Process Studies

Recent developments in cosmology and particle physics have led to speculation that our universe is merely one of a multitude of universes. While this notion, the multiverse hypothesis, is highly contested as legitimate science, it has nonetheless struck many physicists as a necessary consequence of the effort to construct a final, unified theory. In Process and Reality (1929), his magnum opus, Alfred North Whitehead advanced a cosmology as part of his general metaphysics of process. Part of this project involved a theory of cosmic epochs which bears a remarkable affinity to current cosmological speculation. This paper demonstrates how the basic framework of a multiverse theory is already present in Whitehead’s cosmology and defends the necessity of speculation in the quest for an explanatory description.

Alfred North Whitehead and Emmanuel Levinas are not often considered together in the contemporary philosophical literature. There are clearly sensible reasons for this. While Whitehead is a systematic thinker who explicitly engages in metaphysical philosophy within the tradition of process thought and whodoes not focus primarily on ethics, Levinas is resistant to systematic metaphysics and works within the phenomenological tradition in order to argue that ethicsis first philosophy. Despite these significant points of contrast between Whitehead and Levinas, in this paper we argue that the two might stand as resources for each other in various ways. Since this paper is meant to be explorative and suggestive rather than comprehensive and conclusive, we argue for just two possible points of resonance between these important philosophers: (1) Both Levinas and Whitehead develop an account of selfhood that is intrinsically relational and concerned with responsibility—we term this account “Ethical Subjectivity;” and (2) Both Levinas and Whitehead operate according to what we call a “Hermeneutics of the Other” that stresses epistemic humility and dialogical openness.

Many readers of Process and Reality have felt the absence of a robust theory of efficient causation in Whitehead’s final position. There have been numerousremedies proposed, including Whitehead’s own (in Adventures of Ideas), but all of them fail to make what to me is a crucial distinction between creative and noncreative forms of activity. The activity of the superject, the basis for causal activity, is derived from the creativity of concrescence, but is itself noncreative.It is simply the impress of the past, lacking in itself any genuine novelty.

While efforts to frame a Whiteheadian response to problems of quantum interpretation have looked primarily to the later metaphysical writings, a powerful potential in this regard is contained in the ideas of the philosophy of nature period.