![]() ![]() Whitehead’s more integral goal is to find a way to think these ideal opposites in a complementary way, such that each is understood to require the other for its meaning. For Hume, only sensory impressions are real, while ideas are merely agglomerations of impressions. The world of Ideas was considered ultimate, while the world of physical sensations was demoted to “mere appearance,” or worse, “illusion.” On the other end of the philosophical spectrum, David Hume completely disregarded what Whitehead refers to as “the everlasting elements in the passage of fact” ( PR 338). Plato, for example, over-emphasized the “eminent reality” of permanence by raising his Eternal Forms above the physical world of ever-shifting sensory experience. ![]() Philosophy has tended to collapse reality into one or the other of the “ideal opposites” explicated by Whitehead: Permanence and Flux. It is the job of philosophy to elucidate the significance of these rare mystical experiences, to find a systematic place for them in the wider scheme such that the average level of our species’ waking consciousness may continue to deepen. He also reminds us that “the present level of average waking human experience was at one time exceptional” among our ancestors ( AoI 294). There is something of great philosophical significance in the religious and spiritual intuitions of human beings, even if these intuitions represent “exceptional elements in our conscious experience,” as Whitehead admits ( PR 343). From Whitehead’s point of view, the history of religious experience is part of the data that any adequate cosmological scheme must incorporate. Intellectual chauvinism has led many modern scientific materialists to claim that, given the available scientific evidence, atheism is the only rational position. For many modern, scientifically inclined philosophers, this narrowness has taken the form of an all too easy rejection of the world’s religious traditions and the religious experience which gave rise to and continues to inform them. The Assassination of the Diadoches 10.Whitehead tells us at the start of the final part of Process & Reality (“Final Interpretation”) that the chief danger in philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence. James’s Mystical Body in the Light of the Transmarginal Field 7. The Polysemiality of the Concept of “Pure Experience” 5. Introduction-Whitehead’s Reading of James and Its Context 2. Table of Contents Abbreviations-Whitehead Abbreviations-James 0. I submit that it is time to rediscover James from the perspective of his radical empiricism. This double interpretational shift has allowed James to keep a fair amount of visibility on the academic scene but, over the years, it has significantly obliterated his vision-just as Whitehead has been saved from oblivion by theologians. After one hundred years of scholarship, it appears that James’s legacy has mainly been studied from the perspective of his own blend of pragmatism and that this blend has moreover chiefly been put into dialogue with Peirce and analytic philosophy at large. It will be a pragmatic dialogue looking for two types of synergy: to establish the relevance of a Jamesian background to read Whitehead, and to adumbrate how Whitehead can help us understand the stakes of James’s works. We now seek to bring him in dialogue with James. Whitehead's Pancreativism-The Basics has provided tools to understand Whitehead secundum Whitehead. These essays give the opportunity to travel through most aspects of Whitehead’s legacy: anthropology, ecology, education, epistemology, metaphysics, psychology, political theory and relativity physics. 40 €) Drawing upon the major Harvard works -Science and the Modern World (1925), Process and Reality (1929) and Adventures of Ideas (1933)-, the essays gathered here on the occasion of the creation of the Applied Process Metaphysics Summer Institute, seek, first, to introduce into Whitehead’s thought by clarifying what is at stake in his philosophy and by providing a synoptic vision of his key categories in light of their historical development and, second, to foster a creative dialogue among all participants. Applied Process Metaphysics Summer Institute Memorandum, Louvain-la-Neuve, Les Éditions Chromatika, 2010. "Ronny Desmet & Michel Weber (edited by), Whitehead. ![]()
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