This paper traces the use ofWhitehead’s work as a resource for the moral consideration of nonhuman animals and the relation of process thought to the environmental movement.

In the history ofWestern thought the “animal” is a general idea devoid of the details ofparticularity. Whitehead poses a nuanced challenge to us: how to perceive each abstract “animal” as a concrete body. To become “bad with names” is an invitation to exchange reductionist designations with new language for individual creatures that populate the amorphous category of “animal.” Derrida, Deleuze, and Guattari, along with Whitehead, suggest ways in which we might understand the idea that there are no “animals,” only radically particular bodies.

Poststructuralism and Whiteheadian process thought each uniquely dismantle the anthropocentric hierarchies and speciesed constructions we have used to (mis)calculate our ethics with non-human bodies. Yet each perspective uniquely continues, despite its own affirmations, to privilege the identity and construction of the human over other bodies. In an effort to move past these shortcomings and into a more creative ethical imagination, this article reads Whiteheadian metaphysics as an affirmation of poststructural singularity, and uses poststructural criticism to deconstruct Whitehead’s subtler form of anthropocentrism. By joining these traditions together, this article makes clear their respective blind spots, moves past the limited and troubled framework of species upheld in each, and advances the truly novel, creaturely relations for which both traditions adamantly call.

In the present article the other articles in this Special Focus section on Process Thought and Animals are criticized. Both the strengths and weaknesses ofthe articles by Combs, Donaldson, and Sinclair are detailed. Whitehead’s non-invidious hierarchy is defended.

In this article I express concern with the ideas of “perfect memory” and “objective immortality” as articulated by Charles Hartshorne. I borrow from the approach of J. J. Valberg, who explores “puzzles” such as the thought that all of our experience is a dream. I also explore what it might be like to live with an intense awareness of God’s presence.

This article explores process mereology, the theory of part-whole relations. I compare and contrast the mereology of Theodore Sider with that of Alfred North Whitehead, broadly favoring the latter’s approach for allowing us to take seriously an evolutionary structure in metaphysics.