Basic Ideas of Process Philosophy

1
Basic Ideas of Process Philosophy

• From the writings of
• Alfred North Whitehead
• (1861-1947)

2
Major Publications on Metaphysics

• Science and the Modern World (1925)
• Process and Reality (1929)
• Adventures of Ideas (1933)
• Modes of Thought (1938)

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PROCESS PHILOSOPHY HAS MANY AFFINITIES WITH
AMERICAN PRAGMATISM

• Philosophic systems are fallible.
• An essential test of a philosophic system is its
  applicability
• The elucidation of immediate experience is the
  sole justification for any thought.
• (PR 4)

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The chief danger to philosophy

• Is narrowness in the selection of evidence.
• The fairies dance and Christ is nailed
  to the cross.

5
Key Ideas

• Creativity the ground of all that is and all
  that is possible
• Event (actual occasion) each event is an
  individualization of creativity, a unique point
  of view on the universe
• Eternal objects are possibilities for
  realization in the actual world.

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Actual Occasions

• Actual occasions are not enduring substances
  but processes of becoming.
• Subjects (actual occasions) emerge from the
  world.
• Actual occasions are internally related.

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Actual occasions can have two kinds of perception

• Presentational immediacy (sense perception) is
  based on chains of contiguous events.
• It is generally clear and distinct.

8
Perception in the mode of causal efficacy

• includes the feel of past experiences
• An intuitive sense of connection with the
  surrounding world

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More about actual occasions

• Actual occasions are internally related
• Yet they are self-determining to various
  degrees
• They can be known (objectified) only after they
  perish.

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Actual occasions cont.

• constituted by their feelings (prehensions) of
  past occasions and by their prehensions of
  unrealized possibilities.
• experience their world and are intrinsically
  valuable
• Exist in societies

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Societies

• A society shares a defining characteristic.
• Non-social nexus (groupings of actual occasions)
  possess no defining characteristics.
• Living occasions are members of non-social nexus
  because they are distinguished by their
  conceptual originality.

12
Persons

• When the inheritance of the general
  characteristic in a living nexus is serial, the
  nexus is called a living person.
• Strictly speaking only the occasions within the
  non-social nexus are living.

13
Persons exist at many levels of complexity

• In an animal body such as that of a dog or a
  human being there is an unifying occasion which
  is the final node of inheritance from the
  occasions making up the body and mind.
• This presiding occasion is a mind with some power
  of self-determination.

14
Experience

• Most experience is not conscious
• Language while crucial to thought is not
  essential to it
• Feeling is the fundamental mode of disclosure of
  the world

15
Differences between things

• Things are different due to different
  organization of constituent elements
• There is purposiveness in the natural order a
  striving toward novelty, harmony, complexity and
  intensity of experience

16
God

• God has two aspects
• God as primordial is the unlimited conceptual
  realization of potentiality. God is the lure for
  feeling.

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God as consequent

• God feels the worlds advance.
• The consequent nature of God is conscious and
  changing as the world advances.
• God is the poet of the world, the great
  Companion, the fellow sufferer who understands

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Whitehead and James

• God for Whitehead is similar to James idea of
  God as struggling artist, with whom we are
  co-creators.