Perspective in Whitehead's Metaphysics

Perspective in Whitehead's Metaphysics PDF Author: Stephen David Ross
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780873956581
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Stephen David Ross presents an extensive, detailed, and critical interpretation of Whitehead’s mature thought, emphasizing the fundamental role of perspective in Whitehead’s cosmology, and tracing the conflicts and difficulties therein to tensions involving perspective in relation to other central features of Whitehead’s thought. Ross isolates four principles as having a fundamental role in whitehead’s metaphysics: perspective, cosmology, experience, and mechanical analysis. He argues that many of Whitehead’s difficulties can be eliminated by raising the principle of perspective to prominence and by revising the other central features of Whitehead’s theory accordingly. This book addresses key Whiteheadian texts and secondary interpretations of Whitehead. The discussion ranges over most of Whitehead’s theory in Process and Reality, and offers a number of significant and, in some cases, novel views on different aspects of Whitehead’s theory: perception, prehension, causation, objective immortality, self-causation, the extensive continuum, natural order, possiblity, concreteness, and God. Ross’s concluding suggestions for modifying Whitehead’s system promise to occasion much debate among process philosophers, theologians, and anyone concerned with Whitehead’s thought.

Whitehead's Metaphysics of Extension and Solidarity

Whitehead's Metaphysics of Extension and Solidarity PDF Author: Jorge Luis Nobo
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438414803
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Book Description
At the base of Whitehead's philosophy of organism is a vision of the solidarity of all final actualities. Each actuality is a discrete individual enjoying autonomous self-determination, yet each also requires all other actualities as essential components and partial determinants of its own nature. This vision of universal solidarity, Nobo demonstrates, is the fundamental metaphysical thesis whose truth the categories and principles of Whitehead's philosophy were expressly designed to elucidate. The received interpretations of Whitehead's thought, Nobo shows, have ignored the mutual relevance of the solidarity thesis and the organic categoreal scheme and, for that reason, have grossly misrepresented many of Whitehead's most important metaphysical doctrines. Contending that the difficult tasks of interpreting and developing Whitehead's metaphysics presuppose an understanding of the solidarity thesis, Nobo explores that thesis and the metaphysical categories and principles most relevant to its elucidation. In the process, he not only corrects many misinterpretations but also develops important metaphysical doctrines that Whitehead neglected to make sufficiently explicit in his published writings. It is precisely in terms of the neglected doctrine of eternal extensive continuity, Nobo demonstrates, that the more puzzling aspects of the solidarity thesis are satisfactorily explained. He then shows that the extensional solidarity of all final actualities is an essential ingredient of the generalized conception of experience on which Whitehead builds his ontology, cosmology, and epistemology.

Without Criteria

Without Criteria PDF Author: Steven Shaviro
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262517973
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
A Deleuzian reading of Whitehead and a Whiteheadian reading of Deleuze open the possibility of a critical aesthetics of contemporary culture. In Without Criteria, Steven Shaviro proposes and explores a philosophical fantasy: imagine a world in which Alfred North Whitehead takes the place of Martin Heidegger. What if Whitehead, instead of Heidegger, had set the agenda for postmodern thought? Heidegger asks, “Why is there something, rather than nothing?” Whitehead asks, “How is it that there is always something new?” In a world where everything from popular music to DNA is being sampled and recombined, argues Shaviro, Whitehead's question is the truly urgent one. Without Criteria is Shaviro's experiment in rethinking postmodern theory, especially the theory of aesthetics, from a point of view that hearkens back to Whitehead rather than Heidegger. In working through the ideas of Whitehead and Deleuze, Shaviro also appeals to Kant, arguing that certain aspects of Kant's thought pave the way for the philosophical “constructivism” embraced by both Whitehead and Deleuze. Kant, Whitehead, and Deleuze are not commonly grouped together, but the juxtaposition of them in Without Criteria helps to shed light on a variety of issues that are of concern to contemporary art and media practices.

Principia Mathematica

Principia Mathematica PDF Author: Alfred North Whitehead
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Logic, Symbolic and mathematical
Languages : en
Pages : 696

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Book Description


The Concept of Nature

The Concept of Nature PDF Author: Alfred North Whitehead
Publisher: Cosimo, Inc.
ISBN: 1602062137
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
Hailed as "one of the most valuable books on the relation of philosophy and science," Alfred North Whitehead's The Concept of Nature, first published in 1920, was an important contribution to the development of philosophic naturalism. Examining the fundamental problems of substance, space, and time, Whitehead assesses the impact of Einstein's theories as well as the then-recent findings of modern physics on the concept of nature. For students and teachers of natural philosophy, this is essential reading. English mathematician and philosopher ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD (1861-1947) contributed significantly to 20th-century logic and metaphysics. With Bertrand Russell he cowrote the landmark Principia Mathematica, and also authored An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge, The Function of Reason, and Process and Reality.

Adventures of Ideas

Adventures of Ideas PDF Author: Alfred North Whitehead
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0029351707
Category : Civilization
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
History of the human race from the point of view of mankind's changing ideas--sociological, cosmological, philosophica.

The Emergence of Whitehead's Metaphysics, 1925-1929

The Emergence of Whitehead's Metaphysics, 1925-1929 PDF Author: Lewis S. Ford
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438402996
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
A breathtaking detective story, this book charts the adventure of Whitehead's ideas in a remarkably detailed and careful reconstruction of his metaphysical views. Incorporating heretofore unpublished material from students' notes and correspondence, Professor Ford analyzes the order of composition of various portions of Whitehead's books, principally Science and the Modern World, Religion in the Making, and Process and Reality. Ford's reconstructive method is perfectly tailored to his subject, for Whitehead revised by inserting new material rather than altering or deleting the old. Thus Ford is able to date the sequence of the composition of many passages. In distinguishing these layers of articulation, he has pushed the techniques of "higher criticism" beyond anything the French structuralists and deconstructionists have dreamed of and chronicled an extraordinary intellectual biography.

Process Cosmology

Process Cosmology PDF Author: Andrew M. Davis
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030813967
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 460

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Book Description
This book newly articulates the international and interdisciplinary reach of Whitehead’s organic process cosmology for a variety of topics across science and philosophy, and in dialogue with a variety historical and contemporary voices. Integrating Whitehead’s thought with the insights of Bergson, James, Pierce, Merleau-Ponty, Descola, Fuchs, Hofmann, Grof and many others, contributors from around the world reveal the relevance of process philosophy to physics, cosmology, astrobiology, ecology, metaphysics, aesthetics, psychedelics, and religion. A global collection, this book expresses multivocal possibilities for the development of process cosmology after Whitehead.

Whitehead and the Pittsburgh School

Whitehead and the Pittsburgh School PDF Author: Lisa Landoe Hedrick
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793646589
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
Whitehead and the Pittsburgh School: Preempting the Problem of Intentionality proposes a revisionary history of the relationship between Alfred North Whitehead and analytic philosophy, as well as a constructive proposal for how thinking with Whitehead can help disabuse analytic philosophy of the problem of intentionality. Lisa Landoe Hedrick defines “analytic” philosophy as primarily the intellectual tradition that runs from Gottlob Frege to Bertrand Russell to Wilfrid Sellars, or, geographically speaking, from Vienna to Cambridge to Pittsburgh between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As key members of the Pittsburgh School of philosophy, Robert Brandom and John McDowell pick up the Sellarsian project of reconciling nature and normativity in different ways, yet each of them presupposes a problematic relationship between language and the world precisely bequeathed to them by an implicit metaphysics of subjecthood that characterized analytic thinkers of the early twentieth century. Hedrick both investigates Whitehead’s published and archived critiques of early analytic thought—as an extension of a wider critique of modern philosophy—and employs Whitehead to reimagine nature and normativity after the problem of intentionality by way of his aesthetics of symbolism. This book thereby builds upon a burgeoning effort among philosophers to interface process and analytic thought, but it is the first to focus on contemporary analytic thinkers.

Perspective in Whitehead's Metaphysics

Perspective in Whitehead's Metaphysics PDF Author: Stephen David Ross
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780873956581
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Stephen David Ross presents an extensive, detailed, and critical interpretation of Whitehead’s mature thought, emphasizing the fundamental role of perspective in Whitehead’s cosmology, and tracing the conflicts and difficulties therein to tensions involving perspective in relation to other central features of Whitehead’s thought. Ross isolates four principles as having a fundamental role in whitehead’s metaphysics: perspective, cosmology, experience, and mechanical analysis. He argues that many of Whitehead’s difficulties can be eliminated by raising the principle of perspective to prominence and by revising the other central features of Whitehead’s theory accordingly. This book addresses key Whiteheadian texts and secondary interpretations of Whitehead. The discussion ranges over most of Whitehead’s theory in Process and Reality, and offers a number of significant and, in some cases, novel views on different aspects of Whitehead’s theory: perception, prehension, causation, objective immortality, self-causation, the extensive continuum, natural order, possiblity, concreteness, and God. Ross’s concluding suggestions for modifying Whitehead’s system promise to occasion much debate among process philosophers, theologians, and anyone concerned with Whitehead’s thought.

Physics of the World-Soul

Physics of the World-Soul PDF Author: Matthew Segall
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781948609364
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description