Process Studies

This article examines the thought of the nineteenth-century French thinker Jules Lequyery who influenced Charles Renouvier, William James, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Charles HartshornCy who never ceased to promote Lequyer s importance, refers to the Frenchman in all but five of his twenty-one books. Lequyer is especially noteworthy because of his philosophical defense of human freedom against any sort of determinism

Alfred North Whiteheadfamously compares the philosophical method of knowledge acquisition with the process of flying an airplane. Likewise, "shamanic flight" marks stages of cognitive processing in navigation through perceptible and imperceptible worlds. This article focuses on the cosmovision of the Amazon people Huni Kuin, the Whiteheadian method of imaginative rationalization, and the concept of Amerindian perspectivism. This study also investigates shamanism as an experience of knowledge generation. Furthermore, "shamanic flight, "as an ecstatic technique experienced in many diverse Amerindian rituals, will be explored as a method in the discovery and organization ofnonhuman alterities. Finally, Amazonian-based shamanic epistemology will be discussed within a "multinaturalist" ontology.

This article explores the relationship between three elements—personality character, and script—to interpret the idea of someone's identity, A common way to deal with this relationship is in terms of a duality, but a tripartite analysis works better. The article relies heavily on the thought of Charles Hartshorne, with the aid of Simone Weil and Charles Sanders Peirce

This article takes up the processual account of drive and its derivations in relation to desire and emotion with an aim to explore the continuity of feeling from internal drive to value in the world. A mental state or act of cognition begins with an impulse and the category of instinctual drive. Drive partitions to desire, which is shaped by value. The combined concept/feeling can remain internal as emotion or distribute into action in vocalization or display. The transition in the mental state from drive (need) through desire (want) is constrained by intrinsic value, which accompanies the object outward as extrinsic value (worth). The partly intrapersonal nature of action prevents feeling from externalizing. Feeling drives concepts to completion. Concepts propelled by feeling undergo specification to images and/or objects. The feeling in the action gives intensity to emotion; the concept in the perception gives the quality of emotion. Feeling empowers concepts to finality, as emotions, ideas, or act/objects. In the animal mind, feeling empowers drive categories. In the human mind, feeling distributes as emotion into a diversity of ideas. Feeling unfelt in lower organisms is felt in a human mind according to the degree of individuation.

What is the relation of an earlier being to a later such that given the earlier there is or will be a later? I call this the question of material continuation. To answer, I offer a review of several philosophers thoughts, including those ofZeno, Aristotle, Descartes, Bertrand Russell, Henri Bergson, and Alfred North Whitehead. While there is considerable variety among the ontological views of these philosophers, and indeed some direct opposition of both method and assertion, my review suggests that material continuation may be explained by reference to a principle of continual creation. This principle is reflected in Aristotles unmoved mover, in Descartess account of God's activity in persistence, in Bergsons concept of la duree, and in Whitehead's principle of creativity. It disappears from view in objective methodologies first emerging in pre-Socratic thought, made rigorous by the development of science by the modern philosophers such as Descartes, and realized in the scientist philosophy of Russell. I include some consideration of whether the creative principle might be ideal or divine.

This short article was originally delivered as a lecture in China. The article responds to the question asked in the title with a tentative and qualified optimism based on the thought of Alfred North Whitehead.

This article examines a recently discovered unpublished essay by Alfred North Whitehead titled "Religious Psychology of the Western Peoples." It is the most sustained criticism of religion he would ever make. This essay is put into conversation with a previously published essay by Whitehead titled "An Appeal to Sanity"

Concepts of mutual interdependence, process, creative advance, and God occupy key areas in the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Process metaphysics lays emphasis on a naturalism of rigorous rational and empirical methodology with far-reaching implications. Process thinkers have compared Whiteheadian thought to Buddhism, Christianity, and many other religions. However, African religious beliefs have yet to be considered in this area of study. Based on the gap in the literature, this article attempts to reconcile such seemingly different spheres. First, I offer an account of Whitehead's process metaphysics regarding the concepts mentioned above. Second, I argue that nonconventional sources of African philosophy offer conceptual understandings of philosophies of African groups and their place in the metaphysical debate. Third, I discuss these key areas of process thought in Anlo traditional pragmatic philosophy. I illustrate their like-mindedness with process metaphysics through language, religious rites, and historical accounts. I conclude that, although process philosophy overlaps in prominent areas with Anlo belief systems, questions regarding the causal nature of God distinguish the Anlo conception of divinity from that of process philosophy.

This article is prompted by some ideas from Robert S. Brumbaugh and Alfred North Whitehead, in particular. Four different views of experienced time are considered as well as four different conceptions of the practice of life that are the implications of these views of time. Further, four different famous works of literature are considered in the effort to understand these views of time and their implications for the practice of life.

A. N. Whitehead's approach to physical theorizing contrasts with that of mainstream or official (modern) physics in being centrally concerned with articulating a background explanation of physical facts and phenomena in general that would take the place of the "ether" of classical physics, a project otherwise unpursued by the science in its modern period (though luminaries in the field have occasionally hinted at reviving this kind of explanation under certain constraints). Unlike Einsteins, Whitehead's approach to relativity primarily seeks explanation rather than utility (in formulating laws); also, it avoids the philosophical problems with Einstein's theory alleged by Whitehead and a range of other philosophers. This stops short of a finding as to the comparative worth of Whitehead's alternative basis for quantitative formulations.

This article treats religion as a central concern in Whitehead. His view of rational religion relies primarily on rational inference, not direct intuition. Taking seriously in religion the nonreflective elements in human cognition would not jeopardize, but would strengthen, his treatment of the reflective ones. While religion can certainly include vestiges of human savagery, it also promotes the ascent of humanity beyond social decay and enhances the art of life

It has often been noticed that Platos metaphysical view of being is dipolar. The purpose of the present article is to detail what it means to say that being is dipolar in Plato. Further, I will explore the extent to which dipolarity in Whitehead is indebted to Plato and the extent to which Whitehead's dipolarity is different from Platos. In this regard I will concentrate on Whitehead's recently published Harvard Lectures.

Prey-catching behavior (PCB) in frogs and toads has been the focus of intense neuroethological research from the mid-twentieth century to the present and epitomizes some major themes in science and philosophy during this period. It reflects the movement from simple reflexology to more complex views of instinctive behavior, but it also displays a neural reductionism that denies subjectivity and individual agency The present article engages contemporary PCB research but provides a philosophically more promising picture of it based on Whitehead's nonreductionist "philosophy of organism," which proposes that the flow of events from stimulus to response in organisms of all kinds is mediated by "the intervening touch of mentality " This approach resolves some basic mind-body and mind-nature issues that have long bedeviled modern philosophy and presents an image of a postmodern frog for a constructively postmodern science.

The Extensive Continuum is most often seen as an empty form that awaits the accommodation of actuality. Contrary to this popular interpretation, I argue that extension is completely immanent to actual occasions and their prehensive relations. Whitehead's doctrine of internal relations entails that extension cannot be separated from actual occasions, just as actual occasions cannot be separated from extension. To prehend is to extend. Furthermore, any strict separation of form and actuality is shown to bifurcate nature into publicity and privacy. Only with the immanence of extension is nature truly one.

In "A Sketch of the Past," Virginia Woolf introduces her personal philosophy, her own ontology, based on the idea that all human and nonhuman beings are interconnected in a single work of art. This idea is foregrounded in her novels The Waves, Between the Acts, and the pacifist manifesto Three Guineas, where Woolf fully develops her "ontoethics," which consists in ontological interconnection of human beings and recognition of value of every human and nonhuman being. This article discusses this universal relationality via Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy of organism, which emphasizes the interrelatedness of all constituents of reality and solidarity that springs from this ontological bond.