Essays originally published ca. 1949-1989.

Using the term world to mean a creative response to objective reality, this book considers the ways in which Eastern and Western peoples construct their natural, social, aesthetic, and religious worlds. It points the way to a view of Eastern and Western as complementary, rather than contradictory, descriptions.

Three periods in the development of Whitehead's thought are generally recognized : ()-: The period of the writing of Universal Algebra, ...

An attempt to reconcile the "Masculine and Feminine Principles," i.e., the intelligible, rational, formal, quantitative, and the sensible, nonrational, mystical, qualitative; the Western philosophical bias and the Eastern; science, and religion and art. The author's desire is to do justice to both areas, but his sympathy seems to be with the East. The result is a spiritual monism, not without insight, but with a minimum of self-criticism, and without concern for details. --D. S.

The aim of this article is to explore the importance of biological and social networks in Whitehead's philosophy. This exploration will involve a consideration of pluridisciplinarity in Whitehead, including a consideration of the relationship between scientific understanding and philosophical thinking, the question of method in Whitehead's thought, and the crucial distinctions between mechanism and organicism and between nature lifeless and nature alive.

This paper explores the relevance of Karl Marx's philosophy to contemporary research on religious organizations. Despite Marx's primary association with political economy, his insights offer valuable perspectives for understanding the structure and function of religious institutions today. Marx's analysis of societal structures highlights the entrepreneurial nature of modern society, which is also reflected in the dynamics of religious organizations. This study revisits Marx's core philosophical and historical hypotheses, particularly his critique of political economy, and applies them to the analysis (...) of religious institutions. By distinguishing between Marxist and non-Marxist methodologies, this paper demonstrates how Marxist theory provides both critical and hopeful interpretations of the organizational structures within religious contexts. The goal is to show how Marxist philosophy can contribute to a deeper understanding of the socio-economic dimensions of religious institutions, thereby enriching the field of philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Food consumption has been identified as a realm of key importance for progressing the world towards more sustainable consumption overall. Consumers have the option to choose organic food as a visible product of more ecologically integrated farming methods and, in general, more carefully produced food. This study aims to investigate the choice for organic from a cultural–historical perspective and aims to reveal the food philosophy of current organic consumers in The Netherlands. A concise history of the (...) organic food movement is provided going back to the German Lebensreform and the American Natural Foods Movement. We discuss themes such as the wish to return to a more natural lifestyle, distancing from materialistic lifestyles, and reverting to a more meaningful moral life. Based on a number of in-depth interviews, the study illustrates that these themes are still of influence among current organic consumers who additionally raised the importance of connectedness to nature, awareness, and purity. We argue that their values are shared by a much larger part of Dutch society than those currently shopping for organic food. Strengthening these cultural values in the context of more sustainable food choices may help to expand the amount of organic consumers and hereby aid a transition towards more sustainable consumption. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that attempts in the philosophy of biology to show that organisms are processes rather than substances fail. Despite what process ontologists have said, I argue that substance ontology is perfectly able to accommodate the dynamic nature of organisms, their ecological dependence, and their vague boundaries, and that their criticisms are not directed at substance ontology simpliciter, but only at specific (perhaps untenable) characterisations of substances. The paper ends by considering what a processual philosophy (...) of biology that is radically in conflict with an ontology of substances might look like. (shrink)

Locates in Schelling a new understanding of our relation to nature in philosophy.

As the title suggests, this paper looks at the Deleuzian concept of body without organs and compares it with Indian Philosophy. In the Indian context, the concept of moksha/nirvana comes near to it as both are practices that aim at liberation; here, ‘liberation’ is never the awaited end of the process but the process itself. The traditional western substantialism rests on things whereas Deleuze, like Indian Philosophy, celebrates ‘experience’ and the ‘incorporeal’. Thus, body without organs plays a role (...) in individuation. It hints at a journey beyond ‘the self’ which is full of ecstasy or the ananda of the Indian thought system. The question of Being, which not only is conceptual identification, is presented in terms of the virtual and the actual. For Deleuze and Guattari, every actual body has a virtual dimension, a vast reservoir of potentials, and this is the body without organs. The actual emerges from it and carries it with it. Further, the plane of immanence is a field in which concepts are produced. It is neither external to the Self nor forms an external self or a non-self. It is ‘an absolute outside’, very much like Brahman. The pragmatics of Deleuzian theory is that it explains life to be ‘immanence of immanence, absolute immanence’ – an utter beatitude – which has a Vedantic counterpart where the essential Brahman is a combination of three attributes – sat, chit and ananda. Thus, this paper aims at the interesting comparison between Deleuzian theory and Indian Philosophy. (shrink)

The chapter begins by establishing the absence of organizations in the organization of philosophy as a specialist academic discipline. The second section highlights the reasons why this gap is detrimental to philosophical inquiries. The third section seeks to clarify how philosophy, as a type of theoretical inquiry, can contribute to the study of organizations. Three basic features are proposed as underpinning the philosophical method. Hegel’s social theory is then put forward as an exemplary model of what a philosophical (...) account of organizations might achieve. The fourth and final section shifts the perspective to focus on the life of individuals in organizations. Following a recent book combining post-Hegelian critical theory and Christophe Dejours’ psychodynamic approach, the paper highlights important aspects of individual and collective work that lead to a cooperative conception of management. (shrink)

The brain has been described as the organ of thought. In the 18th century, Pierre Cabanis notoriously claimed that “The brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile.” For some reason, the 19th century materialist Karl Vogt believed the point needed to be made even more emphatically so he declared: “The brain secretes thought as the stomach secretes gastric juice, the liver bile, and the kidneys urine.” Countless neuroscientists make claims like the mind is the brain, or the mind is (...) the functioning brain, or the mind arises from the functioning brain. Fairly typical is a quote like the following: “Even though it is common knowledge, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life – all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions, our love lives, our religious sentiments and even what each of us regards as his or her own intimate private self – is simply the activities of these little specks of jelly in our heads, in our brains.There is nothing else.” (Ramachandram - A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness.. (shrink)

Comment, à la fin du XVIIIe siècle, la physiologie cérébrale est progressivement intégrée dans la philosophie positive, puis modifiée en fonction des objectifs théoriques et politiques poursuivis par Auguste Comte.

Recent advances in neuroscience lead to a wider realm for philosophy to include the science of the Darwinian-evolved computational brain, our inner world producing organ, a non-recursive super- Turing machine combining 100B synapsing-neuron DNA-computers based on the genetic code. The whole system is a logos machine offering a world map for global context, essential for our intentional grasp of opportunities. We start from the observable contrast between the chaotic universe vs. our orderly inner world, the noumenal cosmos. So far, (...) philosophy has been rehearsing our thoughts, our human-internal world, a grand painting of the outer world, how we comprehend subjectively our experience, worked up by the logos machine, but now we seek a wider horizon, how humans understand the world thanks to Darwinian evolution to adapt in response to the metaphysical gap, the chasm between the human animal and its environment, shaping the organism so it can deal with its variable world. This new horizon embraces global context coded in neural structures that support the noumenal cosmos, our inner mental world, for us as denizens of the outer environment. Kant’s inner and outer senses are fundamental ingredients of scientific philosophy. Several sections devoted to Heidegger, his lizard debunked, but his version of the metaphysical gap & his doctrine of the logos praised. Rorty and others of the behaviorist school discussed also. (shrink)

Previous studies imply that management philosophy has become an essential ethical foundation for a number of mission-driven organizations in Japan. This study examines how management philosophy might be influential to individuals with a sample of 1019 Japanese employees. The article develops a framework for analyzing the adoption of management philosophy and individual attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. Factor analysis shows that adoption of the management philosophy can be categorized into two dimensions, identification with management philosophy, and (...) sensemaking of that management philosophy. Regression results indicate that while philosophy-oriented practice might affect individual adoption of management philosophy, the adoption of the management philosophy is positively related to both job involvement and organizational citizenship behavior. Furthermore, the results of structural equation analysis indicate that both dimensions of the adoption of the management philosophy might mediate the relationship between organizational practice and individual outcomes. The research not only increases our understandings into the effectiveness of the management philosophy as an essential ethical foundation, but also provides intriguing implication regarding the organizational measures required to enhance the mission-driven culture. (shrink)