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This book collects several essays on diverse aspects of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy. Ranging from comparative and historical studies to explorations of contemporary influence to possibilities for transforming future inquiry, the topics covered here first and foremost point to the relevance of Whitehead’s philosophy for our time. From this core, the essays in this volume highlight a range of issues to which process philosophy speaks profitably. These include philosophical questions surrounding motion, the notion of life, and aesthetics, as well as the conjunction of process philosophy with political science and with neuroscience.
This volume brings together the proceedings of the “European Summer School for Process Thought”, which took place in Mülheim, Germany, in August 2012. It explores Alfred North Whitehead’s thinking in different fields of science, connecting his philosophical writings with physics, religion, education, psychology and aesthetics. The first part of the book is concerned with Whitehead’s philosophical methodology, discussing a plethora of subjects, including the interdependence between some of Whitehead’s works, the role of logic in his style of argument, concepts of time, the role of symbolism, and the relation between specialized terminology and the colloquial in Whitehead’s philosophy. The second part explores applications for the concepts of Whitehead’s thinking in a broader context. In scientific fields as diverse as physics, theological and classical Chinese religious thought, concepts of education and psychological theories of embodiment, Whitehead’s basic philosophical concepts have been implemented in various different ways. As such, this book holds an interdisciplinary appeal for Whitehead scholars from different scientific backgrounds.
The basic aims of contemporary thinking in education are to cultivate a proper comprehension of the meaning and purpose of education and the role of the teacher, and to develop adequate theoretical and methodological frameworks that combine some of the positive sides of the leading theories, while avoiding their disadvantages. Toward these ends, one excellent candidate for consideration is Alfred North Whitehead’s (1861-1947) process-relational philosophy of education, as set forth in The Aims of Education (1929) and elsewhere. The contributors to this volume analyze Whitehead’s philosophy of education in a detailed and critical fashion, including inquiring into the development of cycle-...
This collection of essays written by leading Whitehead scholars bridges two important philosophical movements in Western philosophy separated by many centuries: Neo-Platonism and Process Philosophy. It focuses on a variety of topics, which can be found in both theories, including creativity, temporality, holism, potentiality, causality, evolution, organism, and multiplicities. They all concur with an integral, natural worldview, showing that wholeness, complexity, and indivisibility are prevalent in Nature. All in all, it brings together Neo-Platonism and Process Philosophy through the impact the former had on the latter. This volume shows that process philosophy can contribute to an integral worldview as it draws on ancient philosophy, setting new paradigms for novel approaches to nature, science and metaphysics.
Many life scientists implicitly assume a materialistic metaphysics that is based on the worldview of the 19th century. This sort of reductionistic metaphysics does not do justice to the complexity of biological phenomena, leaving many features of living processes unexplained. The authors of this book explore the viability of process metaphysics to advance our understanding of fundamental biological concepts such as organism, ontogeny, agency, teleology, environment, and normativity. Based on the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead and other process thinkers, the authors ascribe subjective interiority to all living beings, from unicellular organisms to the most complex animals. This book highlights the uniqueness and intrinsic value of living beings. It presents a new approach to essential dimensions of the phenomenon of life with the aim of opening up new horizons in the thinking of philosophers, philosophers of biology, life scientists, and environmentalists.
Symbolizing Existence deals with the current rapidly happening “deterritorialization” of everything which was once regarded stable and binding. What we today regard as statistically encoded information is capable to explicate and index the entire realm of what can be expressed and represented through a cascade of geometrical, functional, or finally logified schemes. We are currently experiencing a rapid loss of “grounding” of that which we once considered binding in our cultural and intellectual history. How can we obtain an articulate, cultivate way of thinking about “instances” that does not fall back into a schematic model Platonism (thereby falling behind Plato), and that does not remain enmeshed in an Aristotelian realization dynamics with a naturalism organized by original genus, kinds, and specific marks of distinction? The central phenomenon considered was the technological process of doping material: At the quantum level, a particle or its representation, the point, is no longer “that which has no parts” (Euclid).
The new edition of this essential resource contains thousands of edited listings for university and college philosophy programs, research centers, professional organizations, academic journals, and philosophy publishers in both countries. It also includes contact information for over 15,000 philosophers in the U.S. and Canada, and a brief statistical overview of the field.
In Whitehead's Radically Temporalist Metaphysics: Recovering the Seriousness of Time, George Allan argues that Whitehead’s introduction of God into his process metaphysics renders his metaphysics incoherent. This notion of God, who is the reason for both stability and progressive change in the world and who is both the infinite source of novel possibilities and the everlasting repository for the finite values, inserts into a reality that is supposedly composed solely of finite entities an entity both infinite and everlasting. By eliminating this notion of God, Allan draws on the temporalist foundation of Whitehead’s views to recover a metaphysics that takes time seriously. By turning to Whitehead’s later writings, Allan shows how this interpretation is developed into an expanded version of the radically temporalist hypothesis, emphasizing the power of finite entities, individually and collectively, to create, sustain, and enhance the dynamic world of which we are a creative part.