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In this highly accessible book, a distinguished philosopher says current focus on the brain conceals the real powers of the mind. Edward Pols revisits one of the basic topics of philosophy: what is the distinction between mind and body and what is the relation between them? He disagrees fundamentally with the many contemporary philosophers who concentrate on the findings of neurophysiology and cognitive science and so look only to the brain for the causes and explanation of mind. Pols concedes the importance of such scientific studies but maintains that they focus on the infrastructure of mind and ignore the momentous difference between the infrastructure and mind itself. Pols calls upon the...
In this brilliant analysis of mind-body problems Edward Pols adds new dimensions to the discussion of basic issues. The prisoner is Socrates, who, in a series of actions involving moral decisions, finds himself under sentence of death, and who has now decided to undergo the sentence rather than accept the opportunity to escape provided by powerful friends. Pols takes as his point of departure Socrates' naïve statement of the contrast between a scientific analysis of a moral action and the point of view taken by the agent himself, and his rejection of the adequacy of the scientific analysis.
In this eloquent and original book, Edward Pols challenges the linguistic consensus that has dominated Anglo-American philosophy in this century. Against the consensus assumption that the only reality question is about the relation between language and the real, he argues that philosophy is about the world and not merely about the propositional structures we use to interpret the world. The heart of his "radical realism" is that the relation between the knower and the real is prior to the relation between language and the real, and that in this prior relation we are capable of knowing directly a reality independent of the human mind.
"Lucas' book competently brings Whitehead's philosophy into dialogue with "analytic" philosophy. This is a topic of great originality and considerable potential importance for the field of philosophy. The writing is forceful, concise, and clear." -- George L. Kline, Bryn Mawr College Lucas treats Whitehead within the framework of major themes in current Anglo-American "analytic" philosophy, viewed against the backdrop of significant historical trends in European and American thought since the Enlightenment. This most misunderstood of twentieth-century philosophers is critically interpreted here. Whitehead had developed 50 years ago some ideas only now emerging in analytic philosophy. Lucas e...
This book offers an interpretation of the basic concepts of process philosophy and outlines a "process theology" based on it that will be especially useful for students of theology, teachers, ministers, and those interested in theological trends.
How can Christians bring about peace and justice in the world, when Christianity seems either to claim the absolute truth about God or to dissolve into "disempowering relativism"? James Will seeks an answer for this crucial question in the spiritual and intellectual life of the church. He challenges the traditional western idea of God as omnipotent and unchanging, instead offering the theory of the universal relationality of God. Writing from the perspective of process theology, Will says that just as God had an impact on the world, so the world has an impact on God. God is related and responsive to the world. In the modern world, where many cultures and belief systems are in contact and often conflict with one another, Will's broadening of the conception of God offers an integration of many cultures and beliefs, recognizing their relatedness without reducing any of them. In this way, Will believes the universal God may bring love and peace to a pluralistic and often divided world.
Edward Pols has made it his purpose in this perceptive study to deal with the aspects of Whitehead's philosophy that belong to traditional metaphysics. Mr. Pols closely examines Process and Reality, Whitehead's chief metaphysical work, and uses Science and the Modern World, Adventures of Ideas, and Modes of Thought to clarify difficulties with some of the doctrines in that work. Mr. Pols's primary concern is with freedom, and he uses this single theme to examine Whitehead's metaphysical system in depth.
Community, like love, is a concept everybody talks about but nobody bothers to define. From the community of scholars to the community of nations, we passionately seek and widely take for granted a quality of interrelatedness that touches a chord deep within each of us whose vibrations we spend little time submitting to critical examination. Frank Kirkpatrick's rigorous and detailed discussion of community places that notion within a discussion that has developed among philosophers over the past 200 years. Beginning with the contractual model of Hobbes and Locke, in which individuals work out rules to control their enforced proximity, he moves on to the more complex, organic model of Marx an...
Alfred North Whitehead's master work, Process and Reality, is intended to extend the cosmological vision of Whitehead in a new direction. By interpreting societies within Whitehead's scheme as structured fields of activity, the author projects a universe of hierarchically ordered fields of activity, up to and including the all-compassing field of activity constituted by the Christian Trinity.