as an experience of knowledge generation. Furthermore, "shamanic flight, "as an ecstatic technique experienced in many diverse Amerindian rituals, will be explored as a method in the discovery and organization ofnonhuman alterities. Finally, Amazonian-based shamanic epistemology will be discussed within a "multinaturalist" ontology.
12. Process Studies: Volume > 51 > Issue: 2
Noel Boulting Identity: Duality or Tripartism?
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This article explores the relationship between three elements—personality character, and script—to interpret the idea of someone's identity, A common way to deal with this relationship is in terms of a duality, but a tripartite analysis works better. The article relies heavily on the thought of Charles Hartshorne, with the aid of Simone Weil and Charles Sanders Peirce
13. Process Studies: Volume > 51 > Issue: 2
Jason Brown, Denys Zhadiaiev From Drive to Value
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This article takes up the processual account of drive and its derivations in relation to desire and emotion with an aim to explore the continuity of feeling from internal drive to value in the world. A mental state or act of cognition begins with an impulse and the category of instinctual drive. Drive partitions to desire, which is shaped by value. The combined concept/feeling can remain internal as emotion or distribute into action in vocalization or display. The transition in the mental state from drive (need) through desire (want) is constrained by intrinsic value, which accompanies the object outward as extrinsic value (worth). The partly intrapersonal nature of action prevents feeling from externalizing. Feeling drives concepts to completion. Concepts propelled by feeling undergo specification to images and/or objects. The feeling in the action gives intensity to emotion; the concept in the perception gives the quality of emotion. Feeling empowers concepts to finality, as emotions, ideas, or act/objects. In the animal mind, feeling empowers drive categories. In the human mind, feeling distributes as emotion into a diversity of ideas. Feeling unfelt in lower organisms is felt in a human mind according to the degree of individuation.
14. Process Studies: Volume > 51 > Issue: 2
M. Gregory Oakes Is There a Principle of Continued Material Being?
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What is the relation of an earlier being to a later such that given the earlier there is or will be a later? I call this the question of material continuation. To answer, I offer a review of several philosophers thoughts, including those ofZeno, Aristotle, Descartes, Bertrand Russell, Henri Bergson, and Alfred North Whitehead. While there is considerable variety among the ontological views of these philosophers, and indeed some direct opposition of both method and assertion, my review suggests that material continuation may be explained by reference to a principle of continual creation. This principle is reflected in Aristotles unmoved mover, in Descartess account of God's activity in persistence, in Bergsons concept of la duree, and in Whitehead's principle of creativity. It disappears from view in objective methodologies first emerging in pre-Socratic thought, made rigorous by the development of science by the modern philosophers such as Descartes, and realized in the scientist philosophy of Russell. I include some consideration of whether the creative principle might be ideal or divine.
15. Process Studies: Volume > 51 > Issue: 2
John B. Cobby For What Can We Still Hope?
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This short article was originally delivered as a lecture in China. The article responds to the question asked in the title with a tentative and qualified optimism based on the thought of Alfred North Whitehead.
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16. Process Studies: Volume > 51 > Issue: 2
Matthew D. Segall Timothy E. Eastman. Untying the Gordian Knot: Process Reality and Context
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17. Process Studies: Volume > 51 > Issue: 2
Kamila Kwapińska Wahida Khandker. Process Metaphysics and Mutative Life: Sketches Of Lived Time
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18. Process Studies: Volume > 51 > Issue: 1
Leemon McHenry Ode to Heraclitus
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19. Process Studies: Volume > 51 > Issue: 1
Joseph Petek Religion and Hatred: Examining an Unpublished Whitehead Essay
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This article examines a recently discovered unpublished essay by Alfred North Whitehead titled "Religious Psychology of the Western Peoples." It is the most sustained criticism of religion he would ever make. This essay is put into conversation with a previously published essay by Whitehead titled "An Appeal to Sanity"
20. Process Studies: Volume > 51 > Issue: 1
Roseline Elorm Adzogble Metaphysical Doctrines of the Anlo of Ghana and Process Philosophy
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Concepts of mutual interdependence, process, creative advance, and God occupy key areas in the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Process metaphysics lays emphasis on a naturalism of rigorous rational and empirical methodology with far-reaching implications. Process thinkers have compared Whiteheadian thought to Buddhism, Christianity, and many other religions. However, African religious beliefs have yet to be considered in this area of study. Based on the gap in the literature, this article attempts to reconcile such seemingly different spheres. First, I offer an account of Whitehead's process metaphysics regarding the concepts mentioned above. Second, I argue that nonconventional sources of African philosophy offer conceptual understandings of philosophies of African groups and their place in the metaphysical debate. Third, I discuss these key areas of process thought in Anlo traditional pragmatic philosophy. I illustrate their like-mindedness with process metaphysics through language, religious rites, and historical accounts. I conclude that, although process philosophy overlaps in prominent areas with Anlo belief systems, questions regarding the causal nature of God distinguish the Anlo conception of divinity from that of process philosophy.