This collection of Charles Hartshorne's writings -- many never before published -- is an indispensible introduction to his rich,and indelible contribution to ...

I have always considered that the two questions respecting God and the Soul were the chief of those that ought to be demonstrated by philosophical rather than ...

This book, first published in 1975, provides critical and comprehensive introduction to the philosophy of Leibniz.

Henri Bergson (1859-1941) is one of the truly great philosophers of the modernist period, and there is currently a major renaissance of interest in his unduly neglected texts and ideas amongst philosophers, literary theorists, and social theorists. Creative Evolution (1907) is the text that made Bergson world-famous in his own lifetime; in it Bergson responds to the challenge presented to our habits of thought by modern evolutionary theory, and attempts to show that the theory of knowledge must have its basis (...) in a theory of life. (shrink)

... PREFACE Paul Gochet (Liege) "[...] une entite physique ne peut etre envisagee que comme une sorte de concretisation, de consolidation locale dans un ...

PART I THE REACTION FROM INTELLECTUALISM IN THE NEW THEORIES OF KNOWLEDGE SECTION I THE BEGINNING OF THE REACTION FROM INTELLECTUALISM B ...

"The Analysis of Matter" is one of the earliest and best philosophical studies of the new physics of relativity and quantum mechanics.

Alfred North Whitehead has made an enormous impact upon philosophical thinking. His work continues to fascinate, and occasionally to exasperate, Whitehead's 'Principia Mathematica' is crucial to an understanding of recent philosophy of logic and of mathematics. Whitehead's metaphysics has proved formidably difficult yet stimulating. With his ideas on God he fathered a major school of modern theology.

Reissue from the classic Muirhead Library of Philosophy series (originally published between 1890s - 1970s).

PORTRAITS FROM MEMORY and Other Essays by BERTRAND RUSSELL SIMON AND SCHUSTER NEW YORK 1956 VI CONTENTS PAGE Mind and Matter 1 45 The Cult of Common Usage 1 66 ...

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This volume's aim is to clarify, criticize and theoretically develop some of Whitehead's major philosophic ideas and insights. Eighteen distinguished contributors follow Whitehead in his unique attempt to integrate the often disparate concerns of science , art, religion, social life and common sense. They manage to avoid the twin pitfalls of uncritical acceptance and impatient rejection of Whitehead's thought. They delineate Whitehead's indebtedness to and divergence from the philosophic traditions of Plato, Leibniz, Hume, Hegel, Bergson and others. Some of the (...) distinguished philosophers contributing to this volume are: Charles Hartshorne, William Ernest Hocking, Richard M. Rorty, Gregory Vlastos, William A. Christian, Sr., Nathaniel Lawrence, Ivor Leclerc, Victor Lowe, Robert M. Palter, and Donald W. Sherburne. Originally published in 1963 by Prentice-Hall, this edition contains a new preface by the editor. (shrink)

The disciplined investigation of consciousness is of three main types: eidetic, anthropological , and psychophysical. The first concerns the essence of consciousness in general and of its main modes. Its method involves introspection, empathy, and insight into necessities present in what these reveal. As the study of the essence of that which is the locus of all value it is of unique importance, and it is also essential as a foundation of the other inquiries. Such inquiry has been the main (...) task set for itself by phenomenology as a philosophical school, but engagement in it need not imply acceptance of distinctive doctrines of this school. English language?philosophy has developed in ways which discourage the eidetic investigation of consciousness, especially through insistence that modes of consciousness, conceived as a private possession, cannot be the referent of socially shared meanings. Its great mistake has been to expect ?consciousness? to refer to some elusive phenomenon to be looked for in the world and able to be studied as a distinctive reality only if conceptually isolable from what it reveals. Study of consciousness, however, is not primarily study of a phenomenon to be found within the world, but of the variety of ways in which the world can be present to us. (shrink)

Various reflections on the nature of consciousness, partly inspired by Alastair Hannay's views on the subject, are presented. In particular, its reality as a distinct non-physical existence is defended against such alternatives as have dominated philosophy for many years. The main difficulty in such a defense concerns the contingency it seems to imply as to the relations between consciousness and its expression in behaviour. But it only implies such contingency if some version of the Humean principle that there cannot be (...) necessary connections between distinct existences is assumed. It is more promising to see this relation as the falsification of this Humean principle and thus avoid what seems the main recommendation of behaviourism, functionalism etc. Some final reflections on the nature of the physical suggest that something like consciousness may be the noumenal essence of the physical in general. (shrink)

Despite its lack of influence in analytical philosophy, and independently of its content as a process philosophy, Whitehead's system in Process and Reality affords a valuable lesson on how to pursue revisionary systematic metaphysics. This paper argues the case generally for metaphysical revision and system, describes the structure of Whitehead's categorial scheme, endorses his idea of an ultimate which is not an entity, and outlines an alternative, “digital” ultimate or basis composed of several analytical factors. [I]n the absence of a (...) well-defined categoreal scheme of entities, issuing in a satisfactory metaphysical system, every premise in a philosophical argument is under suspicion. (shrink)

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Science, material, idealism, pragmaticism, history of scientific thought.

Plato and Platonism reviews the natures and limits of Platonic interpretation. Students, academics and researchers will find that Moravcsik's careful and rigorous analysis offers an understanding of what Platonism in our times would have been like. The book leads us to an appreciation of genuine Platonism, rarely discussed today.

In this essay I make a case for a number of common themes between A. N. Whitehead and W. V. Quine in their approach to ontology. Both philosophers espoused a view of metaphysics as continuous with natural science and stressed the importance of physics in the development of ontology. As a consequence of the revolutionary developments in modern physics, both Whitehead and Quine contend that events are ontologically basic, but differ on the status of properties in their respective systems.

In this essay I examine the concept of an event within the context of P. F. Strawson's distinction between descriptive and revisionary metaphysics. As opposed to the linguistic treatment of events in the descriptive approach of Strawson and Donald Davidson, I make a case for the revisionary approach of A. N. Whitehead and W. V. Quine, according to which events are basic rather than dependent on substances.

The problem of ‘individuals’ is an age-old philosophical concern, but from time to time in the history of thought it is a problem which becomes acute. In our day the far-reaching advances in science—in physics and chemistry, in biology and bio-chemistry, in neurology and psychology—have made the philosophical attention to the problem of ‘individuals’ a matter of urgency. Yet, with some notableexceptions, philosophers have so far been displaying singularly little interest in the problem.