• Whitehead Adventures Of Ideas

.,.,.SignatureAlfred North Whitehead (15 February 1861 – 30 December 1947) was an English mathematician and philosopher. He is best known as the defining figure of the philosophical school known as, which today has found application to a wide variety of disciplines, including ecology, theology, education, physics, biology, economics, and psychology, among other areas.In his early career Whitehead wrote primarily on mathematics, logic, and physics. His most notable work in these fields is the three-volume (1910–1913), which he wrote with former student. Principia Mathematica is considered one of the twentieth century's most important works in mathematical logic, and placed 23rd in a list of the top 100 English-language nonfiction books of the twentieth century by.Beginning in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Whitehead gradually turned his attention from mathematics to, and finally to.

He developed a comprehensive metaphysical system which radically departed from most of. Whitehead argued that reality consists of rather than material objects, and that processes are best defined by their relations with other processes, thus rejecting the theory that reality is fundamentally constructed by bits of matter that exist independently of one another. Today Whitehead's philosophical works – particularly – are regarded as the foundational texts of process philosophy.Whitehead's process philosophy argues that 'there is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have consequences for the world around us.' For this reason, one of the most promising applications of Whitehead's thought in recent years has been in the area of and pioneered. Whewell's Court north range at,.

Whitehead spent thirty years at Trinity, five as a student and twenty-five as a senior lecturer.Alfred North Whitehead was born in, England, in 1861. His father, Alfred Whitehead, was a minister and schoolmaster of, a school for boys established by Thomas Whitehead, Alfred North's grandfather. Whitehead himself recalled both of them as being very successful schools, but that his grandfather was the more extraordinary man. Whitehead's mother was Maria Sarah Whitehead, formerly Maria Sarah Buckmaster. Whitehead was apparently not particularly close with his mother, as he never mentioned her in any of his writings, and there is evidence that Whitehead's wife, Evelyn, had a low opinion of her.Whitehead was educated at, one of the best in the country. His childhood was described as over-protected, but when at school he excelled in sports and mathematics and was head of his class.In 1880, Whitehead began attending, and studied mathematics.

His academic advisor was. He earned his BA from Trinity in 1884, and graduated as fourth. Career Elected a of Trinity in 1884, Whitehead would teach and write on and at the college until 1910, spending the 1890s writing his Treatise on Universal Algebra (1898), and the 1900s collaborating with his former pupil, on the first edition of. He was a.In 1890, Whitehead married Evelyn Wade, an Irish woman raised in France; they had a daughter, Jessie Whitehead, and two sons, and Eric Whitehead.

Eric Whitehead died in action at the age of 19, while serving in the during World War I. Alfred's brother Henry became Bishop of Madras, and wrote the closely observed ethnographic account (Calcutta: Association Press, 1921), which is still of value today. Russell was a student of Whitehead's at Trinity College, and a longtime collaborator and friend.In 1910, Whitehead resigned his senior lectureship in mathematics at Trinity and moved to London without first lining up another job. Richard Rummell's 1906 watercolor landscape view of, facing northeast.

Whitehead taught at Harvard from 1924 to 1937.Whitehead did not begin his career as a. In fact, he never had any formal training in philosophy beyond his. Early in his life he showed great interest in and respect for philosophy and, but it is evident that he considered himself a rank amateur. In one letter to his friend and former student, after discussing whether science aimed to be explanatory or merely descriptive, he wrote: 'This further question lands us in the ocean of metaphysic, onto which my profound ignorance of that science forbids me to enter.' Ironically, in later life Whitehead would become one of the 20th century's foremost.However, interest in metaphysics – the philosophical investigation of the nature of the universe and existence – had become unfashionable by the time Whitehead began writing in earnest about it in the 1920s.

The ever-more impressive accomplishments of science had led to a general consensus in academia that the development of comprehensive metaphysical systems was a waste of time because they were not subject to.Whitehead was unimpressed by this objection. In the notes of one of his students for a 1927 class, Whitehead was quoted as saying: 'Every scientific man in order to preserve his reputation has to say he dislikes metaphysics. What he means is he dislikes having his metaphysics criticized.' In Whitehead's view, scientists and philosophers make metaphysical assumptions about how the universe works all the time, but such assumptions are not easily seen precisely because they remain unexamined and unquestioned.

While Whitehead acknowledged that 'philosophers can never hope finally to formulate these metaphysical,' he argued that people need to continually re-imagine their basic assumptions about how the universe works if philosophy and science are to make any real progress, even if that progress remains permanently. For this reason Whitehead regarded metaphysical investigations as essential to both good science and good philosophy.Perhaps foremost among what Whitehead considered faulty metaphysical assumptions was the idea that reality is fundamentally constructed of bits of matter that exist totally independently of one another, which he rejected in favor of an -based or 'process' in which events are primary and are fundamentally interrelated and dependent on one another.

He also argued that the most basic elements of reality can all be regarded as experiential, indeed that everything is constituted by its. He used the term 'experience' very broadly, so that even inanimate processes such as electron collisions are said to manifest some degree of experience. In this, he went against Descartes' separation of two different kinds of real existence, either exclusively material or else exclusively mental. Whitehead referred to his metaphysical system as 'philosophy of organism', but it would become known more widely as '.' Whitehead's philosophy was highly original, and soon garnered interest in philosophical circles. After publishing The Concept of Nature in 1920, he served as president of the from 1922 to 1923, and was quoted as saying that Whitehead was 'the best philosopher writing in English.'

So impressive and different was Whitehead's philosophy that in 1924 he was invited to join the faculty at as a professor of philosophy at 63 years of age. Eckhart Hall at the. Beginning with the arrival of in 1927, Chicago's become closely associated with Whitehead's thought for about thirty years.This is not to say that Whitehead's thought was widely accepted or even well understood. His philosophical work is generally considered to be among the most difficult to understand in all of the. Even professional philosophers struggled to follow Whitehead's writings. One famous story illustrating the level of difficulty of Whitehead's philosophy centres around the delivery of Whitehead's in 1927–28 – following 's lectures of the year previous – which Whitehead would later publish as:Eddington was a marvellous popular lecturer who had enthralled an audience of 600 for his entire course. The same audience turned up to Whitehead's first lecture but it was completely unintelligible, not merely to the world at large but to the elect.

My father remarked to me afterwards that if he had not known Whitehead well he would have suspected that it was an imposter making it up as he went along. The audience at subsequent lectures was only about half a dozen in all.Indeed, it may not be inappropriate to speculate that some fair portion of the respect generally shown to Whitehead by his philosophical peers at the time arose from their sheer bafflement.

The Chicago once remarked of Whitehead's 1926 book Religion in the Making: 'It is infuriating, and I must say embarrassing as well, to read page after page of relatively familiar words without understanding a single sentence.' However, Mathews' frustration with Whitehead's books did not negatively affect his interest. In fact, there were numerous philosophers and theologians at Chicago's Divinity School that perceived the importance of what Whitehead was doing without fully grasping all of the details and implications.

In 1927 they invited one of America's only Whitehead experts, to Chicago to give a lecture explaining Whitehead's thought. Wieman's lecture was so brilliant that he was promptly hired to the faculty and taught there for twenty years, and for at least thirty years afterward Chicago's Divinity School was closely associated with Whitehead's thought.Shortly after Whitehead's book appeared in 1929, Wieman famously wrote in his 1930 review:Not many people will read Whitehead's recent book in this generation; not many will read it in any generation. But its influence will radiate through concentric circles of popularization until the common man will think and work in the light of it, not knowing whence the light came. After a few decades of discussion and analysis one will be able to understand it more readily than can now be done.Wieman's words proved prophetic.

Though Process and Reality has been called 'arguably the most impressive single metaphysical text of the twentieth century,' it has been little-read and little-understood, partly because it demands – as Isabelle Stengers puts it – 'that its readers accept the adventure of the questions that will separate them from every consensus.' Whitehead questioned western philosophy's most dearly held assumptions about how the universe works, but in doing so he managed to anticipate a number of 21st century scientific and philosophical problems and provide novel solutions. Whitehead's conception of reality Whitehead was convinced that the scientific notion of was misleading as a way of describing the ultimate nature of things.

In his 1925 book Science and the Modern World, he wrote thatThere persists. a fixed scientific which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute, or material, spread through space in a flux of configurations. In itself such a material is senseless, valueless, purposeless. It just does what it does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of its being.

It is this assumption that I call 'scientific materialism.' Also it is an assumption which I shall challenge as being entirely unsuited to the scientific situation at which we have now arrived.In Whitehead's view, there are a number of problems with this notion of 'irreducible brute matter'. First, it obscures and minimizes the importance of change. By thinking of any material thing (like a rock, or a person) as being fundamentally the same thing throughout time, with any changes to it being secondary to its ', scientific materialism hides the fact that nothing ever stays the same. For Whitehead, change is fundamental and inescapable; he emphasizes that 'all things flow.' In Whitehead's view, then, concepts such as 'quality', 'matter', and 'form' are problematic.

These 'classical' concepts fail to adequately account for change, and overlook the active and experiential nature of the most basic elements of the world. They are useful, but are not the world's basic building blocks. What is ordinarily conceived of as a single person, for instance, is philosophically described as a continuum of overlapping. After all, people change all the time, if only because they have aged by another second and had some further experience. These occasions of experience are logically distinct, but are progressively connected in what Whitehead calls a 'society' of events. By assuming that enduring objects are the most real and fundamental things in the universe, materialists have mistaken the abstract for the (what Whitehead calls the ').To put it another way, a thing or person is often seen as having a 'defining ' or a 'core ' that is unchanging, and describes what the thing or person really is. In this way of thinking, things and people are seen as fundamentally the same through time, with any changes being qualitative and secondary to their core identity (e.g.

'Mark's hair has turned gray as he has gotten older, but he is still the same person'). But in Whitehead's cosmology, the only fundamentally existent things are discrete 'occasions of experience' that overlap one another in time and space, and jointly make up the enduring person or thing.

On the other hand, what ordinary thinking often regards as 'the essence of a thing' or 'the identity/core of a person' is an abstract generalization of what is regarded as that person or thing's most important or salient features across time. Identities do not define people, people define identities.

Everything changes from moment to moment, and to think of anything as having an 'enduring essence' misses the fact that 'all things flow', though it is often a useful way of speaking.Whitehead pointed to the limitations of language as one of the main culprits in maintaining a materialistic way of thinking, and acknowledged that it may be difficult to ever wholly move past such ideas in everyday speech. After all, each moment of each person's life can hardly be given a different proper name, and it is easy and convenient to think of people and objects as remaining fundamentally the same things, rather than constantly keeping in mind that each thing is a different thing from what it was a moment ago. Yet the limitations of everyday living and everyday speech should not prevent people from realizing that 'material substances' or 'essences' are a convenient generalized description of a continuum of particular, concrete processes. No one questions that a ten-year-old person is quite different by the time he or she turns thirty years old, and in many ways is not the same person at all; Whitehead points out that it is not philosophically or sound to think that a person is the same from one second to the next.

Was one of Whitehead's primary influences. In the preface to, Whitehead wrote: 'The writer who most fully anticipated the main positions of the is John Locke in his.'

A second problem with materialism is that it obscures the importance of relations. It sees every object as distinct and discrete from all other objects. Each object is simply an inert clump of matter that is only externally related to other things.

The idea of matter as primary makes people think of objects as being fundamentally separate in time and space, and not necessarily related to anything. But in Whitehead's view, relations take a primary role, perhaps even more important than the relata themselves.

A student taking notes in one of Whitehead's fall 1924 classes wrote that, 'Reality applies to connections, and only relatively to the things connected. (A) is real for (B), and (B) is real for (A), but they are not absolutely real independent of each other.' In fact, Whitehead describes any entity as in some sense nothing more and nothing less than the sum of its relations to other entities – its synthesis of and reaction to the world around it. A real thing is just that which forces the rest of the to in some way conform to it; that is to say, if theoretically a thing made strictly no difference to any other entity (i.e. It was not related to any other entity), it could not be said to really exist. Relations are not secondary to what a thing is, they are what the thing is.It must be emphasizedhowever, that an entity is not merely a sum of its relations, but also a valuation of them and reaction to them.

Whitehead Adventures Of Ideas

For Whitehead, is the absolute principle of existence, and every entity (whether it is a human being, a tree, or an ) has some degree of novelty in how it responds to other entities, and is not fully determined by or laws. Of course, most entities do not have. As a human being's actions cannot always be predicted, the same can be said of where a tree's roots will grow, or how an electron will move, or whether it will rain tomorrow.

Moreover, inability to predict an electron's movement (for instance) is not due to faulty understanding or inadequate technology; rather, the fundamental creativity/freedom of all entities means that there will always remain phenomena that are unpredictable.The other side of creativity/freedom as the absolute principle is that every entity is constrained by the social structure of existence (i.e., its relations) – each actual entity must conform to the settled conditions of the world around it. Freedom always exists within limits. But an entity's uniqueness and individuality arise from its own self-determination as to just how it will take account of the world within the limits that have been set for it.In summary, Whitehead rejects the idea of separate and unchanging bits of matter as the most basic building blocks of reality, in favor of the idea of reality as interrelated events in process.

He conceives of reality as composed of processes of dynamic 'becoming' rather than static 'being', emphasizing that all physical things change and evolve, and that changeless 'essences' such as matter are mere abstractions from the interrelated events that are the final real things that make up the world. Theory of perception Since Whitehead's described a universe in which all entities, he needed a new way of describing that was not limited to living, beings.

The term he coined was 'prehension', which comes from the Latin prehensio, meaning 'to seize'. The term is meant to indicate a kind of perception that can be conscious or unconscious, applying to people as well as. It is also intended to make clear Whitehead's rejection of the theory of representative perception, in which the only has private ideas about other entities. For Whitehead, the term 'prehension' indicates that the perceiver actually incorporates aspects of the perceived thing into itself. In this way, entities are constituted by their perceptions and relations, rather than being independent of them.

Further, Whitehead regards perception as occurring in two modes, causal efficacy (or 'physical prehension') and presentational immediacy (or 'conceptual prehension').Whitehead describes causal efficacy as 'the experience dominating the primitive living organisms, which have a sense for the fate from which they have emerged, and the fate towards which they go.' It is, in other words, the sense of relations between entities, a feeling of being influenced and affected by the surrounding environment, unmediated by the. Presentational immediacy, on the other hand, is what is usually referred to as 'pure sense perception', unmediated by any causal or, even interpretation.

In other words, it is pure appearance, which may or may not be delusive (e.g. Mistaking an image in a mirror for 'the real thing').In higher organisms (like people), these two modes of perception combine into what Whitehead terms 'symbolic reference', which links appearance with causation in a process that is so automatic that both people and animals have difficulty refraining from it. By way of illustration, Whitehead uses the example of a person's encounter with a chair. An ordinary person looks up, sees a colored shape, and immediately infers that it is a chair.

However, an artist, Whitehead supposes, 'might not have jumped to the notion of a chair', but instead 'might have stopped at the mere contemplation of a beautiful color and a beautiful shape.' This is not the normal human reaction; most people place objects in categories by habit and instinct, without even thinking about it. Moreover, animals do the same thing. Using the same example, Whitehead points out that a dog 'would have acted immediately on the hypothesis of a chair and would have jumped onto it by way of using it as such.'

In this way symbolic reference is a fusion of pure sense perceptions on the one hand and causal relations on the other, and that it is in fact the causal relationships that dominate the more basic mentality (as the dog illustrates), while it is the sense perceptions which indicate a higher grade mentality (as the artist illustrates). Evolution and value Whitehead believed that when asking questions about the basic facts of existence, questions about can never be fully escaped. This is borne out in his thoughts on, or the hypothetical natural process by which life arises from simple organic compounds.Whitehead makes the startling observation that 'life is comparatively deficient in survival value.' If humans can only exist for about a hundred years, and rocks for eight hundred million, then one is forced to ask why complex organisms ever evolved in the first place; as Whitehead humorously notes, 'they certainly did not appear because they were better at that game than the rocks around them.' He then observes that the mark of higher forms of life is that they are actively engaged in modifying their environment, an activity which he theorizes is directed toward the three-fold goal of living, living well, and living better. In other words, Whitehead sees life as directed toward the purpose of increasing its own satisfaction. Without such a goal, he sees the rise of life as totally unintelligible.For Whitehead, there is no such thing as wholly inert.

Instead, all things have some measure of freedom or, however small, which allows them to be at least partly self-directed. The coined the term ' (the idea that all entities experience) to describe Whitehead's view, and to distinguish it from (the idea that all matter has ). Rescher is a proponent of both Whiteheadian and American.Historically Whitehead's work has been most influential in the field of. The most important early proponent of Whitehead's thought in a context was, who spent a semester at as Whitehead's teaching assistant in 1925, and is widely credited with developing Whitehead's into a full-blown.

Other notable process theologians include, and.Process theology typically stresses God's relational nature. Rather than seeing God as or emotionless, process theologians view God as 'the fellow sufferer who understands', and as the being who is supremely affected by temporal events. Hartshorne points out that people would not praise a human ruler who was unaffected by either the joys or sorrows of his followers – so why would this be a praise-worthy quality in God?

Instead, as the being who is most affected by the world, God is the being who can most appropriately respond to the world. However, process theology has been formulated in a wide variety of ways. Robert Mesle, for instance, advocates a 'process naturalism', i.e. A process theology without God.In fact, process theology is difficult to define because process theologians are so diverse and in their views and interests. Cobb is a process theologian who has also written books on biology and economics.

Roland Faber and Catherine Keller integrate Whitehead with, and theory. Was both a theologian and a. Writes on theology and political theory. In Syntheism - Creating God in The Internet Age, futurologists and repeatedly credit Whitehead for the process theology they see rising out of the expected to dominate the digital era.Process philosophy is even more difficult to pin down than process theology.

In practice, the two fields cannot be neatly separated. The 32-volume series in constructive postmodern thought edited by process philosopher and theologian displays the range of areas in which different process philosophers work, including physics, ecology, medicine, public policy, nonviolence, politics, and psychology.One philosophical school which has historically had a close relationship with process philosophy is American. Whitehead himself thought highly of and, and acknowledged his indebtedness to them in the preface to. Charles Hartshorne (along with ) edited the collected papers of, one of the founders of pragmatism. Noted was in turn a student of Hartshorne. Today, is one example of a philosopher who advocates both process philosophy and pragmatism.In addition, while they might not properly be called process philosophers, Whitehead has been influential in the philosophy of,.

Science. Bohm is one example of a scientist influenced by Whitehead's philosophy.Scientists of the early 20th century for whom Whitehead's work has been influential include physical chemist, biologist, and geneticists and.dedicated his 'Explorations in Personality' to Whitehead, a contemporary at Harvard.In physics, articulated a view that might perhaps be regarded as dual to 's. It has been severely criticized. Yutaka Tanaka suggested that the disagrees with experimental findings, and proposed that Einstein's work does not actually refute Whitehead's formulation.

Whitehead's view has now been rendered obsolete, with the discovery of, phenomena observed locally that largely violate the kind of local flatness of space that Whitehead assumes. Consequently, Whitehead's cosmology must be regarded as a local approximation, and his assumption of a uniform spatio-temporal geometry, Minkowskian in particular, as an often-locally-adequate approximation. An exact replacement of Whitehead's cosmology would need to admit a Riemannian geometry. Also, although Whitehead himself gave only secondary consideration to, his of processes has proved attractive to some physicists in that field. And are among those whose work has been influenced by Whitehead.In the 21 st century, Whiteheadian thought is still a stimulating influence: and Hank Keeton's Physics and Whitehead (2004) and Michael Epperson's Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (2004) and Foundations of Relational Realism: A Topological Approach to Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Nature (2013), aim to offer Whiteheadian approaches to. Henning, Adam Scarfe, and 's Beyond Mechanism (2013) and 's Science Set Free (2012) are examples of Whiteheadian approaches to biology.Ecology, economy, and sustainability. Theologian, philosopher, and environmentalist founded the in with in 1973, and is often regarded as the preeminent scholar in the field of and.One of the most promising applications of Whitehead's thought in recent years has been in the area of civilization, and.'

Because Whitehead's holistic of value lends itself so readily to an ecological point of view, many see his work as a promising alternative to the traditional worldview, providing a detailed metaphysical picture of a world constituted by a web of interdependent relations.' This work has been pioneered by, whose book Is It Too Late? A Theology of Ecology (1971) was the first single-authored book in environmental ethics. Cobb also co-authored a book with leading and entitled For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future (1989), which applied Whitehead's thought to, and received the for Ideas Improving World Order. Cobb followed this with a second book, Sustaining the Common Good: A Christian Perspective on the Global Economy (1994), which aimed to challenge 'economists' zealous faith in the great god of growth.'

Education Whitehead is widely known for his influence in. His philosophy inspired the formation of the Association for Process Philosophy of Education (APPE), which published eleven volumes of a journal titled Process Papers on and education from 1996 to 2008. Whitehead's theories on education also led to the formation of new modes of learning and new models of teaching.One such model is the ANISA model developed by Daniel C. Jordan, which sought to address a lack of understanding of the nature of people in current education systems. As Jordan and Raymond P.

Shepard put it: 'Because it has not defined the nature of man, education is in the untenable position of having to devote its energies to the development of curricula without any coherent ideas about the nature of the creature for whom they are intended.' Another model is the FEELS model developed by Xie Bangxiu and deployed successfully in China. 'FEELS' stands for five things in curriculum and education: Flexible-goals, Engaged-learner, Embodied-knowledge, Learning-through-interactions, and Supportive-teacher. It is used for understanding and evaluating educational curriculum under the assumption that the purpose of education is to 'help a person become whole.' This work is in part the product of cooperation between Chinese government organizations and the Institute for the Postmodern Development of China.Whitehead's philosophy of education has also found institutional support in Canada, where the created a Process Philosophy Research Unit and sponsored several conferences on process philosophy and education. Howard Woodhouse at the University of Saskatchewan remains a strong proponent of Whiteheadian education.Three recent books which further develop Whitehead's philosophy of education include: Modes of Learning: Whitehead's Metaphysics and the Stages of Education (2012) by George Allan; and The Adventure of Education: Process Philosophers on Learning, Teaching, and Research (2009) by Adam Scarfe, and 'Educating for an Ecological Civilization: Interdisciplinary, Experiential, and Relational Learning' (2017) edited by Marcus Ford and Stephen Rowe. 'Beyond the Modern University: Toward a Constructive Postmodern University,' (2002) is another text that explores the importance of Whitehead's metaphysics for thinking about higher education.Business administration Whitehead has had some influence on philosophy of.

This has led in part to a focus on identifying and investigating the effect of temporal events (as opposed to static things) within organizations through an “organization studies” discourse that accommodates a variety of 'weak' and 'strong' process perspectives from a number of philosophers. One of the leading figures having an explicitly Whiteheadian and stance towards is Mark Dibben, who works in what he calls 'applied process thought' to articulate a philosophy of management and business administration as part of a wider examination of the through the lens of.

For Dibben, this allows 'a comprehensive exploration of life as perpetually active experiencing, as opposed to occasional – and thoroughly passive – happening.' Dibben has published two books on applied process thought, (2008), and (2009), as well as other papers in this vein in the fields of philosophy of management and.Margaret Stout and Carrie M. Staton have also written recently on the mutual influence of Whitehead and, a pioneer in the fields of organizational theory. Stout and Staton see both Whitehead and Follett as sharing an that 'understands becoming as a relational process; difference as being related, yet unique; and the purpose of becoming as harmonizing difference.' This connection is further analyzed by Stout and Jeannine M. Love in Integrative Process: Follettian Thinking from Ontology to Administration Political views Whitehead's political views sometimes appear to be without the label.

He wrote:Now the intercourse between individuals and between social groups takes one of two forms, force or persuasion. Is the great example of intercourse by way of persuasion., and governmental compulsion exemplify the reign of force.On the other hand, many Whitehead scholars read his work as providing a philosophical foundation for the social liberalism of the movement that was prominent throughout Whitehead's adult life. Morris wrote that '. there is good reason for claiming that Whitehead shared the social and political ideals of the new liberals.' Primary works Books written by Whitehead, listed by date of publication. A Treatise on Universal Algebra. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1898. Available online at.

The Axioms of Descriptive Geometry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907. Available online at. with., Volume I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910.

Available online at. 1 to.56 is available as a CUP paperback. An Introduction to Mathematics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911. Available online at. 56 of the series. with., Volume II.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912. Available online at.

with., Volume III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913. Available online at. The Organization of Thought Educational and Scientific. London: Williams & Norgate, 1917. Available online at. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1919. Available online at.

The Concept of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920. Based on the November 1919 delivered at. Available online at. The Principle of Relativity with Applications to Physical Science.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922. Available online at. Science and the Modern World.

New York: Macmillan Company, 1925. 55 of the series. Religion in the Making. New York: Macmillan Company, 1926. Based on the 1926. Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect.

New York: Macmillan Co., 1927. Based on the 1927 Barbour-Page Lectures delivered at the University of Virginia.: An Essay in Cosmology. New York: Macmillan Company, 1929. Based on the 1927–28 delivered at the University of Edinburgh. The 1978 Free Press 'corrected edition' edited by and Donald W. Sherburne corrects many errors in both the British and American editions, and also provides a comprehensive index.

The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: Macmillan Company, 1929. The Function of Reason. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1929.

Based on the March 1929 Louis Clark Vanuxem Foundation Lectures delivered at Princeton University. Adventures of Ideas. New York: Macmillan Company, 1933.

Also published by Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933. Nature and Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934. Modes of Thought.

New York: MacMillan Company, 1938. 'Mathematics and the Good.'

In The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, edited by, 666–681. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1941. 'Immortality.'

In The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, edited by, 682–700. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1941.

Essays in Science and Philosophy. London: Philosophical Library, 1947. with Allison Heartz Johnson, ed. The Wit and Wisdom of Whitehead. Boston: Beacon Press, 1948.In addition, the of the is currently working on a critical edition of Whitehead's writings, which is set to include notes taken by Whitehead's students during his Harvard classes, correspondence, and corrected editions of his books.

Paul A. Bogaard and Jason Bell, eds. The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead, 1924–1925: Philosophical Presuppositions of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.See also.References.

Alfred North WhiteheadAlfred North Whitehead occupies a place in the history of Western philosophy which makes his importance comparable only with that of the great masters – Plato, Kant and Hegel, who gave to mankind monumental systems of thought. Whitehead conceives the universe as an organism, a process, to understand which our notions of things, entities, substances, and of place and time have to be completely overhauled and transformed. We are generally accustomed to think that material bodies are located at particular points of space and instants in time, and that no other body can occupy those points of space at that time.

This idea of what Whitehead calls 'simple location', which falsely tries to explain things without reference to other regions of space and time, is bound up with the common belief that causation is the production of an effect by a cause which precedes it in time. Whitehead's criticism is that a causal relation between two things is incompatible with their simple location, for two things which are separate from each other cannot bear a causally binding relation between themselves. Causation as it is ordinarily understood implies that a knowledge of the cause should give us the knowledge of all its effects. This is impossible if we persist in believing that things and events are separated from one another. If the simple location of events is a fact, even inference would give us no knowledge of the inferred events, for inference requires that the events from which we infer others should have an 'inherent reference' to the inferred events in order that they may give us knowledge of these latter; but such a reference is absent between events that are really different from each other.

Memory of the past, too, would not be possible if all events are utterly cut off from one another in space and time. Our experiences oblige us to give up the belief in the simple location of things and events. There do not exist disconnected bodies or events at different points of space or moments in time.If, then, events are not separated from one another, how can we distinguish between a cause and its effect, between the events from which we infer and those which we infer?

Whitehead's answer is: By admitting a process that lies between all things, a process in which things themselves become parts of the process, a continuous flow of events, which takes us to the conception of the universe as an organism, a system in which every part influences every other part, every event is pervaded and interpenetrated by every other event. It is impossible to find anywhere in the universe isolated objects existing by themselves statically in space and time.The theory of organism provides a solution to the problem of the relation between mind and matter. We are wont to think that mind and matter are two distinct facts of experience influencing each other in some way. But how can any mutual interference be possible if they are separated from each other? The problem can be solved only if mind and matter interact by a relation of process. Nature flows into the mind and flows out transformed by it into the objects of perception.

Here, neither of the two is more real than the other. The perceiver and the perceived form one continuous process.

There are no subjects and objects differentiated from one another. The perceived universe is a view of itself from the standpoint of its parts that are modified by the activity of its whole being. There is a continuity of process between mind and matter.The relation of substance and its qualities, too, as it is generally understood, presents great difficulties. We cannot say how qualities inhere in a substance; we do not know whether they are different or identical. The usually accepted view is that substances are featureless things possessing only primary qualities, to which the secondary qualities are imparted by the knowing mind. Then there remains nothing in Nature except motion, which appears as light when it impinges on the retina and as sound when it strikes the ear-drum.

The world, says classical physics, consists of mere electrical charges, having no colour, no sound, no beauty, no good, no value, nothing that we call a world. The world is in our minds. What is real is electrical force, mathematical point-events, symbols and formulae. And what of aesthetic, ethical and religious values? Science has no such things as these. We also know how Locke's distinction of the primary qualities from the secondary ones led to the astonishing conclusions arrived at by Berkeley and Hume. Whitehead points out that classical science discovers a featureless universe because of the notion of simple location of things.

It committed the mistake of abstracting things and events from their relation to others, and substances from the qualities which characterise them. The remedy is the acceptance of a universe of organic relations, where all facts, meanings and values are conserved without contradicting sense, reason and experience, and in which all spatial otherness and temporal distinction is overcome in a system of universal mutual reference of things and events. Space, time and events are organically related to each other; nothing can ever exist as isolated from other existences.Whitehead learns from Hegel that all things and events are internally related and that to abstract them from their environment or their context in the whole would be to misrepresent them totally and to conceive them as what they are not. Matter is a group of agitations of force which extends its body to the entire universe and constitutes its stuff. The configurations of this force are called bodies or events and their existence and nature determine everything. Things are without limits or boundaries, they really exist everywhere, at every time, in every way. We cannot pluck a leaf from the tree and know what it is to the tree, or cut a part of the human body and know how it works as its organ.

The bifurcation of an event from other events, of substance from its attributes, of cause from its effect, of mind from body, of things from the rest of the universe is a deathblow given to all right knowledge. Whitehead propounds a philosophy based on the scientific theory of relativity. The result is the novel concept of the organism.Whitehead's universe as an organism is governed by the law of internal relations. All things are all other things in every condition, and the relations themselves are not independent of the things. Now, we have to give up the habit of using the words 'thing', 'entity', etc.

While studying Whitehead, for he has pointed out that our ideas of thinghood are bound up with our notions of simple location involving what he calls the 'fallacy of misplaced concreteness'. What we call a thing is for him a set of agitations of force, a group of activity or energy, a configuration of process or motion, and he calls such a bit of process an 'actual occasion'.

We shall, however, for the sake of convenience, apply this term to things in general or objects of our experience. Sometimes, Whitehead calls these actual occasions 'drops of experience'. These names given to the material of the objects of common perception are to bring out that they are not isolated entities but currents of teleological process, continuous with all things in the universe. No part of the process can be abstracted from the others and studied correctly.

Every actual occasion involves every other, and to know any one is to know the whole universe. Actual occasions are spatio-temporal aspects of process, a nexus of which we call an object. An object is nothing but a continuous process of actual occasions as we experience them in their externalised condition. There is no fixed object anywhere. An event is a series of actual occasions revealed in perception as demonstrated in a molecule for a few moments. Objects are more complex formulations of such events. The objectness of an object is in its capacity to be experienced in perception.Every actual occasion is sensitive to the existence of others, and thus to the entire universe.

All actual occasions take account of each other, and in some way, subtler than even sense-perception, 'perceive' each other. There is a kind of pervasive 'feeling' of every actual occasion for the others in the universe.

Whitehead uses the word 'feeling' in quite a different sense from the one in which we are used to understand it, and makes it more fundamental than the conscious level of the mind in waking life. This feeling is a natural sympathy which the actual occasions have for the whole, a general connectedness and unity of the universe which they reveal in themselves by the very fact of their constitution. This rudimentary feeling or experience is, to Whitehead, of the nature of unconscious 'prehension' or taking into relation of the other actual occasions, a grasping of the characteristics of every aspect of the universe.

The prehensions may be positive absorbings or negative rejections of aspects. The actual occasions are thus related both in physical and mental life; the two are not features of distinct orders of being. The process is feeling and reality, and the energy of physics is but what we feel within ourselves as minds, a feeling in our own constitutions as actual occasions for the indivisible process which is the universe. Every actual occasion represents and feels a situation of the entire process, and its very existence is due to the contribution of the rest of the actual occasions; it is produced by the whole universe by way of integration of characters, which Whitehead calls the process of 'concrescence'.

An actual occasion is called more precisely a 'prehensive occasion', for it has no existence independent of its prehensions.Whitehead speaks of an 'ingressive' evolution of the actual occasions from possible forms of experience which are known as 'eternal objects'. The eternal objects 'ingress' into the formation of actual occasions. These eternal objects are not concrete existences but abstract possibilities of the evolution of the actual occasions. The universe of our experience is the result of the ingression of one of infinite sorts of eternal objects which have not all been actualised in this particular realm of spatio-temporal events. The manner of the selection of particular kinds of eternal objects for ingression is similar to that in which certain actual occasions contribute to the birth of the other actual occasions in varying ways of relation, which are known as the 'relevances' of these actual occasions to others. The actual occasions determine themselves by physical prehension of other actual occasions and by conceptual prehension of eternal objects.

The eternal objects, therefore, are not different from the actual occasions, though distinct in nature, and even when not actualised form part of the process of the universe and influence everything by way of negative prehension. The laws of Nature are the relatively stable expressions or modes of its behaviour in relation to actual occasions that appear at a given time. As the universe evolves in time, its laws must change with its modified relation to its evolved parts.God, says Whitehead, is finally responsible for the selection of specific types of eternal objects for ingression into the actual occasions and for giving the universe a specific actual character different from the many other possible ones. God is the 'principle of limitation', for He limits the actual occasions to only a few of the infinite possibilities or patterns of process that may characterise numberless universes. God transcends the universe of process, for what determines the process cannot itself be involved in the process. We cannot conceive of any reason why God should have imposed on the actual occasions a particular kind of limitation and actualised this universe rather than any other.

Whitehead says that there is a directing influence immanent in an actual occasion, called by him the 'subjective aim' of the actual occasion, which makes it what it is. Whitehead is not clear about the ultimate nature of this subjective aim, though we may regard it as an expression of the impulse to advance in evolution. The Vedanta would identify this subjective aim with the aspiration of the universe to realise its perfection in the Absolute which is immanent in the actual occasions and the eternal objects. Whitehead, perhaps, would hold the same opinion, for God and the universe, according to him, are mutually immament and interpenetrative, though God stands above the universe as the principle of its limitation.

God is the universal aim of the activity of the actual occasions, in whom they envisage their highest possibilities. All the values of life are recognisable in God who is the non-temporal ideal determining the actualities of the temporal realm. God does not create the universe, but makes it possible by the process of limitation, and hence He is not responsible for the evils of relative life. Evil is the result of short-sighted activity centred in selfish purposes wrenched from the universal aim.But Whitehead does not regard his God as identical with the Absolute. God is for him a 'non-temporal accident'. If God is one of the accidents, he cannot be the cause of the accidents which constitute the temporal universe. God has to be conceived in more satisfactory forms in order that He may determine the universe.

If, by the accidental God, Whitehead means a cosmic principle akin to the Ishvara of the Vedanta, who is accidental in the sense that he is relative to the constitution of the particular universe of which he is the lord, God has to presuppose a Reality which ranges beyond accident and relativity. Whitehead's God becomes a 'consequent', an effect, related to the evolving process, and so cannot be saved unless He becomes a manifestation of the Absolute which is beyond creation. This crown of all philosophy appears to be missing in Whitehead's system, though we may suppose that he would have no objection to taking it as implied.The criticism of the commonsense view of causation advanced by Whitehead agrees with that levelled by the Vedanta against the notion of the production of an effect from a cause separated from it. The effect cannot be different from its cause, for it is not independent of what constitutes its cause. It is not identical with its cause, for, then, we would have to abandon the concept of effect and abolish causation itself from the scheme of things.

But Whitehead's process does not fully solve the problem of causation, though it overcomes the shortcomings of the classical theory of the production of certain static entities from other static entities which are anticedent to the former in time. We cannot conceive of a process without spatio-temporal relations; and if space and time are not absolute, process cannot be reality.

Process is the nature of the universe as presented to the observation of actual occasions which are falsely abstracted from the rest of the universe. But without this abstraction there cannot be observation or objective perception of the process. And, if the abstraction or the isolation of actual occasions from the other aspects of the universe is false, the experience of the universe as a process, too, becomes false, in which case the identification of process with reality is a falsification of reality. We never know process as what is not experienced, and the experience open to us is in terms of an abstraction of ourselves from the whole. Thus process turns out to be a relative appearance of a reality which is more fundamental. The Vedanta identifies this reality with the immutable consciousness immanent in all processes and yet transcending them. There is the procession of actual occasions because of a reality which does not move with the procession.

Whitehead requires to relegate his process to phenomena, and to reconstruct his concept of reality. The process may be real to us, finite beings, but is not real in itself.If matter and life are fundamentally one, as Whitehead holds, the whole universe gets animated with feeling and experience.

We have then, it is implied, to abandon the notion of inert matter and endow the universe with a limitless life which has to be equated with its reality. This life cannot be a process, for we have seen that a process needs some other support for it to appear.

Life cannot be mere vital force, for the latter is a process of organic existence. It cannot be mind, for it, again, is a process of ideas. We are forced to return to a universal being underlying even mind, whose essence is consciousness. Matter, life and mind are the different grades of the expression of the Absolute in the region of space-time. They are comprehended in its essential being where they step beyond their distinctness of structure and realise themselves in truth.

The Absolute is being and knowing.The world of physics is the body of the Virat as perceived by spatio-temporal subjects. Science cannot concern itself with the inner significance of aesthetic, ethical and religious values, because it is busy with what is observed through the senses, and not with the factors that condition all observation. The latter become the subjects for study in philosophy. Values are not in things, the things are shells that cover a living principle in them; and it is the things that engage the attention of science. Value is the effect which consciousness produces in us when it envisages objects. The universe by itself has no sympathy with values, for it works mechanically when viewed as a sense-object. This happens because in sense-experience the object is abstracted from the consciousness which informs it.

c5hJq.ebook Marine EcologicalProcesses Pdf Free.Download PDF ePub DOC audiobook ebooks. #7539489 in Books. Torrent Novabackup Professional V1420soft. Valiela Marine Ecological Processes Pdf To Jpg. Assessing storm effects is an. What Are Ecological Processes; Valiela Marine Ecological Processes Pdf To Excellent. A total of 533 dorsal fin images from 19 available photo-identification. Valiela marine ecological processes pdf to excel converter. Hotspot Free Download For Windows 8.1. The oceans represent a vast, complex and poorly understood ecosystem. Marine Ecological Processes is a modern. The oceans represent a vast, complex and poorly understood ecosystem. Marine Ecological Processes is a modern review and synthesis of marine ecology that.

Matter appears to consist merely of electrical charges and form just a kink in the continuum of space-time, because the scientist in his observations disregards the existence and constitution of his own personality. Science studies abstractions, not wholes. No wonder, it discovers a corpse instead of a living beauty. To study a piece of mineral or the leg of a frog is not to participate in the miracle of life.

The meaning of existence is disclosed in ourselves, not in what we merely see. God peeps out in tiny man, and that dust of a frail body houses a Spirit which encompasses the universe. The eternal in us refuses to be neglected in our activities, and demands a careful attention by which we can listen to the voice of the highest heaven. The clatterings of the senses are silenced by the music of Divine. Science has to return to philosophy to put on life, and philosophy has to look within to gain its soul.The unconscious prehensions of Whitehead are really the tentacles with which conscious life feels its own parts in its evolution towards Godhead. The various degrees in which consciousness reveals itself are the forms of the mutual reaction of the phenomenal subject and the object. Consciousness hides itself in matter, breathes in plants, dreams in animals and wakes up in man, though it does not become fully self-conscious even in man.

This process of gradual manifestation is valid only in individual existence. In cosmic being it is all an instantaneous illumination of all grades of life. The exigencies of individual experience, however, find it indispensable to extend to the cosmic scheme the scale of the gradual rise of consciousness in different orders of being and to make the cosmos the body of God. But these are explanations of life and accounts of experience as cast in the mould of our own make-up. Reality has no degrees in itself; there are degrees only in our perception of it.

Unconscious prehensions are the conscious reaches of the Absolute through the sleeping individualities of the actual occasions. Consciousness cannot rise from unconsciousness unless it is already present in the latter, though veiled. Prehensions when brought about by the sheer force of the necessity of the interdependence of aspects of existence may be unconscious, but they are not so essentially when the aspects become alive to their positions in relation to the universe.Both for Whitehead and for the Vedanta, God is not the author of evil in creation.

For Whitehead this is true because God is not the creator but the principle of limitation, who provides the conditions necessary for the manifestation of the universe. It does not mean, however, that there exists, as Whitehead supposes, any primordial material stuff independently of God, or that God is an efficient cause differentiated from a material cause. God is the efficient, instrumental, material, formal and final cause – all in one. But God appears as consciousness and also a stuff of creation when He is viewed in an empirical abstraction. The Vedanta explains the nature of the present universe as determined by the nature of the latent potencies of the unliberated individuals lying in an unconscious state at the end of the previous cycle of creation. The universe is nothing but a field of experience for the individuals that constitute it.

Without the potencies of these contents, the universe is nothing. The good and the evil of life are both expressions of these potencies actualised in experience. God, therefore, has nothing to do either with good or evil. He is not grieved at our sins, nor does He rejoice over our virtues. He does not create agency or action, nor does He bring about the fruits of action. But He appears to do all these when we, as finite beings, try to understand His ways. Whitehead does not find any reason for the particular type of limitation that God has introduced into the universal scheme.

The Vedanta makes out that the form of this limitation depends on the dispositions of the latent principles to be manifested in the shape of the universe. God is the light whose mere presence rouses the potencies to activity and self-evolution.