Craig Eisendrath reinterprets and unifies the writings of the late-nineteenth-century psychologist William James and the twentieth-century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. James's psychology achieves greater depth by its grounding in philosophic doctrine, and Whitehead's abstract and frequently abstruse philosophy gains greater specificity through the concrete illustrations provided by a wealth of psychological evidence. The result is an extension of James and an exegesis of Whitehead. The merging of James's theory of will and Whitehead's theory of concrescence and organism is the central (...) pivot of the book. Eisendrath discusses as well the philosophical traditions behind both men and analyzes their theories on perception, time, space, causality, the nature and role of ideas, the laws of nature, God and civilization. (shrink)

Alfred North Whitehead wrote a letter to Charles Hartshorne in 1936 in which he referred to William James as the American Plato. Especially given Whitehead’s admiration of Plato, this was a high compliment to James. What was the basis for this compliment and analogy? In responding to that question beyond the partial and scattered references provided by Whitehead, this article briefly explores the following aspects of the thought of James in relation to Whitehead: the one and the many, the denial (...) of Cartesian dualism, James’s background in physiology, refutation of Zeno’s paradoxes, religious experience, and other kinships. In the end, the author agrees with Robert Neville that James had seminal ideas which could correctly result in a complimentary analogy with Plato. Therefore, a greater focus on the important thought of James is a needed challenge in contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

The significance of A. N. Whitehead’s contribution to 20th century metaphysics has become widely recognized. The focus on the novelty of his process ontology, however, has led to a view that isolates him from the mainstream of the tradition of Western philosophy. Hence, it is often overlooked that on the methodological level Whitehead is a pragmatist, whose much quoted indebtedness to William James is reflected in the project of his speculative metaphysics. A detailed analysis of the respective theories of truth (...) and knowledge in James and Whitehead illustrates their common methodological approach and allows us to assess the role of Whiteheadian thinking within the pragmatist tradition. James advances a form of epistemic conservatism that supplements the pragmatic idea of a concept’s cash-value with the demand for internal consistency. New beliefs have to fit in the totality of all previously accepted convictions in order to become accepted as true. James argues his case on three levels – a psychological, an epistemological and a pragmatic one – and develops a theory of truth that comprises an empirical and a rational dimension. Whitehead takes up this two-sided approach, but modifies the idea of genetic consistency into that of systematic coherence. The fundamental concepts of an ontological theory must not be isolated from each other to allow for a cosmology which is both rational and satisfies the pragmatic test of applicability. With the close relation of James and Whitehead in mind, the latter can be identified as the ‘missing link’ that bridges the gap between the so-called classical pragmatism and its more analytic versions as advanced by Quine, Lewis and Rescher. (shrink)

For many philosophical thinkers down through the centuries, the notion of a creation out of sheer nothing has been found to be quite unintelligible. Nevertheless the idea of creation preserves an important insight and needs to be freed from the difficulties of this traditional formulation. Alfred North Whitehead has offered an alternative theory of creation worth exploring: each individual actuality creates itself out of prior creative acts. God then serves to direct this creative process.

There are close affinities between James' theory of time as discussed in A Pluralistic Universe and the so-called epochal theory of time offered by Alfred North Whitehead. In this paper I examine James' theory and compare it with the views of Henri Bergson.

Whitehead's Pancreativism: The Basics has provided tools to understand Whitehead secundum Whitehead. We now seek to bring him in dialogue with James. It will be a pragmatic dialogue looking for two types of synergy: to establish the relevance of a Jamesian background to read Whitehead, and to adumbrate how Whitehead can help us understand the stakes of James's works. After one hundred years of scholarship, it appears that James's legacy has mainly been studied from the perspective of his own blend (...) of pragmatism and that this blend has moreover chiefly been put into dialogue with Peirce and analytic philosophy at large. This double interpretational shift has allowed James to keep a fair amount of visibility on the academic scene but, over the years, it has significantly obliterated his vision. It is time to rediscover James from the perspective of his radical empiricism. (shrink)

This paper contributes to a growing body of philosophical and psychological work that draws parallels between the writings of William James and Alfred North Whitehead1. In Part One I introduce Whitehead’s distinction between assemblage and systematization (section 1) and suggest that Whitehead’s philosophy was in part a systematization of James’ psychological and philosophical assemblage (section 2). The systematization is based on a rethinking of the entity/function contrast (section 3) by way of Whitehead’s concept of the actual entity/occasion (section 4). This (...) permits a process- oriented ontological extension and James’ notion of pure experience (sections 5 & 6), which yields a deepened version of radical empiricism (section 7). The four sections of Part Two build a more specific argument that James’ often implicit distinctions between energetic, perceptual, conceptual and discursive modes of experience can be systematized by way of Whitehead’s concepts of causal efficacy, presentational immediacy and symbolic reference. Following the suggestion of Magritte’s famous Ceci n’est pas une Pipe artwork, this yields an analysis of the sum of human experience into four progressively integrated factors: power, image, proposition and enunciation. (shrink)

The Jamesian notion of the ‘stream of consciousness’ is closely related to the epochal theory of time. It also stems from an attempt to resolve the old aporia contained in Zeno’s paradoxes. Time flows like a ‘river’ or a ‘stream,’ but still it grows by ‘drops’ or ‘buds.’ These basic units of time are whole and indivisible, but they do not ‘crack’ or ‘divide’ reality. Other process philosophies also include this notion of a continuous time that, nevertheless, integrates these interrelated (...) units that account for individualisation without any breach of continuity. Henri Bergson’s durée and Alfred N. Whitehead’s epochal theory of time clearly illustrate this doctrine. The examination of memory and the status of the past as a positive existence also emphasise the temporal aspect of reality. Existing reality grows out of its past, which endures in the newborn actuality. (shrink)