Der Artikel beschäftigt sich mit dem englischen Philosophen Alfred North Whitehead und mit dem Vorstellungshintergrund, der seiner Philosophie zugrundeliegt. Der direkte Hintergrund seiner Philosophie ist die moderne Physik seit Michael Faraday und Maxwell, die als erste auf die elektromagnetischen Wellen und Schwingungen und Beziehungsgeflechte hingewiesen haben, die zwischen den Dingen liegen und die von Albert Einstein "Felder" genannt wurden. Wie sie aussehen, wissen wir bis heute nicht so genau, weil es Modellvorstellungen sind, deren Realität eigentlich nur durch (...) Messungen belegt ist. Das was zwischen den Dingen passiert ist später zu einer Hauptidee von Albert Einstein geworden, man denke nur an die Gravitationswellen, die erst vor wenigen Jahren entdeckt wurden. Einstein hatte sie vorausgesehen oder vorhergesagt. Die Quantenphysik ist voll von Wechselwirkungen zwischen den Objekten und von Verschränkungen, von Quantenverschränkungen. Deshalb spricht der Quantenphysiker Carlo Rovelli seit dem Jahre 2000 von einer "relationalen Quantenphysik". Diese Art von Relationen stellen den Hintergrund der Philosophie Whiteheads dar. (shrink)

In Process and Reality and other works, Alfred North Whitehead struggled to come to terms with the impact the new science of quantum mechanics would have on metaphysics. -/- This ambitious book is the first extended analysis of the intricate relationships between relativity theory, quantum mechanics, and Whitehead's cosmology. Michael Epperson illuminates the intersection of science and philosophy in Whitehead's work-and details Whitehead's attempts to fashion an ontology coherent with quantum anomalies. -/- Including a (...) nonspecialist introduction to quantum mechanics, Epperson adds an essential new dimension to our understanding of Whitehead-and of the constantly enriching encounter between science and philosophy in our century. -/- ** NOTE: This book was recently selected by the National Endowment for the Humanities for their Humanities Open Book Program. As a result, you can download it for free at Fordham University Press and Amazon. (shrink)

Die moderne Physik besteht nicht nur aus neuen Entdeckungen und Erfindungen, sondern auch aus ganz neuen Denkweisen und Sichtweisen, bei denen nicht mehr die Objekte im Mittelpunkt stehen, sondern das, was zwischen den Dingen passiert: Verbindungen zwischen den Dingen, Verschränkungen, Zusammenhänge, energetische Felder, Übergänge,.

Since the time Nietzsche declared the death of God, while Auguste Comte postulated in the Law of Three Stages that humankind had gone pass the religious/mythical stage as well as the metaphysical/speculative stage and was now living in the positive/scientific stage, there has been the consistent institutionalization of atheism and secularism. The early part of the 20th century saw Freud’s publication of the Future of an Illusion in which he predicted that as science continues to advance, religion will become obsolete. (...) The logical positivist too lumped up metaphysical and religious propositions as meaningless and nonsensical. It is within this atmosphere that Alfred North Whitehead comes into philosophy. The main question that this paper seeks to answer is: Why does the concept of God occupy an eminent place in Whitehead’s system when all his contemporaries consider God a hypothesis they no longer needed as Laplace had earlier maintained? Of great interest here is the fact that before 1925 Whitehead’s writings had no concern for God. However, in his 1925 Science and the Modern World, the chapter on “Abstractions” required that there be such an explanatory factor, reason for which it is immediately followed by the chapter on “God”. The last part of his Process and Reality treats elaborately the nature of the relationship between God and the world. This paper explores the reasons why Whitehead places a lot of interest on God and the role that this God plays in his system. (shrink)

In this paper we concur with Alfred North Whitehead that education with inert ideas is harmful and useless to the student and the society at large. Inert ideas constitute dead knowledge, that is, knowledge that does not relate to one’s day-to-day experiences nor to knowledge gained from other disciplines. Knowledge acquired by students should have an impact on their lived existential situatedness and it should have a link or correlation with knowledge gained from other disciplines. How do (...) we avoid inert ideas in education? Whitehead admonishes us to keep knowledge alive. This, to him, is the central problem of education. We argue in this paper that in an age dominated by fake news, alternative facts and deep fakes, critical thinking and self-examination are no longer options in the process of education. Thus, the traditional banking system of education is outmoded and should be replaced by the cultivation of critical thinking skills in the child. To do this we must take seriously Whitehead’s two commandments of education; the rhythm of education which implies giving the child knowledge appropriate to their age; and the trilogy of freedom-discipline-freedom. (shrink)

What are the metaphysical foundations of Buddhism and modern science? Nagarjuna is not looking for a material or immaterial object which can be declared as a fundamental reality of this world. His fundamental reality is not an object. It is a relation between objects. This is a relational view of reality. This is the heart of Nagarjuna’s ideas. In the 19th century a more or less unknown Italian philosopher, Vincenzo Goberti, spoke about relations as the mean and as bonds between (...) things. Later, in quantum physics and in the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead we are talking about interactions and entanglements. These ideas of relatedness or connections or entanglements in Eastern and Western modes of thought are the main idea of this essay. Not all entanglements are known. Just two examples: the nature of quantum entanglements is not known. Quantum entanglements should be faster than light. That's why Albert Einstein had some doubts. A second example: the completely unknown connections between the mind and the brain. Other examples are mysterious like the connections between birds in a flock. Some are a little known like gravitational forces. (shrink)

Time’s arrow is necessary for progress from a past that has already happened to a future that is only potential until creatively determined in the present. But time’s arrow is unnecessary in Einstein’s so-called block universe, so there is no creative unfolding in an actual present. How can there be an actual present when there is no universal moment of simultaneity? Events in various places will have different presents according to the position, velocity, and nature of the perceiver. Standing against (...) this view is traditional common sense since we normally experience time’s arrow as reality and the present as our place in the stream of consciousness, but we err to imagine we are living in the actual present. The present of our daily experience is actually a specious present, according to E. Robert Kelly (later popularized by William James), or duration, according to Henri Bergson, an habitus, as elucidated by Kerby (1991), or, simply, the psychological present (Adams, 2010) – all terms indicating that our experienced present so consists of the past overlapping into the future that any potential for acting from the creative moment is crowded out. Yet, for philosophers of process from Herakleitos onward, it is the philosophies of change or process that treat time’s arrow and the creative fire of the actual present as realities. In this essay, I examine the most well known but possibly least understood process cosmology of Alfred North Whitehead to seek out this elusive but actual present. In doing so, I will also ask if process philosophy is itself an example of the creative imagination and if this relates to doing science. I conclude Whitehead's process philosophy falls short of allowing for the actual creative spontaneity of a dynamic (eternal) present. (shrink)

The problem causation poses is: how can we ever know more than a Humean regularity. The problem consciousness poses is: how can subjective phenomenal experience arise from something lacking experience. A recent turn in the consciousness debates suggest that the hard problem of consciousness is nothing more than the Humean problem of explaining any causal nexus in an intelligible way. This involution of the problems invites comparison with the theories of Alfred North Whitehead, who also saw them (...) related in this way. According to Whitehead, a tempting but false phenomenology of consciousness obscures temporality and leads to the causation problem, which then makes consciousness itself seem causally inexplicable. Bringing the processual nature of consciousness back into view discloses causation at work in the moment-to-moment emergence of consciousness, and it reveals that causation operates in a logically fuzzy domain where the skeptical critique of causality finds no foothold. (shrink)

This paper explains the decline of the humanities, showing hour this was predicted by Alfred North Whitehead, and argues the consequence is decadence. Reviving the humanities, it is argued, involves the advance of process philosophy overcoming the division between the sciences and humanities, and it is shown how this can orient people to challenge our decadent culture.

Through Alfred North Whitehead’s metaphysics, the Philosophy of Organism, it will be argued that psychedelic experience is a vertical, lateral and temporal integration of sentience.

Although Whitehead’s particular style of philosophizing--looking at traditional philosophical problems in light of recent scientific advances--was part of a trend that began with the scientific revolutions in the early 20th century and continues today, he was marginalized in 20th century philosophy because of his outspoken defense of what he was doing as “metaphysics.” Metaphysics, for Whitehead, is a cross-disciplinary hermeneutic responsible for coherently integrating the perspectives of the special sciences with one another and with everyday experience. The program (...) of such a meta-discipline is challenging to philosophical orthodoxy because it enlarges, rather than narrows, the range of empirical evidence that philosophy must acknowledge. This places Whitehead’s philosophy in a perennial tradition that seeks to resolve fundamental antinomies through synthesis and reconciliation rather than reduction or elimination. (shrink)

Conventional approaches to consciousness assume that our current science tells us within tolerable limits what physical nature is. Because nature so understood cannot explain consciousness as we seem to experience it ourselves, explaining consciousness becomes a problem. One solution is to rethink what consciousness is so that it becomes the sort of thing our current natural science could in principle explain. Whitehead takes the opposite approach, using the existence of consciousness as a clue to what nature must be if (...) it can generate something like consciousness. The justification for this approach can be found in Whitehead’s implicit indictment of descriptive phenomenology. According to Whitehead, the seemingly insoluble problem of explaining consciousness naturalistically is an artifact created by the assumption that consciousness faithfully samples the world, when in fact it obscures the very aspects of nature that are indispensable to understanding how anything, including consciousness itself, could emerge through a physical process. (shrink)

Bis vor kurzem wurden die Namen Alfred North Whitehead und Bertrand Russell zumeist in einem Atemzug genannt. Im Anschluss an die gemeinsam verfassten Principia Mathematica gingen beide jedoch dezidiert eigene philosophische Wege. Wahrend Russell maageblich zur Entstehung der analytischen Philosophie beitrug, markiert Whiteheads spate Philosophie den Beginn der bis heute virulenten prozessmetaphysischen Tradition. Stand Whitehead dabei lange im Schatten seines langjahrigen Freundes und Kollegen, zeichnet sich spatestens seit Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts ein bemerkenswerter Umschwung ab. Der (...) vorliegende Band nimmt die Entwicklung zum Anlass, um Gemeinsamkeiten und Differenzen der beiden Klassiker der angelsachsischen Philosophie neu zu sondieren. (shrink)

For Whitehead and Nishitani, a rethinking of religion necessitates a rethinking of the metaphysics that underlie one’s concept of religion. The dynamism of religion is unveiled only within the metaphysical grounding of an ontology that accommodates the philosophical preference of “becoming” as an ultimate category of reality. The novelty of Whitehead’s theory of religion lies in the process metaphysics that it presupposes. For him, religion, like the whole of reality, is inherently developing and evolving. What Nishitani offers is (...) a rethinking of Western understanding of religion by way of an Asian speculative approach grounded in Zen Buddhism. He argues that Western religion, particularly Christianity and Judaism, has succumbed to the modern predicament of nihilism, or relative nothingness. He radicalizes this same nihility towards absolute nothingness (śūnyatā). For both Whitehead and Nishitani, despite the distortion of religion by religious fundamentalists, genuine religion consolidates and points a society towards its real destiny. However, the realization of religion’s role necessitates reflexivity on its own inherent dynamism. (shrink)

This paper looks at the history of the problem of individuation from Plato to Whitehead. Part I takes as its point of departure Reiner Wiehl’s interpretation of the different meanings of “abstract” in the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead and arrives at a corresponding taxonomy of different ways things can be called concrete. Part II compares the way philosophers in different periods understand the relation between thought and intuition. The view mostly associated with ancient philosophy is (...) that thought and sense-perception target different kinds of objects. The view mostly associated with modern philosophy (although it was introduced by the Stoics) is that thought and sense-perception are different ways of targeting the same objects. These differences have specific consequences for theories of individuation, which are assessed historically in Part III and then applied to Whitehead’s difficult texts in part IV. (shrink)

In "The Incoherence of Whitehead’s Theory of Perception" (PS 9:94-104), Robert H. Kimball tries to show how Alfred North Whitehead’s account of perception is a failed attempt to reconcile two traditional theories of perception: phenomenological (or sense-data) theory and causal (or physiological) theory. Whitehead fails, Kimball argues, in two main ways. First because his notion of symbolic reference requires the simultaneous enjoyment of perceptions in the mode of presentational immediacy and causal efficacy. Kimball believes this (...) experience is, in principle, impossible and supports this claim by attacking Whitehead’s conception of causal efficacy and the experiential evidence used to support it. Whitehead’s second failure results from the first: Whitehead’s erroneous belief in the simultaneous enjoyment of the two modes of perception leads him to construct a theory of perception which is composed of two contradictory parts: realism and mediatism. In this essay, I will examine Kimball’s attack on causal efficacy and symbolic reference and show why Whitehead’s theory of perception is not susceptible to Kimball’s charge of incoherence. (shrink)

This is the outline: 1. Introduction – Quelques remarques sur Dieu 2. Science et religion vont-elles se rencontrer ? 3. Le conflit va-t-il tout emporter ? 4. Au coeur du problème : une version sclérosée du dogmatisme 5. Quelle posture pour la rencontre entre science et religion ? 6. Y a-t-il une synthèse à l’horizon ? À quelles conditions ?

Michel Weber Whitehead’s Pancreativism: The Basics. Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag 2007. Pp. 255. US$106.00 (cloth ISBN-13: 978-3-938793-15-2). -/- In his introduction to After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre called upon his readers to imagine a culture in which, to begin with, the natural sciences had been destroyed by an anti-science movement, and then, reacting against this movement, people had attempted to reconstruct science from surviving fragments. In this imaginary world adults argue over the respective merits of different theories, and children learn by (...) heart the surviving portions of the periodic table and recite as incantations some of the theorems of Euclid, but ‘nobody, or almost nobody, realizes that what they are doing is not natural science in the proper sense at all.’ The contexts needed to make sense of scientific arguments have been lost, perhaps irretrievably. This imaginary world is used by MacIntyre to suggest that in the actual world we inhabit moral philosophy and morality itself are in the same state of grave disorder as natural science in this imaginary world. Reading Michel Weber’s book makes one aware that it is not only moral philosophy that is in a grave state of disorder, but philosophy itself, and it is not only morality but our entire culture which is affected by this. Analytic philosophy and other anti-philosophy movements have so destroyed the background beliefs and contexts assumed by philosophers in the past that while there are still philosophy departments in universities producing works that are widely read, there is no real understanding of what philosophy is. Weber’s book provides not only a sense of what has been lost, but also provides some of the background knowledge required to revive philosophy. (shrink)

Terms for consciousness, used with a cognitive meaning, emerged as count nouns in the 17th century. This transformation repeats an evolution that had taken place in late antiquity, when related vocabulary, used in the sense of conscience, went from being mass nouns designating states to count nouns designating faculties possessed by every individual. The reified concept of consciousness resulted from the rejection of the Scholastic-Aristotelian theory of mind according to which the mind is not a countable thing, but a pure (...) potentiality. This rejection was motivated by an acute sense of the mind’s fallible subjectivity. While conditioned by recent historical events, the 17th century’s pervasive sense of subjectivity also reveals a heavy debt to Hellenistic philosophy, which had been recently rediscovered. But whereas Hellenistic thought, mistrustful of theoria, only reifies conscience, early modern thinking, more mistrustful of praxis and seeking its grounding in theoria, goes a step further and reifies consciousness. Partly modeled on theological ideas, the resulting concept of consciousness is plagued by paradoxes that have becomes notorious for their intractability. But essentially the same model of consciousness underwrites contemporary theory, embroiling contemporary debates in the same controversies that dominated the 17th century. Sidestepping these difficulties by returning to the Scholastic-Aristotelian theory of mind would be a tall order, but it is not impossible. Alfred North Whitehead's theory of consciousness offers an example. His novel theory of time enables Whitehead to rehabilitate the Aristotelian concept of passive mind in a wholly naturalistic way. (shrink)

Très souvent, on compte sur la science pour nous sauver. Le rapport qu'on établit avec elle peut donner à penser que la science parlerait ainsi de choses, validerait quelque chose comme des évidences immédiates. La connaissance scientifique est inférentielle. Si elle a un objet, ce qu'en rigueur de termes la philosophie n'a pas, elle doit néanmoins se mettre à distance de lui pour se faire science. Elle valide ainsi des schèmes abstraits, qui ne sont scientifiques que dans cette mesure. Nous (...) prendrons la mesure du fait que pour nous aider à retrouver le concret, l'intuition est meilleure guide que la science, et puis nous convoquerons certaines idées de l'algébriste et métaphysicien Alfred North Whitehead dont l'actualité ne cesse d'étonner, lorsqu'il inverse l'accès direct au réel, à l'envers de la vulgate reçue concernant les rapports entre science et religion. (shrink)

The article recovers the earlier meaning of event as found in Alfred North Whitehead’s works, Principles of Natural Knowledge and Concept of Nature. In the early Whitehead, the event is considered as the metaphysical ultimate; such that events are the metaphysical building blocks in order to account for the temporal and spatial extensiveness of reality. The recuperation of the pre-PR concept of event is expressive of a dynamic of extending over, or passing into, of one event (...) to another. This dynamic is explicitly absent in the actual occasion of Process and Reality, after Whitehead’s “turn to atomism.”. (shrink)

Abstract In diesem Text geht es zunächst um eine Zurückweisung eines indologischen Interpretationsmusters, nach dem in Nagarjunas Philosophie den Dingen eine fehlende Existenz zugeschrieben wird. Das halte ich für einen Versuch, den Buddhismus auf die Stufe eines Aberglaubens herabzustufen. Weiterhin geht es um das zwischen den Dingen Liegende und um den Begriff der Abhängigkeit und um zahlreiche ganz ähnliche Begriffe, die der Philosoph A. N. Whitehead verwendet, um ein Prinzip zum Ausdruck zu bringen, das von ihm auch als die (...) Verflochtenheit der Dinge bezeichnet wird. Ein viel früherer Hinweis auf das zwischen den Dingen Liegende stammt von dem indischen Philosophen Nagarjuna. Bei beiden Philosophen gibt es Dutzende von Begriffen und Bildern, die sich vom Denken an ein Objekt lösen, um sich mehr auf das zu konzentrieren, was zwischen den Dingen passiert, auf Zwischenräume und Zwischenzustände. Mein eigenes Beispiel dafür ist ein Vogelschwarm, der weder verklumpt noch auseinanderfällt. Solch ein Zwischenzustand lässt sich nicht auf einen einzigen Begriff festnageln, der die Vielfalt der Beziehungen zum Ausdruck bringen könnte. (shrink)

David Hume’s thought has interrupted entire disciplines from dogmatic slumbers. Yet Hume’s influence is even more expansive and continuous than we might have thought. There are two significant areas of inquiry where Hume’s influence has not been adequately appreciated or articulated: analytic phenomenology and analytic process philosophy. My dissertation explores these traditions’ indebtedness to Hume by engaging with the work of Edmund Husserl and Alfred North Whitehead, who introduce consequential changes into their systems in direct response to (...) what they see as Humean problems with their initial models. Three major themes are of special interest. First, vis-à-vis “Unity of Mind,” each philosopher asks what accounts for the apparent unity of mind and experience, including what principles connect distinct experiences. Second, vis-à-vis “Temporal Awareness,” each philosopher inquires into what grounds temporality and the experience of temporal passage, including what principles connect distinct moments. Third, vis-à-vis “Personal Identity,” each philosopher investigates what constitutes the experience of continuity and unity over time, including personal continuity and unity qua “personal identity.” A fourth concordance is methodological. In pursuing the aforementioned themes, each philosopher accords epistemic primacy to lived experience and what discloses itself therein. An overarching Humean problem for all, correlatively, is how continuity and unity arise from distinct items: perceptions, intentional experiences, and actual occasions, respectively. My dissertation attempts to explicate this and related systematic issues from a historical perspective informed by contemporary analytic metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and recent scholarship in Hume, Husserl, and Whitehead studies. Chapter One argues that Hume’s infamous “Appendix problem” concerns reconciling the incontrovertible unity of mind with his unrenounceable epistemological principle that the mind never perceives real connections between distinct perceptions. Chapter Two traces Hume’s proto-phenomenological influence on Husserl’s theories (not theory) of temporal awareness. Chapter Three examines Hume’s proto-processual influence on Whitehead's theories (not theory) of personal identity. Unfortunately, neither Husserl nor Whitehead read each other’s work. Nevertheless, both take Hume to be the one who knocks at, yet ultimately fails to walk through the doors that his explorations unveil. By so doing, they beg that we do the same with them. (shrink)

While some philosophers and increasing numbers of scientists are striving to revive speculative metaphysics as a condition for further advancing science, solving the central problems of contemporary philosophy and confronting the major problems facing society, even philosophers decrying the increasingly marginal status of philosophy continue to ignore or denigrate their efforts. It is argued that this lack of appreciation and the associated misrepresentations of speculative metaphysics stems from the failure to appreciate work in this area as an ongoing tradition among (...) historians and historically oriented philosophers of science and philosopher scientists. Most importantly, it stems from ignorance of Whitehead's defence of speculative metaphysics against analytic philosophy and the impact of this defence on the tradition of speculative metaphysics. Whitehead's metaphilosophy is analysed as a successful refutation of the assumptions on which Russell's early analytic approach to philosophy was based, assumptions which came to inform the whole tradition of analytic philosophy. The paper concludes by indicating the importance of Whitehead's defence of speculative metaphysics not only for philosophy, but also for the future of society. (shrink)

Book review of Dadejík, O., Kaplický, M., Ševčík, M., and Zuska, V. (2021) Process and Aesthetics: An Outline of Whiteheadian Aesthetics and Beyond. Prague: Karolinum Press. ISBN 978-80-246-4726-5.

While some process philosophers have denigrated the emergent theory of mind, what they have denigrated has been ‘materialist’ theories of emergence. My contention is that one of the most important reasons for embracing process philosophy is that it is required to make intelligible the emergence of consciousness. There is evidence that this was a central concern of Whitehead. However, Whitehead acknowledged that his metaphysics was deficient in this regard. In this paper I will argue that to fully understand (...) the emergent theory of mind and its relation to process philosophy it is necessary to recast the whole history of modern philosophy in terms of efforts by philosophers grappling with the relationship between mind and body, or more broadly, consciousness and nature. This will involve granting a central place to Schelling’s philosophy, the ideas that influenced it and how Schelling’s insights were developed by subsequent philosophers. Process philosophy will then be seen as the tradition generated by efforts to transcend the opposition between idealism and materialism, and its promise in this regard, apart from anything else, is what makes it the most promising philosophy for the future. (shrink)

There have been many attempts to retire dualism from active philosophic life, replacing it with something less removed from science, but we are no closer to that goal now than fifty years ago. I propose breaking the stalemate by considering marginal perspectives that may help identify unrecognized assumptions that limit the mainstream debate. Comparison with Whitehead highlights ways that opponents of dualism continue to uphold the Cartesian “real distinction” between mind and body. Whitehead, by contrast, insists on a (...) conceptual distinction: there can no more be body without mind than mind without body (at least at the level of ultimate constituents). Key to this integration is Whitehead’s understanding that mind, at its most rudimentary, is simply the intrinsic temporality of a physical event. Thus, the resulting form of “panpsychism” is more naturalistic than commonly supposed, and it solves both the composition problem (traditionally fatal to panpsychism) and the “hard problem.”. (shrink)

Tento text se soustřeďuje na prozkoumání vztahu dvou knih Alfreda Northa Whiteheada, Procesu a reality a Funkce rozumu, které byly publikovány ve stejném roce, v roce 1929. Autor textu nejprve představuje Whiteheadovo pojetí spekulativní filosofie, tak jak je představeno na úvodních stránkách Procesu a reality. Poukazuje, že Whitehead pro potřeby konstrukce filosofického schématu odmítl matematickou axiomatickou metodu a metodu rigidního empirismu a představuje Whiteheadovu vlastní filosofickou metodu, metodu deskriptivní generalizace. Ta může být ve stručnosti shrnuta jako imaginativní konstrukce spekulativního (...) schématu, založená na předchozích pozorováních, která je zpětně testována dalšími pozorováními. Text poukazuje na to, že v Procesu a realitě není předvedena imaginativní konstrukce Whiteheadovy filosofie. Jedna z fází deskriptivní generalizace tedy chybí. Text tvrdí, že tuto chybějící fázi deskriptivní generalizace můžeme najít ve Funkci rozumu. (shrink)

“Creating the future” is a notion introduced by Alfred North Whitehead to define the task of universities and the function of philosophy. Implicitly, it is a rejection of the idea that the future is already determined, and in some sense, already exists, with the appearance of temporal becoming an illusion. “Creation” originally meant “the action of causing to exist”, or “a coming into being”. The “future” is not normally considered to be what can be created. Originally, it (...) meant “yet to be”. It now tends to be defined in relation to time, as “the time to come”, where “time” is assumed to be an independent existent along with space as the “containers” of material beings, with the future in some sense pre-existing its becoming present. The quantity of “matter” or “mass-energy” is assumed to be constant and to change its position and configurations in predictable ways over time. To refer to the future as being created is to reject this view of the universe and the basic concepts that define it, replacing these with concepts that can make intelligible the freedom of and creativity of people, the future as in process of being created, and humans as partially responsible for what future is created. It is to recognize that there are real possibilities that can be envisioned, understood, chosen, and brought into existence, with some process philosophers claiming that new possibilities can also be created. (shrink)

This collection of essays explores the metaphysical thesis that the living world is not made up of substantial particles or things, as has often been assumed, but is rather constituted by processes. The biological domain is organised as an interdependent hierarchy of processes, which are stabilised and actively maintained at different timescales. Even entities that intuitively appear to be paradigms of things, such as organisms, are actually better understood as processes. Unlike previous attempts to articulate processual views of biology, which (...) have tended to use Alfred North Whitehead’s panpsychist metaphysics as a foundation, this book takes a naturalistic approach to metaphysics. It submits that the main motivations for replacing an ontology of substances with one of processes are to be found in the empirical findings of science. Biology provides compelling reasons for thinking that the living realm is fundamentally dynamic, and that the existence of things is always conditional on the existence of processes. The phenomenon of life cries out for theories that prioritise processes over things, and it suggests that the central explanandum of biology is not change but rather stability, or more precisely, stability attained through constant change. This edited volume brings together philosophers of science and metaphysicians interested in exploring the consequences of a processual philosophy of biology. The contributors draw on an extremely wide range of biological case studies, and employ a process perspective to cast new light on a number of traditional philosophical problems, such as identity, persistence, and individuality. (shrink)

The triumph of scientific materialism in the Seventeenth Century not only bifurcated nature into matter and mind and primary and secondary qualities, as Alfred North Whitehead pointed out in Science and the Modern World. It divided science and the humanities. The core of science is the effort to comprehend the cosmos through mathematics. The core of the humanities is the effort to comprehend history and human nature through narratives. The life sciences can be seen as the zone (...) in which the conflict between these two very different ways of comprehending the world collide. Evolutionary theory as defended by Schelling developed out of natural history, but efforts have been made to formulate neo-Darwinism through mathematical models. However, it is impossible to eliminate stories from biology. As Stuart Kauffman argued, mathematical models attempt to pre-state all possibilities, but in evolution there can be adjacent possibles that can be embraced by organisms but cannot be pre-stated. To account for such actions it is necessary to tell stories. Mathematics provides analytic precision allowing long chains of deductions, but tends to deny temporal becoming and cannot do justice to the openness of the future, while narratives focus on processes and events, but lack exactitude that would provide precise deductions and predictions. In advancing mathematics adequate to life, Robert Rosen argued that living beings as anticipatory systems must have models of themselves, and strove to develop a form of mathematics able to model life itself. It has been convincingly argued that narratives are central to human self-creation and they are lived out before being explicitly told. Their models of themselves are first and foremost, stories or narratives. If this is the case, might not living beings as biological entities be characterized by proto-stories or narratives in their models of themselves? Biosemiotics, largely inspired by C.S. Peirce, provides a bridge between mathematical and narrative comprehension, conceiving them as different forms of semiosis. The study of life through biosemiotics could reveal how mathematics and narratives can be understood in relation to each other. This could have implications for how we understand science and the humanities and their relationship to each other. In this paper I will examine work in theoretical biology that might advance these efforts. (shrink)

Amid the wide variety of interpretations of quantum mechanics, the notion of a fully coherent ontological interpretation has seen a promising evolution over the last few decades. Despite this progress, however, the old dualistic categorical constraints of subjectivity and objectivity, correlate with the metrically restricted definition of local and global, have remained largely in place – a reflection of the broader, persistent inheritance of these comfortable strictures throughout the evolution of modern science. If one traces this inheritance back to its (...) ancient roots in Plato and Aristotle, it is clear that the coherence, scientific utility, and historical durability of the various natural philosophies that followed have been directly proportional to their commitment, tacit or explicit, to object-oriented realism. As Simondon might put it, it is a commitment to the primacy of individuated substance over the process of individuation. For Whitehead, it is the misplaced assimilation of becoming to being, of potentiality to actuality. Quantum mechanics has challenged this commitment with a combined breadth and depth of force that far exceeds any other theory in the history of science. The theory’s objectively demonstrable empirical application is manifest only by way of a fundamentally subjective, context-dependent mechanism of measurement. More compelling still, actual system states are always actualizations of locally contextualized yet globally conditioned potential system states, such that “globally objective” reality is no longer merely the object of local measurement, but also its product. Thus, any coherent, ontological interpretation of quantum theory must include a conceptual framework by which objectivity and subjectivity, actuality and potentiality, global and local, being and becoming, individuated fact and process of individuation, are no longer understood as merely epistemic, mutually exclusive category pairs descriptive of an already extant, closed reality – but rather as mutually implicative ontological categories explicative of an ontogenetic, open reality-in-process. (shrink)

In their seeking of simplicity, scientists fall into the error of Whitehead's "fallacy of misplaced concreteness." They mistake their abstract concepts describing reality for reality itself--the map for the territory. This leads to dogmatic overstatements, paradoxes, and mysteries such as the deep incompatibility of our two most fundamental physical theories--quantum mechanics and general relativity. To avoid such errors, we should evoke Whitehead's conception of the universe as a universe-in-process, where physical relations perpetually beget new physical relations. Today, the (...) most promising interpretations of quantum mechanics exemplify this Whiteheadian idea, formalizing physical systems, and the universe itself, as ongoing histories of actualizations of potential states, where actual states and potential states exist in mutually implicative relation as two separate categories of reality—an idea first proposed by Aristotle and rehabilitated by Heisenberg. In these interpretations, the classical conception of a history as a derivative story about fundamental physical objects is reversed: the classical physical object becomes the derivative story about fundamental histories of quantum states. The consistent histories interpretation of Robert Griffiths and the decoherent histories interpretation of Roland Omnès are cardinal examples of this approach to quantum mechanics. Another example, the relational realist interpretation, begins with the decoherent histories approach and formalizes it explicitly as a Whiteheadian interpretation, taking his “algebraic method” and applying it to quantum mechanics via algebraic topology. This branch of mathematics can be thought of as a “de-concretized” geometry in that it focuses only on the logical relations among objects and regions (and relations of these relations) rather than the fixed magnitudes of lines, planes, and other such rigid intervals. It has all the robust logical structure of geometry yet allows for an elasticity of relations that makes topological mathematical structures inherently immune misplaced concretization. (shrink)

This paper will suggest that the work Alfred North Whitehead provides a fruitful resource for understanding the philosophical development and validity of scientific concepts through an analysis of their socio-historical location. The paper will address two key elements of Whitehead?s thought. One element is "The Bifurcation of Nature" and the paper traces the influence that this conceptual compromise has had on philosophy and science through its reinforcement of the division between the natural and the social sciences. (...) The second element is the status of abstraction in thought and existence. The article will outline Whitehead?s argument that it is necessary to pay attention to the social environment which both enables and inhibits thought if historical epistemology is to develop novel yet analytically strong concepts. (shrink)

This paper intends to give a philosophical analysis of the concepts of consciousness and rationality, and particularly to display the correlation existing between what is usually called the “normal state of consciousness” and what should be called the “normal state of rationality”. Eventually, it draws consequences for the correlation existing between “altered/aberrant states of consciousness” and “altered/aberrant rationality”. Although it argues from a broad phenomenological perspective, its grounding technicalities belong to the field of process thought, as fleshed out by the (...) later Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947). (shrink)

The authors argue that the consciousness debate inhabits the same problem space today as it did in the 17th century. They attribute the lack of progress to a mindset still polarized by Descartes’ real distinction between mind and body, resulting in a standoff between humanistic and scientistic approaches. They suggest that consciousness can be adequately studied only by a multiplicity of disciplines so that the paramount problem is how to integrate diverse disciplinary perspectives into a coherent metatheory. Process philosophy is (...) well qualified to attempt such a synthesis. The rationale for the volume is summed up in the book's unifying thesis: normal, focal-attentive consciousness is not the sui generis phenomenon it is usually taken to be, but part of a wider spectrum of experience (including marginal, deviant, and non-human experience) that can only be studied by approaches as diverse as phenomenology, psycho- and neuropathology, biology, and zoology. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to introduce, interpret, and develop two incompatible process -ontological theories of personal identity that have received little attention in analytic metaphysics. The first theory derives from the notion of personal identity proposed in Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy, but I interpret this notion differently from previous commentators. The Whiteheadian theory may appeal to those who believe that personal identity involves an entity or entities that are essentially dynamic, but has nothing to do (...) with diachronic objectual identity : the binary equivalence relation that every entity bears to itself, and only to itself, even after undergoing intrinsic change. The Whiteheadian theory may also find favor with those who, like Whitehead, reject the possibility of pure processes and hold that in every becoming, something—which need not be an object, thing, or individual substance—becomes. The second theory derives from the notion of recurrent dynamics presented in Johanna Seibt’s General Process Theory. The Seibtian theory may appeal to those who believe that personal identity involves not only an entity or entities that are essentially dynamic, but also the relation of diachronic objectual identity. The Seibtian theory may also find favor with those who, like Broad and Sellars, find reason to postulate pure processes. (shrink)

Conwy Lloyd Morgan developed an evolutionary philosophy of nature that was a point of departure and major influence on philosophers in the 1920s. He both influenced and was influenced by Alfred North Whitehead. Following Henri Bergson, Lloyd Morgan argued for a place for emergence to supplement Darwin’s thesis of continuity in evolution, developing Herbert Spencer’s thesis that evolution proceeds from the inorganic to the organic to the super-organic, associated with mind and society. In doing so, Lloyd Morgan (...) offered an event ontology and developed the notion of emergence within a monistic framework, giving a central place to “organisms”. While the notion of emergence was marginalized for several decades after the 1930s, it was revived towards the end of the Twentieth Century. While some process philosophers inspired by Whitehead defended panexperientialism in opposition to theories of emergence, recent process philosophers have embraced and further developed the theory of emergence, arguing process philosophy is required to make emergence intelligible. This has led to a new appreciation of the problem of emergence and the relationship between Lloyd Morgan and Whitehead. (shrink)

The Introduction highlights the three main themes of the book: (1) the ontological and epistemological status of everyday human consciousness, (2) the distribution of consciousness in the natural world, and (3) panpsychism. The individual contributions to the book are summarized and related literature is briefly discussed.

C.H. Waddington’s concepts of ‘chreods’ (canalized paths of development) and ‘homeorhesis’ (the tendency to return to a path), each associated with ‘morphogenetic fields’, were conceived by him as a contribution to complexity theory. Subsequent developments in complexity theory have largely ignored Waddington’s work and efforts to advance it. Waddington explained the development of the concept of chreod as the influence on his work of Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy, notably, the concept of concrescence as a self-causing process. (...) Processes were recognized as having their own dynamics, rather than being explicable through their components or external agents. Whitehead recognized the tendency to think only in terms of such ‘substances’ as a bias of European thought, claiming in his own philosophy ‘to approximate more to some strains of Indian, or Chinese, thought, than to western Asiatic, or European, thought.’ Significantly, the theoretical biologist who comes closest to advancing Waddington’s research program, also marginalized, is Mae-Wan Ho. Noting this bias, and embracing Whitehead’s and Waddington’s efforts to free biology from assumptions dominating Western thought to advance an ontology of creative causal processes, I will show how later developments of complexity theory, most importantly, Goodwin’s work on oscillations, temporality and morphogenesis, Vitiello’s dissipative quantum brain dynamics, Salthe’s work on hierarchy theory, biosemiotics inspired by Peirce and von Uexküll, Robert Rosen’s work on anticipatory systems, together with category theory and biomathics, can augment while being augmented by Waddington’s work, while further advancing Mae-Wan Ho’s radical research program with its quest to understand the reality of consciousness. (shrink)

Abstract: The following is an outline of an emerging foundation for science that begins to explain living forms and their patterns of movement beyond the sphere of mechanistic interactions. Employing an event ontology based on a convergence of quantum physics and Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy, coupled with the controversial yet promising theory of formative causation, this development will explore possible influences on the outcomes of events beyond any combination of external forces, laws of Nature, and chance. (...) If it turns out there are no such additional influences--beyond mechanistic causes--it is difficult to see how agency or free will could exist. Assuming agency exists, as Whitehead apparently does, while committing to an event ontology in which process is fundamental leads to interesting questions about the natures of any entities that might participate in events. Furthermore, what might the purposes and agendas of such entities be based upon, beyond memory traces or DNA code? This ontological model, recognizing processes as fundamental, leads to a revised cosmology where the trajectory of a series of events may be due to more than rearrangement of material bits according to external forces and where goal-directed, recurring processes and the emergence of mind are not so surprising. Just as special relativity reduces to classical treatment when speeds slow down, this scientific model for a living world reduces to mechanistic materialism whenever conditions are more limited. Though this development is based on a philosophy of process, there are some dissimilarities with respect to Whitehead’s particular version. (shrink)

This paper draws upon the work of three different philosophers, from America (Thomas Nagel), France (Henri Bergson) and Britain (Alfred North Whitehead), to argue for (i) the reality of subjectivity, (ii) the nonphysical nature of subjective consciousness that is dependent upon but not determined by the physical nature of the body, and (iii) the potential unity of a new concept of nature-on-the-move, as distinct from the bifurcation of nature that views only the objective as real. It then (...) presents arguments for new understandings of positivism, interpretivism and the critical stance, in a unified and more coherent frame, going beyond Habermas, Foucault and Bourdieu, to a more fundamental understanding of the philosophical context, situating IS within a more inclusive concept of nature. (shrink)

The use of the symbol ∨for disjunction in formal logic is ubiquitous. Where did it come from? The paper details the evolution of the symbol ∨ in its historical and logical context. Some sources say that disjunction in its use as connecting propositions or formulas was introduced by Peano; others suggest that it originated as an abbreviation of the Latin word for “or,” vel. We show that the origin of the symbol ∨ for disjunction can be traced to Whitehead (...) and Russell’s pre-Principia work in formal logic. Because of Principia’s influence, its notation was widely adopted by philosophers working in logic (the logical empiricists in the 1920s and 1930s, especially Carnap and early Quine). Hilbert’s adoption of ∨ in his Grundzüge der theoretischen Logik guaranteed its widespread use by mathematical logicians. The origins of other logical symbols are also discussed. (shrink)

"Wir mögen an der Natur beobachten, messen, rechnen, wägen und so weiter, wie wir wollen, es ist doch nur unser Maß und Gewicht, wie der Mensch das Maß der Dinge ist." So schrieb Goethe im Jahre 1807. "Die Natur wird uns keine Sonderbehandlung gewähren, nur weil wir uns als 'Krone der Schöpfung' betrachten... Ich fürchte, sie ist nicht eitel genug, um sich an den Menschen als einen Spiegel zu klammern, in dem allein sie ihre eigene Schönheit sehen kann", schreibt der (...) Physiker Hans-Peter Dürr heute. Diesen beiden Stellungnahmen liegen sehr unterschiedliche Vorstellungen vom Verhältnis Mensch - Natur zugrunde. Wie überhaupt die Naturphilosophie von den Vorsokratikern bis in die Gegenwart die unterschiedlichsten Varianten dieser Beziehung durchgespielt hat. Dass der Mensch sich jedoch in einem weit über die alttestamentarische Vorstellungskraft hinausgehenden Maße die Natur "untertan" gemacht und dabei großräumig zerstört hat, steht außer Zweifel. Im Rahmen der ökologischen Krise muss das Verhältnis zur Natur neu überdacht werden. Das vorliegende Lesebuch, das sich auch als Studientext und Diskussionsgrundlage für Schulen und Hochschulen bestens eignet, bietet den Blick in die Geschichte der Naturphilosophie, der dafür unerlässlich ist: Die Schwierigkeiten, die heute im Umgang mit der Natur auftreten, sind vielfach auf immer noch wirksame traditionelle Naturvorstellungen zurückzuführen. Andererseits gibt es einige eigenständige, bisher noch zu wenig berücksichtigte Ansätze, die zu neuen Konzeptionen anregen können. ------------------------------------------------------------- Inhalt: Vorwort; Einführung: Traditionslinien der Naturphilosophie; Heraklit und die Atomisten Leukipp und Demokrit; Platon und Aristoteles; Christliches Naturverstehen im Mittelalter: Aurelius Augustinus, Thomas von Aquin, Jacob Böhme; Naturvorstellungen in der beginnenden Neuzeit: Galileo Galilei, Rene Descartes, Isaac Newton; Kants Naturbegriff; Goethes Naturforschung; Nachkantische Naturphilosophie: Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel; Geschichte der Natur und Kritik des Naturalismus: Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill; Kritik des Substanzbegriffes, Alfred North Whitehead, Werner Heisenberg, Ilya Prigogine und Isabelle Stengers; Bibliographie. (shrink)

Although the economic thought of Marshall and Pigou was united by ethical positions broadly considered utilitarian, differences in their intellectual milieu led to degrees of difference between their respective philosophical visions. This change in milieu includes the influence of the little understood period of transition from the early idealist period in Great Britain, which provided the context to Marshall’s intellectual formation, and the late British Idealist period, which provided the context to Pigou’s intellectual formation. During this latter period, the pervading (...) Hegelianism and influences of naturalism arising from the ideas of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer were challenged by Hermann Lotze, a key transitional thinker influencing the Neo-Kantian movement, who recognised significant limits of naturalism, on the one hand, and the metaphysical tenor of absolute idealism, on the other, and attempted to provide a balance between the two. The goal of this paper is to make the provisional case for the argument that Pigou’s views on ethics were not only directly influenced by utilitarian thinkers like Mill and Sidgwick, but they were also indirectly influenced by Hermann Lotze, via the influence of the Neo- Kantian movement on late British idealism. To that end, Pigou’s essays in The Trouble with Theism (1908), including his sympathetic consideration of the ethics of Friedrich Nietzsche, reflect the influence of Lotze indirectly through the impact at Cambridge of: James Ward’s critique of associationist psychology, and consideration of the limits of naturalism including the critique of evolutionary ethics; Bertrand Russell’s rejection of neo-Hegelianism and, together with Alfred North Whitehead, the development of Logicism; and G.E. Moore’s critique of utilitarian ethics on the basis of the naturalistic fallacy and the development of his own intuitionist system of ethics. (shrink)

1.Summary The key terms. 1. Key term: ‘Sunyata’. Nagarjuna is known in the history of Buddhism mainly by his keyword ‘sunyata’. This word is translated into English by the word ‘emptiness’. The translation and the traditional interpretations create the impression that Nagarjuna declares the objects as empty or illusionary or not real or not existing. What is the assertion and concrete statement made by this interpretation? That nothing can be found, that there is nothing, that nothing exists? Was Nagarjuna denying (...) the external world? Did he wish to refute that which evidently is? Did he want to call into question the world in which we live? Did he wish to deny the presence of things that somehow arise? My first point is the refutation of this traditional translation and interpretation. 2. Key terms: ‘Dependence’ or ‘relational view’. My second point consists in a transcription of the keyword of ‘sunyata’ by the word ‘dependence’. This is something that Nagarjuna himself has done. Now Nagarjuna’s central view can be named ‘dependence of things’. Nagarjuna is not looking for a material or immaterial object which can be declared as a fundamental reality of this world. His fundamental reality is not an object. It is a relation between objects. This is a relational view of reality. This is the heart of Nagarjuna’s ideas. In the 19th century a more or less unknown Italian philosopher, Vincenzo Goberti, spoke about relations as the mean and as bonds between things. Later, in quantum physics and in the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead we are talking about interactions and entanglements. These ideas of relatedness or connections or entanglements in Eastern and Western modes of thought are the main idea of this essay. Not all entanglements are known. Just two examples: the nature of quantum entanglements is not known. Quantum entanglements should be faster than light. That's why Albert Einstein had some doubts. A second example: the completely unknown connections between the mind and the brain. Other examples are mysterious like the connections between birds in a flock. Some are a little known like gravitational forces. 3. Key terms: ‘Arm in arm’. But Nagarjuna did not stop there. He was not content to repeat this discovery of relational reality. He went on one step further indicating that what is happening between two things. He gave indications to the space between two things. He realized that not the behaviour of bodies, but the behaviour of something between them may be essential for understanding the reality. This open space is not at all empty. It is full of energy. The open space is the middle between things. Things are going arm in arm. The middle might be considered as a force that bounds men to the world and it might be seen as well as a force of liberation. It might be seen as a bondage to the infinite space. 4. Key term: Philosophy. Nagarjuna, we are told, was a Buddhist philosopher. This statement is not wrong when we take the notion ‘philosophy’ in a deep sense as a love to wisdom, not as wisdom itself. Philosophy is a way to wisdom. Where this way has an end wisdom begins and philosophy is no more necessary. A.N. Whitehead gives philosophy the commission of descriptive generalization. We do not need necessarily a philosophical building of universal dimensions. Some steps of descriptive generalization might be enough in order to see and understand reality. There is another criterion of Nagarjuna’s philosophy. Not his keywords ‘sunyata’ and ‘pratityasamutpada’ but his 25 philosophical examples are the heart of his philosophy. His examples are images. They do not speak to rational and conceptual understanding. They speak to our eyes. Images, metaphors, allegories or symbolic examples have a freshness which rational ideas do not possess. Buddhist dharma and philosophy is a philosophy of allegories. This kind of philosophy is not completely new and unknown to European philosophy. Since Plato’s allegory of the cave it is already a little known. (Plato 424 – 348 Befor Current Era) The German philosopher Hans Blumenberg has underlined the importance of metaphors in European philosophy. 5. Key terms: Quantum Physics. Why quantum physics? European modes of thought had no idea of the space between two this. They were bound to the ideas of substance or subject, two main metaphysical traditions of European philosophical history, two main principles. These substances and these subjects are two immaterial bodies which were considered by traditional European metaphysics as lying, as a sort of core, inside the objects or underlying the empirical reality of our world. The first European scientist who saw with his inner eye the forces between two things had been Michael Faraday (1791-1867). Faraday was an English scientist who contributed to the fields of electromagnetism. Later physicists like Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg and others followed his view in modern physics. This is a fifth point of my work. I compare Nagarjuna with European scientific modes of thought for a better understanding of Asia. I do not compare Nagarjuna with European philosophers like Hegel, Heidegger, Wittgenstein. The principles and metaphysical foundations of physical sciences are more representative for European modes of thought than the ideas of Hegel, Heidegger and Wittgenstein and they are more precise. And slowly we are beginning to understand these principles. Let me take as an example the interpretation of quantum entanglement by the British mathematician Roger Penrose. Penrose discusses in the year of 2000 the experiences of quantum entanglement where light is separated over a distance of 100 kilometers and still remains connected in an unknown way. These are well known experiments in the last 30 years. Very strange for European modes of thought. The light should be either separated or connected. That is the expectation most European modes of thought tell us. Aristotle had been the first. Aristotle (384 - 322 Before Current Era) was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and a teacher of Alexander the Great. He told us the following principle as a metaphysical foundation: Either a situation exists or not. There is not a third possibility. Now listen to Roger Penrose: “Quantum entanglement is a very strange type of thing. It is somewhere between objects being separate and being in communication with each other” (Roger Penrose, The Large, the Small and the Human Mind, Cambridge University Press. 2000 page 66). This sentence of Roger Penrose is a first step of a philosophical generalization in a Whiteheadian sense. 6. Key terms: ‘The metaphysical foundations of modern science’ had been examined particularly by three European and American philosophers: E. A. Burtt, A.N. Whitehead and Hans-Georg Gadamer, by Gadamer eminently in his late writings on Heraclitus and Parmenides. I try to follow the approaches of these philosophers of relational views and of anti-substantialism. By ‘metaphysical foundations’ Edwin Arthur Burtt does not understand transcendental ideas but simply the principles that are underlying sciences. -/- 7. Key terms: ‘Complementarity’, ‘interactions’, ‘entanglements’. Since 1927 quantum physics has three key terms which give an indication to the fundamental physical reality: Complementarity, interactions and entanglement. These three notions are akin to Nagarjuna’s relational view of reality. They are akin and they are very precise, so that Buddhism might learn something from these descriptions and quantum physicists might learn from Nagarjuna’s examples and views of reality. They might learn to do a first step in a philosophical generalisation of quantum physical experiments. All of us we might learn how objects are entangled or going arm in arm. [The end of the summary.] -/- « Wenn du gerade das, wodurch auch immer du gefesselt bist, erkennst, wirst du zur Freiheit gelangen. Wenn du diesen speziellen Pfad verwirklichst, gelangst du in einem Leben zur Buddhaschaft. Deswegen verhält es sich folgendermaßen : Wenn plötzlich die Geistesregung « Begierde » enststeht, dann betrachte, ohne ihr zu folgen, direkt ihre Essenz und verweile in dieser Betrachtung, ohne Ablenkungen zuzulassen. Auf diese Weise reinigt Begierde sich selbst, ohne aufgegeben zu werden, da sie ohne Grundlage und Ursprung entsteht. Das wird « Befreiung in sich selbst », « unterscheidende ursprüngliche Weisheit » oder Buddha Amitabha » genannt ». Jigden Sumgön, Licht, das die Dunkelheit durchbricht, Otter Verlag, München 2006, Seite 47, 48 . (shrink)

In the approach that sustains this entire essay, besides my own trajectory as a researcher, the path moves away from the orthodox tradition, the more Kantian one, incorporating in Social Theory a philosophical line for a long time forgotten, by including figures such as Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), the founding father, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), Henri Bergson (1859-1941), Gilbert Simondon (1924-1989), Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) and many others. They would be the famous authors of vitalism, also (...) known as philosophers of life (Lebensphilosophie), philosophers of process, or philosophers of affect. What are the implications when these figures invade the field of Social Theory, which characteristics can be found and, mainly, which advantages when compared with their more orthodox side and their insistent commitment to Kantian philosophy and its transcendental by-products (power, culture, ideology, discourse, etc)? Following this and other questions, six points will be considered as representative of what we call here an Object-Oriented Social Theory (O.O.S.T.). (shrink)

This paper considers imagination a performative expression using an ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Using William James’ notion of “medical materialism” as a critical tool, I turn to the work of autistic poet Tito Mukhopadhyay, demonstrating how disability politics restructures totalizing systems of domination without referring to rights or identity claims.

“I will show you fear in a handful of dust” (T. S. Eliot: The Wasteland) -/- How can dust and water become a conscious living person capable of fear? The way these elements are transformed into life is sketched out, but it's our conscious minds, our intensity of being in a flood of emotions; this is the big problem that science has so far failed to explain. Freya, a biologist, is dissatisfied with the way evolution has no explanation for her (...) own self. Instead, science treats people as robots with any self-awareness considered an illusion. In this way, it destroys our humanity. Max explains that given the chemical basis of life, this is the only possible conclusion. On the brink of accepting this unpalatable fact, she meets with Orin. Together they explore the unthinkable, that the basis of consciousness and self is present in the underlying operations of the universe. These skilfully constructed dialogues explain how the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and panpsychism (primordial universal consciousness) can explain the evolution of not only bodies but also of life, self and consciousness. (shrink)

1.Summary The key terms. 1. Key term: ‘Sunyata’. Nagarjuna (Kumarajiva) is known in the history of Buddhism mainly by his keyword ‘sunyata’. This word is translated into English by the word ‘emptiness’. The translation and the traditional interpretations create the impression that Nagarjuna (Kumarajiva) declares the objects as empty or illusionary or not real or not existing. What is the assertion and concrete statement made by this interpretation? That nothing can be found, that there is nothing, that nothing exists? Was (...) Nagarjuna (Kumarajiva) denying the external world? Did he wish to refute that which evidently is? Did he want to call into question the world in which we live? Did he wish to deny the presence of things that somehow arise? My first point is the refutation of this traditional translation and interpretation. 2. Key terms: ‘Dependence’ or ‘relational view’. My second point consists in a transcription of the keyword of ‘sunyata’ by the word ‘dependence’. This is something that Nagarjuna (Kumarajiva) himself has done. Now Nagarjuna’s (Kumarajiva’s) central view can be named ‘dependence of things’. Nagarjuna (Kumarajiva) is not looking for a material or immaterial object which can be declared as a fundamental reality of this world. His fundamental reality is not an object. It is a relation between objects. This is a relational view of reality. This is the heart of Nagarjuna’s (Kumarajiva’s) ideas. In the 19th century a more or less unknown Italian philosopher, Vincenzo Goberti, spoke about relations as the mean and as bonds between things. Later, in quantum physics and in the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead we are talking about interactions and entanglements. These ideas of relatedness or connections or entanglements in Eastern and Western modes of thought are the main idea of this essay. Not all entanglements are known. Just two examples: the nature of quantum entanglements is not known. Quantum entanglements should be faster than light. That's why Albert Einstein had some doubts. A second example: the completely unknown connections between the mind and the brain. Other examples are mysterious like the connections between birds in a flock. Some are a little known like gravitational forces. 3. Key terms: ‘Arm in arm’. But Nagarjuna (Kumarajiva) did not stop there. He was not content to repeat this discovery of relational reality. He went on one step further indicating that what is happening between two things. He gave indications to the space between two things. He realized that not the behaviour of bodies, but the behaviour of something between them may be essential for understanding the reality. This open space is not at all empty. It is full of energy. The open space is the middle between things. Things are going arm in arm. The middle might be considered as a force that bounds men to the world and it might be seen as well as a force of liberation. It might be seen as a bondage to the infinite space. 4. Key term: Philosophy. Nagarjuna (Kumarajiva), we are told, was a Buddhist philosopher. This statement is not wrong when we take the notion ‘philosophy’ in a deep sense as a love to wisdom, not as wisdom itself. Philosophy is a way to wisdom. Where this way has an end wisdom begins and philosophy is no more necessary. A.N. Whitehead gives philosophy the commission of descriptive generalization. We do not need necessarily a philosophical building of universal dimensions. Some steps of descriptive generalization might be enough in order to see and understand reality. There is another criterion of Nagarjuna’s (Kumarajiva’s) philosophy. Not his keywords ‘sunyata’ and ‘pratityasamutpada’ but his 25 philosophical examples are the heart of his philosophy. His examples are images. They do not speak to rational and conceptual understanding. They speak to our eyes. Images, metaphors, allegories or symbolic examples have a freshness which rational ideas do not possess. Buddhist dharma and philosophy is a philosophy of allegories. This kind of philosophy is not completely new and unknown to European philosophy. Since Plato’s allegory of the cave it is already a little known. (Plato 424 – 348 Befor Current Era) The German philosopher Hans Blumenberg has underlined the importance of metaphors in European philosophy. 5. Key terms: Quantum Physics. Why quantum physics? European modes of thought had no idea of the space between two this. They were bound to the ideas of substance or subject, two main metaphysical traditions of European philosophical history, two main principles. These substances and these subjects are two immaterial bodies which were considered by traditional European metaphysics as lying, as a sort of core, inside the objects or underlying the empirical reality of our world. The first European scientist who saw with his inner eye the forces between two things had been Michael Faraday (1791-1867). Faraday was an English scientist who contributed to the fields of electromagnetism. Later physicists like Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg and others followed his view in modern physics. This is a fifth point of my work. I compare Nagarjuna (Kumarajiva) with European scientific modes of thought for a better understanding of Asia. I do not compare Nagarjuna (kumarajiva) with European philosophers like Hegel, Heidegger, Wittgenstein. The principles and metaphysical foundations of physical sciences are more representative for European modes of thought than the ideas of Hegel, Heidegger and Wittgenstein and they are more precise. And slowly we are beginning to understand these principles. Let me take as an example the interpretation of quantum entanglement by the British mathematician Roger Penrose. Penrose discusses in the year of 2000 the experiences of quantum entanglement where light is separated over a distance of 100 kilometers and still remains connected in an unknown way. These are well known experiments in the last 30 years. Very strange for European modes of thought. The light should be either separated or connected. That is the expectation most European modes of thought tell us. Aristotle had been the first. Aristotle (384 - 322 Before Current Era) was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and a teacher of Alexander the Great. He told us the following principle as a metaphysical foundation: Either a situation exists or not. There is not a third possibility. Now listen to Roger Penrose: “Quantum entanglement is a very strange type of thing. It is somewhere between objects being separate and being in communication with each other” (Roger Penrose, The Large, the Small and the Human Mind, Cambridge University Press. 2000 page 66). This sentence of Roger Penrose is a first step of a philosophical generalization in a Whiteheadian sense. 6. Key terms: ‘The metaphysical foundations of modern science’ had been examined particularly by three European and American philosophers: E. A. Burtt, A.N. Whitehead and Hans-Georg Gadamer, by Gadamer eminently in his late writings on Heraclitus and Parmenides. I try to follow the approaches of these philosophers of relational views and of anti-substantialism. By ‘metaphysical foundations’ Edwin Arthur Burtt does not understand transcendental ideas but simply the principles that are underlying sciences. 7. Key terms: ‘Complementarity’, ‘interactions’, ‘entanglements’. Since 1927 quantum physics has three key terms which give an indication to the fundamental physical reality: Complementarity, interactions and entanglement. These three notions are akin to Nagarjuna’s (Kumarajiva’s) relational view of reality. They are akin and they are very precise, so that Buddhism might learn something from these descriptions and quantum physicists might learn from Nagarjuna’s (Kumarajiva’s) examples and views of reality. They might learn to do a first step in a philosophical generalisation of quantum physical experiments. All of us we might learn how objects are entangled or going arm in arm. [The end of the summary.]. (shrink)