Process Studies

Volume 46, Issue 1, Spring/Summer 2017

Whitehead and Efficient Causation
The Physical as Conceptual Realization

Whitehead’s understanding of efficient causation is developed in reaction against the prevailing worldview of his scientific and philosophical predecessors’ material abstraction, bodily sensationalism, subject-object bifurcation, and partial subjectivism. Whitehead believed these ideas precluded the development of any satisfactory account of causal relation and connectivity. His response is to offer a forensic account of the nature of subjective experience within which causal efficacy could be accommodated. Yet Whitehead’s position has its own problems. In response, this article argues for a primordial basis to causal connectivity and for understanding physical causation in terms of conceptual realization.