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Whitehead's Philosophy: The World as Process1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2009
Extract
This paper will endeavour to present an outline of the Organic Philosophy associated with the name of Whitehead. Whitehead resembles Spinoza and Leibniz in that he is a philosopher who has tried to construct a world-outlook that will do justice to science and to the other aspects of life and knowledge. Moreover, just as in his day Leibniz was an eminent mathematician and scientist, so Whitehead in our day enjoys the same distinction. But Whitehead's philosophy differs both from that of Spinoza and from that of Leibniz. Spinoza based his philosophy upon the monistic substance, of which the actual events in the world are the inferior modes. Whitehead bases his philosophy upon the actual events themselves and derives the solidarity of the world as a whole from their mutual interplay. Thus the organic philosophy is pluralistic in contrast with Spinoza's monism. In comparing Whitehead's philosophy with that of Leibniz, we find that they agree in both being pluralistic, but they differ in the emphasis placed upon the notion of mentality. Leibniz's monads are best conceived as generalizations of the notion of mentality, and the conception of physical bodies only enters into his philosophy subordinately and derivatively. Whitehead, however, in his philosophy of organism endeavours to hold the balance between the physical and mental more evenly, and thus does justice to both aspects of reality.
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1948
References
page 141 note 1 Process and Reality, p. 29.
page 143 note 1 “Prehension” is a technical term which can most simply be explained as meaning “apprehension” without the “ap-,” i.e. without awareness. Whitehead points out that Bacon regarded objects as all “perceiving” one another to the extent that they affected each other.
page 144 note 1 Consider a percipient event (P) at region A. Now the mode of a sense-object “green” at A (abstracted from the sense-object whose relationship to region A the mode is conditioning) is the aspect from A of some other region B. The sense-object “green” relates region A to region B. That is to say, the mode of the sense-object “green” at A is expressible as location elsewhere.
page 144 note 2 Whitehead maintains (as did Leibniz) that, while consciousness is a rare character in the universe, only found in association with high-grade organisms, “experience” is universal, because all actual entities prehend one another.
page 146 note 1 Science and the Modern World, p. 245.
page 153 note 1 Cf. Science and the Modern World, p. 245Google Scholar.
page 153 note 2 Ibid., p. 247.
page 154 note 1 Science and the Modern World, p. 249.
page 155 note 1 The most fruitful way of conceiving God's “eternal” nature is to think of it as a vision and “valuation” of the realm of eternal forms, accompanied by an urge for their actualization in an orderly way in finite things.
page 156 note 1 Process and Reality, p. 487.
page 156 note 2 Ibid., p. 468.
page 157 note 1 Process and Reality, pp. 493–4.
page 158 note 1 Process and Reality, p. 489.
page 158 note 2 Ibid., p. 490.
page 158 note 3 Ibid., p. 495.
page 158 note 4 Ibid., p. 496.
page 159 note 1 Process and Reality, p. 486.
page 159 note 2 Ibid., p. 496.
page 160 note 1 Lecture on “Immortality” in The Philosophy of Alfred Frank Whitehead (North-Western University Press, 1941)Google Scholar.