Process Studies

The incoherence is between Whitehead’s definition of “speculative philosophy” in the first section of Process and Reality's opening chapter which defines metaphysics as transcendental and important moments in later chapters of the book, where he asserts that metaphysical formulations are generalizations of empirical or contingent features. In explicating this inconsistency, the article attends to Whitehead’s definition of metaphysical in distinction from cosmological features, his understandings of the “aeroplane” metaphor, the ontological principle, and especially the initial aim. The article argues that Whitehead’s account of these, and especially the initial aim, should be deleted from neoclassical metaphysics.

This article critically engages Paul Moser’s “Divine Hiddenness Response” to the problem of evil—an approach to have recently come out of traditional free-will theism. I begin with identifying the initial common ground between Mosers thought and process theology that arguably coincides with what can be called the "Four Noble Truths of Christianity. ” Howevery when confronted with the problem of evil that threatens the credibility of these truths. Moser offers an epistemic strategy to address this threat without modifying the classical concept of omnipotence and without having a full-explanation theodicy. I will argue that, far from helping the situation, this approach exacerbates it and is therefore strongly undesirable. In addition, Moser’s assumption of the absence of an adequate theodicy is unjustified in light of the demonstrable merits of process theodicy in accomplishing what omnipotence-preserving approaches cannot do—defusing the defeaters to Christianity’s Four Noble Truths effectively. Thusy it is desirable andy in the absence of better optionsy epistemically obligatory that omnipotence be modified and replaced with a version of God’s perfect power that is more coherent and evidence-based, and is also in line with a significant strand within the Bible.

This article examines the kind of power available to a God worthy of worship, in connection with the prospect for a full theodicy for the world's suffering and evil. It portrays how such a God would seek to relate to people with uncoerced reconciliation to God as a gift having definite expectations of them. To that end, God would be elusive and hidden at times, including regarding ultimate purposes, to minimize the alienation of humans from God. We have no good reason to suppose that God would reveal divine purposes to humans in a way that gives them a full theodicy. Similarly, we have no good reason to acknowledge a certain kind of limitation in divine power over evil, but, given divine goodness, we would expect to have such a clear reason if God had such a limitation. The absence of the latter clear reason counts against a proposed full theodicy.

In this article, I draw attention to some important points of intersection in the work of Henri Bergson and Friedrich Nietzsche. In particular I focus on the overlapping nature of their naturalisms. This proves enlightening for an overall appreciation of their respective philosophical projects but also allows those projects to be inscribed within a broader set of naturalistic traditions to which I think they contribute in interesting ways. I begin by assessing how Bergson's and Nietzsche's general problematics are shaped by the antinaturalistic character of their targets, more specifically the appeals to the immobile and the unconditional that they expose in their critical approaches. I move on to examine the core components of their naturalistic responses, highlighting how both thinkers extend introspective insights about the psyche and the body to make claims regarding broader activity patterns across nature and ground these new monistic continua in their concepts of rhythms (Bergson) and drives (Nietzsche). Lastly; I draw out three important consequences on which these moves jointly converge, with particular emphasis on the “quantal” nature of the ontologies they outline. Moving beyond the comparative perspective, I conclude by using these points to situate Bergson and Nietzsche among three different lineages of naturalism: metaphysical antireductionist, and Epicurean.

The aim of this article is to explore the importance of biological and social networks in Whitehead's philosophy. This exploration will involve a consideration of pluridisciplinarity in Whitehead, including a consideration of the relationship between scientific understanding and philosophical thinking, the question of method in Whitehead's thought, and the crucial distinctions between mechanism and organicism and between nature lifeless and nature alive.