Process Studies

This article undertakes a critical analysis of the adoption of process metaphysics in the field of archaeology and anthropology for the explanation of animism. The field of "new animism" has adopted process metaphysics in order to counter the nineteenth-century definition of animism as epistemological projection toward animism as ontological condition. This shift from epistemology to ontology has the danger of equating animism with process metaphysics as such. By examining the category ofpropositional judgment within Whitehead's metaphysics, I argue that the condition of animism emerges through a judgment of truth, which is aesthetic. It is through Whitehead's integration of propositional judgment within his metaphysical system that one can understand that an ontological approach toward animism is not necessarily opposed to a refiective type of experience.

Charles Hartshorne highlights sympathy as a core element of God's love that is undervalued in Christian theology. A detailed understanding of the relationship between loving God and loving others and loving others as oneself is developed based on God's sympathetic love. A comparison between Hartshorne's sympathetic love and Confucian empathetic ren is possible since both eliminate the estrangement between the subject loving and the subject loved and both expand love to others beyond the limited scope of love in human moral practice.

This article brings together Alfred North Whitehead and Śaṅkara, the eminent eighth-century teacher of Advaita Vedanta, in a dialogue on causation. After arguing that comparative philosophical encounter is possible, the article investigates how Whitehead might benefit Śaṅkara in his critique of the Buddhist doctrine of momentariness and how Śaṅkara may assist Whitehead in responding to criticisms of his own doctrine of causation and his critique of Hume.

Contemporary debates on freedom traverse questions concerning metaphysics, the mind/body relationship, evolution, morality, and religion. Throughout his life, the French philosopher Henri Bergson dealt with these questions from the perspective of time, believing that spatializing these problems led to inadequate solutions. That freedom was a centralizing concern in his oeuvre can be demonstrated in the way he approached these questions in challenging determinism, materialism, mechanism, and finalism. Bergson studies, despite noting the importance of freedom for Bergson, have focussed on intuition and duration as his seminal contributions. Bergson himself never thematized freedom in any specific way, but by working with a positive conception of freedom, as a creation of the new within the fiow of duration, freedom can be seen as a centralizing motif in his work. By clarifying the nature of freedom and its centrality, the ground can be cleared for a Bergsonian intervention into contemporary debates on freedom.

This article explores the relationship between "the God of religion" and "the God of philosophy" via four key concepts: existence, actuality, reality, and mystical experience. The exploration of these key concepts relies heavily on the thought of Charles Hartshorne, but it also relies on crucial insights from Charles Sanders Peirce and Simone Weil.

This article examines the time duration of individual occasions in the light of the discovery that temporal succession produces frequency ratios. The frequency ratios are used to define energy ratios and the quantum. The manifold and the common particles are constructed graphically using the arrows of time, with the mass-ratios of the particles derivable from the graphs. The formal reduction of physics to time compels us to adopt Whitehead's conception of the physical universe as occasions of experience engaged in temporal/causal succession. The relative duration of the constituent occasions of the particles are determined by their graphs. In the final section, a refined account of the mind-brain interaction sequence confirms the duration of a human occasion as one tenth of a second.

In this article, a proposal for Christian theology is constructed in relation to racial injustice. This proposal involves "strategic essentialism," which is informed by feminist theory. This proposal will be explored in light of the views of John Cobb and James Cone.