In this article I argue against the claim that “actual entity” and “actual occasion” are synonymous in Whitehead. My examination of these terms will help to illuminate the role of “society” in Whitehead’s philosophy and to prepare the way for a fruitful comparison of process thought and contemporary systems theory in the sciences.

In this article I argue against the claim that "actual entity" and "actual occasion" are synonymous in Whitehead. My examination of these terms will help to illuminate the role of "society" in Whitehead's philosophy and to prepare the way for a fruitful comparison of process thought and contemporary systems theory in the sciences.

Whitehead claims there is only one type of individual in the universe—the actual entity—but there are necessarily multiple tokens of this type. This turns out to be paradoxical. Nevertheless, a type of individuality that is necessarily plural because, for each token, relations to other tokens are constitutive is something familiar from ordinary language, everyday politics, and, not least, 19th century German social thought. Whitehead’s actual entity generalizes the notion of species-being we find in Fichte, Feuerbach, and Marx. The (...) rationale for the concept of species-being brings to light important social and political implications of Whitehead’s cosmology. (shrink)

It is not asserted that an actual occasion excludes other occasions in the sense that it is completely independent of or isolated from them. This is an element in the 'traditional' doctrine of substance which Whitehead regards as fundamentally false. Nor will exclusiveness be asserted in any sense which is incompatible with what I understand to be Whitehead's doctrine of objectification, which is his theory of how one actual entity is 'present in' another. Nothing could be clearer (...) from Whitehead's writings than the fact that he means to say that actual occasions are 'present in' or included by other actual occasions. There is no intention of denying this obvious fact. (shrink)

This paper puts forward an argument for a systematic, technical approach to formulation in verbal interaction. I see this as a kind of expansion of Sacks’ membership categorization analysis, and as something that is not offered (at least not in a fully developed form) by sequential analysis, the currently dominant form of conversation analysis. In particular, I suggest a technique for the study of “occasioned semantics,” that is, the study of structures of meaningful expressions in actual occasions of conversation. (...) I propose that meaning and rhetoric be approached through consideration of various dimensions or operations or properties, including, but not limited to, contrast and co-categorization, generalization and specification, scaling, and marking. As illustration, I consider a variety of cases, focused on generalization and specification. The paper can be seen as a return to some classical concerns with meaning, as illuminated by more recent insights into indexicality, social action, and interaction in recorded talk. (shrink)

This article asks: Is the human self, the stream of human consciousness, a single unique enduring actual entity or whole (like Alfred North Whitehead’s God) or a society of transient actual occasions (like Charles Hartshorne’s God)? It argues forcefully for the former and against the latter and concludes that both God and human selves are enduring but constantly developing actual entities who are constantly being enriched by new events, experiences, and activities in time.

A field‐oriented interpretation of Whiteheadian societies of actual occasions, when used to explain the notion of “strong supervenience” as applied to the mind‐brain problem, allows one to claim that not only higher‐level properties such as consciousness but even higher‐level entities such as the mind or soul are emergent from lower‐level systems of neuronal interaction. Moreover, it also explains the preexistence of God to the world and Christian belief in eternal life with the triune God in a way that is (...) impossible within the limits of a theory of strong supervenience. (shrink)

I have tried to expound Whitehead's doctrine of Creativity and of actual entities. Nothing remains but to give a brief summary of what has been said in the foregoing notes.Creativity is the ultimate activity and principle of novelty in the Universe.The world is said to consist of “actual entities,” not substances. An actual entity is also called an “actual occasion.” It is essentially a genetic process, having two sides, the process of “becoming,” and the outcome (...) of the process named the “satisfaction.” The satisfaction is the fully determined achievement abstracted from the process. On attaining satisfaction the actual entity viewed as a self-creating subject loses its “final” causation, and as a subject perishes, but the “satisfaction” remains as a potential constituent for the emergence of a new actual entity. This is its “efficient” causation. The potentiality of the satisfaction for a new creation is called its “objective immortality”: in this capacity it functions as an “object” for the self-creation of another actual entity. (shrink)

This article defends Marjorie Suchocki’s position against two main objections raised by David E. Conner. Conner objects that God as a single actual entity must be temporal because there is succession in God’s experience ofthe world. The reply is that time involves at least two successive occasions separated by perishing, but in God nothing ever perishes. Conner also objects that Suchocki’s personalistic process theism is not experiential but is instead theoretical and not definitive. The reply is that his dismissal (...) of Part V of PR is arbitrary, the interpretation of all experience is theoretical, and no metaphysical interpretations are absolutely definitive, including PR as a whole. Also, Conner ignores religious experience. (shrink)

An actual cause of some token effect is itself a token event that helped to bring about that effect. The notion of an actual cause is different from that of a potential cause – for example a pre-empted backup – which had the capacity to bring about the effect, but which wasn't in fact operative on the occasion in question. Sometimes actual causes are also distinguished from mere background conditions: as when we judge that the struck (...) match was a cause of the fire, while the presence of oxygen was merely part of the relevant background against which the struck match operated. Actual causation is also to be distinguished from type causation: actual causation holds between token events in a particular, concrete scenario; type causation, by contrast, holds between event kinds in scenario kinds. (shrink)

Orthodox quantum mechanics is built upon psychophysical collapse events that are the close analogs, within contemporary physical theory, of the the Whiteheadian actual occasions, with their mental and physical poles. This article describes the way in which these events enter into quantum theory, and mediate the emergence of actuality from potentiality.

André Gallois’s Occasions of Identity injects a refreshing new perspective into an old debate. Actually, what is new is the advocacy of the perspective: Gallois takes up a view that many consider a non-starter, and shows this reaction to be premature. The debate is over the right way to understand the traditional puzzles involving two things being in the same place at the same time; the perspective is that identity can hold temporarily. Suppose an amoeba, name it AMOEBA, divides in (...) two. One of the resultant amoebas, POND, lives in a pond; the other, SLIDE, is examined on a slide in a laboratory. Does AMOEBA survive this process, and if so, does it survive as POND or SLIDE? If we stipulate that POND and SLIDE are symmetrically related to AMOEBA then it seems arbitrary to identify AMOEBA with exactly one of POND and SLIDE. But we cannot identify AMOEBA with each, for then by the transitivity and symmetry of identity we would wrongly identify POND and SLIDE. We are left with the conclusion that AMOEBA is identical to neither. But this seems wrong too; surely fission does not result in death. So just what does happen to AMOEBA? How to respond to this and related cases has been much discussed.1 There are many proposals, each with distinctive strengths and weaknesses. To these Gallois adds his own, which runs as follows. After division, there are two amoebas, POND and SLIDE, each of which existed before division. But it does not follow that there were two amoebas before division. Though POND and SLIDE are numerically distinct after division, they were numerically identical before division. The identity relation can hold temporarily, or occasionally, as Gallois puts it. My sense is that this sort of claim is regarded by most metaphysicians as downright wacky. And yet there is something very natural about it. Why distinguish POND and SLIDE today because they will differ tomorrow? I suspect the “wackiness” reaction has two sources, one based on Leibniz’s Law.. (shrink)

This article deals with the discussion of abortion in a number of US presidential and vice-presidential debates, from a scaling perspective. The interest in scales, as constructed and negotiated by participants in the course of interaction, is a component of occasioned semantics. I found that, in the political debates that I examined, there are a number of different scales anchored by the contrast between ‘pro-life’ and ‘pro-choice’ positions. These are as follows: Stage of pregnancy, Prescribed action, Special circumstances, Locus of (...) enforcement and Frequency. These scales are manipulated in various ways by the candidates to make their own stances seem reasonable and moral and their opponents’ unreasonable and immoral. A position may be made to appear more moderate by adding a more extreme alternative to the scale, which is then rejected. Also, common goals may be emphasized. The debaters also use ‘negative downgrading’ – rejection of a more moderate position – to suggest an opponent’s unreasonableness. It is noted that the availability of several scales affords various ways of formulating the reasonableness or unreasonableness of a particular position. The article continues with a close examination of an extended debate sequence, illustrating the crucial role of implicature in the manipulation of scales, the attribution of attitude, and the practice of argumentation, and the possibility of dealing with implicature within a conversation analytic framework. The discussion is, at all points, grounded in and illustrated by the actual talk of the political candidates. It is suggested that viewing specific occasions of interaction in terms of the creation and negotiation of scales can yield a unique and revealing perspective on what is taking place. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Defense of Poetry: Reflections on the Occasion of WritingJack KolbA Defense of Poetry: Reflections on the Occasion of Writing, by Paul H. Fry; 256 pp. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995, $45.00 cloth, $16.95 paper.And the worm turns. It might elicit dubious laughter from those Yale critics who taught Paul Fry, now William Lampson Professor at their institution, by his admission a Berkeley student in the (...) 1960s (and still, clearly, trying to come to terms with the absolutism of his era), to have him (a)rise to the occasion of verse. After all, the question he asks at the outset of his study—“how are we to account for all the poetry, not to mention fiction, not to mention all the criticism... that still gets written?”—seems anathema except to us academic conservatives, those who resent the encroachment of sterile philosophic approaches into literature. And irrelevant to those writers who don’t give a damn about academic criticism. Fry’s reality, and not just his literary reality, here confronts the weight of academia.What is most troublesome to me about this worthy book is the vast prolegomena that seems, alas, de rigueur these days, the critical dross that Fry must apparently spend an inordinate amount of time attempting to placate, dodge, and negotiate. If academic criticism must perform such elaborate obeisance to questionable philosophies of literature, then academic criticism is truly dead. No reason to grieve: it will be replaced by those who seek to understand and relish literature, still informed by the worthy questions of imitation and audience and authorial psychology, and even internal construction that have enticed readers for centuries.Fry is anything but a happy deconstructionist. One senses immediately that he is distinctly discontented with theoretical discourse, that what he really wants to discuss is poetry, and the poetic impulse. And when he does, he does it brilliantly. Indeed, it is only his argument that inhibits him. To oversimplify (an inevitable process in this book), Fry wants to rescue some poetry from the self-destructiveness, as he sees it, of sterile critical approaches—mostly from the neo-historicists, but also from all others who would deny the essential job of poetry to replicate reality. Both human and historical values have got in the way [End Page 522] of this “pure” conveyance. Somehow poetry (unique of the arts) can escape this:It is the function of indication, of saying that something just is (to which until now I have confined my notion of ostension), to estrange utterance from its historical situation by refusing to say that that something is predicated upon, determined by, something else, whether in narrative, description, or explanation....This is the moment, completing the structure of ostension, which reduces the estranged, necessarily “situated” utterance to sound and trace, and thus returns it to the unsignifying sphere of actuality, of things in themselves, from which history for its part is by nature forever estranged. Literature, then, is that mode of utterance which lays bare the irreducible distance between history and actuality from the parti pris of the latter. By suspending our purposeful engagement with the world, it reattaches itself to the world.(pp. 54–55)No single passage can do Fry justice, for his approach is accretive, and fearsomely intelligent (this is one of the few books of contemporary criticism I’ve read in which I felt that the awful vocabulary was merited). Yet, ultimately, Fry’s ontology sounds very much like old-fashioned mimesis; it is the universality of experience, he asserts, that escapes the historicist or the dogmatist or the deconstructionist. At some level poetry is what it is. In fact what Fry seemingly wants is in his terms an obliteration of the mediation of mimesis: his true poetry wants to be reality, or at least as close as we come to it in art.Of course the problem with this definition of poetry is that it is, despite Fry’s twistings and turnings, a definition of poetry. Poetry, as even Plato tells us, is an imitation. So how do we try to get closest to reality? With poetry, Fry suggests; poetry that acknowledges the universal reality... (shrink)

IN RETURNING again and again, over the years, to the same topics in first philosophy, I have tried on each occasion to justify what I was doing by reassessing our cognitive authority for dealing with such topics. By doing so, I allied myself with an old and familiar tradition: the one that takes it for granted that first philosophy is always under an obligation to justify itself. Its substantive topics, according to this tradition, can be legitimately pursued only if (...) it is also shown in that very pursuit by what right, by what authority, one does so. If, proceeding in this way, we should ever manage to achieve a first philosophy that commanded general respect, it would then be seen to be first not just in its substantive findings but in its rational authority as well. That prospect is enough to make me wish to persuade all those who are interested in bringing the discipline into being to call it, as I do here, by its earliest and most illuminating name. And to say "bring it into being" is no mere flourish, for the discipline has never become fully actual--has never, that is, achieved the pervasive and living authority that continues to be our deepest intellectual need. (shrink)

Professor C. G. Hempel (known to a host of admirers and friends as 'Peter' Hempel) is one of the most esteemed and best loved philosophers in the If an Empiricist Saint were not somewhat of a Meinongian Impos world. sible Object, one might describe Peter Hempel as an Empiricist Saint. In deed, he is as admired for his brilliance, intellectual flexibility, and crea tivity as he is for his warmth, kindness, and integrity, and does not the presence of so many (...) wonderful qualities in one human being assume the dimensions of an impossibility? But Peter Hempel is not only possible but actual! One of us (Hilary Putnam) remembers vividly the occasion on which he first witnessed Hempel 'in action'. It was 1950, and Quine had begun to attack the analytic/synthetic distinction (a distinction which Carnap and Reichenbach had made a cornerstone, if not the keystone, of Logical Em piricist philosophy). Hempel, who is as quick to accept any idea that seems to contain real substance and insight as he is to demolish ideas that are empty or confused, was one of the first leading philosophers outside of Quine's immediate circle to join Quine in his attack. Hempel had come to Los Angeles (where Reichenbach taught) on a visit, and a small group consisting of Reichenbach and a few of his graduate students were gath ered together in Reichenbach's home to hear Hempel defend the new posi tion. (shrink)

There is interest in more and better interaction between civil society and actors developing nanotechnologies, nano-materials and nano-enabled products: government agencies but also branch organizations in the chemical sector position civil society organizations (CSOs) as ‘voices of civil society’, and invite CSOs to participate in multistakeholder events. In such events, CSOs are expected to articulate societal needs, issues and values so that these can be taken up by actors with institutional roles and mandates to develop and embed newly emerging nanosciences (...) and nanotechnologies (NEST). This article argues that such a division of moral labor between CSOs and nanotechnology actors is not productive to address NEST and its emerging societal issues. There is an assumption that societal issues are ‘out there’ and can be recognized by CSOs, while in fact, societal issues might co-evolve with new development trajectories and thus have to be discovered and articulated. More productive deliberation requires, ideally, overcoming the traditional division of moral labor between these two groups of actors: technology developers should also inquire into and articulate emerging societal issues, and CSOs should inquire into and reflect on actual development trajectories. In order to explore issues and repercussions that arise in such a repositioning, this article will discuss a bottom up experiment of such an interaction between a nanotechnology developer (DuPont) and a CSO (Environmental Defense Fund). Based on the empirical analysis of this bottom up experiment, tentative requirements will be developed for how joint inquiries between technology developers and CSOs can be realized on a larger scale in our society. (shrink)

The following two review papers have a common origin. Pietarinen’s book Signs of Logic and Stjernfelt’s book Diagrammatology were both published in the same Synthese Library Series being published by Springer. The two books also share the common topic of diagrammatic reasoning in Charles Peirce’s work. Beginning in a conference Applying Peirce held in Helsinki in conjunction with the World Congress of Semiotics in June 2007, two authors have commented upon these books under the headline of Synthese Library Book Session (...) on several occasions, including the Aarhus meeting on Signs and Meaning held in February 2008, the Diagrammatology and Diagram Praxis workshop in Lisboa in March 2009, and the Peirce and Early Analytic Philosophy symposium in Helsinki in June 2009. Therefore, these two review papers form a continuing discussion on the contributions Peirce’s diagrammatic epistemology and logic will have to a broad range of issues at the intersections of philosophy, logic, cognitive sciences and beyond. (shrink)

Der Kosmologie von Alfred N. Whitehead wird gegenwärtig viel Aufmerksamkeit zuteil. Eine entscheidende Frage entbehrt jedoch einer zufriedenstellenden Antwort: Wie kommen die prozesshaften Ereignisse zu ihrer räumlichen Ausdehnung? Dieser Artikel möchte aufzeigen, worin das Problem besteht und dass Whiteheads Metaphysik keine Lösung des Problems zu bieten vermag.The cosmology of Alfred N. Whitehead is attracting much attention these days. But a vital point remains unanswered: In which way do the actual occasions acquire their spatial extension? This paper is supposed to (...) show where the problem lies and that Whitehead's metaphysics offers no solution to it. (shrink)

Although the ideas in Process and Reality are well-recognized by many scientists in various disciplines beyond philosophy, these investigations are focused on the formal interpretation of the notion of space in the context of mereotopology. Indeed, the notion of time is either neglected completely or understood as an abstraction from the four-dimensional existence of enduring objects. However, there is no elucidation of the notion of time beyond this existence. We introduce a monadic second order language to formalize the ultimate principles (...) presupposed to Whitehead’s investigation, i.e., creativity, novelty and advance have been analyzed and reformulated as axioms. The models of the formulated theory are linear process structures, which are a special type of occurrence structures. The model-theoretic aspects of their theory are discussed in the present paper. Our fundamental theorem indicates that the worlds, which ground the knowledge of actual occasions, are ordered linearly and are equal for contemporaneous actual occasions, which implies a condition essential to the being of time. (shrink)

This essay responds to Lewis Ford’s “Allan’s Atheism,” in which he assesses a recent essay of mine that finds God an unnecessary and indeed coherence-destroying addition to Process and Reality. I clarify my position by showing how Whitehead’s notions of physical purpose and aesthetic determination adequately account for the novelty required for an actual occasion’s concrescence and for increases in achieved value. I then criticize Ford’s claim that genuine novelties must have a divine origin and that in Adventures (...) of Ideas the Eros of the Universe refers to God. (shrink)

Digital media seem to be marked by process. The digital image itself is produced by software processes and the constant flux of code. Further this, interaction with digital systems involves a constant process by which a so-called 'user' comes into contact with various machinic occasions. It seems that in light of these processes it is impossible to maintain an aesthetic or media theory that pictures a self-contained and psychologised subject interacting with a static and inert object. How then can we (...) begin to think about digital aesthetics through a process philosophy rather than the traditional and reductive subject/object distinction found in so much aesthetic theory? This paper seeks to address this problem by enacting Alfred Whitehead's process philosophy, informed by Gilles Deleuze, Isabelle Stengers and Steve Shaviro and work it through several examples of recent manifestations of interactive media art, including work by Martin Wattenberg, Dennis Del Favero, Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel. I work Whitehead's process philosophy through these artworks to illustrate the performative nature of software processes and the manner in which these processes affect the aesthetics of interaction. I also use these works to illustrate a concept of interaction that privileges process and events rather than a concept that focuses upon an individual human user. In this paper I propose to view the 'user' as a set of occasions – as a particular condition that is produced by various user-initiated actions – rather than an enduring subject that is able to distance herself from the object of aesthetic contemplation. By doing this I move toward a theory in which user-occasions, machine-occasions and their interpenetration actualise the aesthetics of media art. Whitehead allows me to think outside of the binary oppositions that divide the world into knower/known or subject/object relationships. Throughout the argument I unpack Whiteheadian concepts such as actual entities, the unison of immediate becoming and, in general, the primacy of the event, bringing these concepts to bear on individual case studies of interactive media art. Whitehead's general thesis is that materiality and permanence are created by a continual process. Viewing the digital encounter through this theoretical framework I position the aesthetic experience of interaction as that which emerges from the fluctuations of process. The event of interaction is a necessarily hybrid process in which human occasions become supplemented by technology and the aesthetic event becomes innately coupled to the processes of the machine. In this paper I am not interested in any notion of consciousness or a psychologised human 'user', rather I am interested in a particular condition that takes place as user-initiated processes work with machine-initiated processes. This is because, for Whitehead, process comes before consciousness; it is the process of actual entities that prompt the consciousness into being. In this paper I thus propose interaction with digital systems as the commingling of contemporary actual occasions, shifting emphasis from a conscious human user and instead focusing on the process of the encounter that precedes this conscious experience. (shrink)

Using a generalized conception of experience, from which all features characteristic for higher animals (such as consciousness and thought) have been removed, allowed relating experience to adaptive processes in lower organisms. The temporal vector character of every current experience, containing as well memories of past experiences as intentions for future activities, can then be found in the adaptive response of cyanobacteria to alterations in phosphate supply, particularly in energetic manifestations of this phenomenon. A possible analogy between adaptive events as the (...) “atomic units” of physiological adaptation and Whitehead's actual occasion of experience is discussed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 525 ever, Scharlemann's work is carefully reasoned, and should serve to encourage further reflection on the manner of human existence that is implied in the relation of discipleship. The book is in general well-printed, but there are some errors. The title of Chapter 4 is given incompletely in the table of contents. On p. 79, read intellectus quaerens fidem for intellectuals quaerens fidem. The Catholic University of (...) America Washington, D.C. JOHN P. GALVIN Time and Eternity. By BRIAN LEFTOW. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. Pp. xii + 377. $42.95 (cloth). This is a considerable book on a considerable topic-the logical relation of time to eternity, the possibility of a simple God's knowing temporal events, and their presence in God. The book aims to make sense of and defend the claim that God is in fact timeless, and to explore the relations between such a timeless being and temporal beings. The book is thus something of a tour de force which, as Professor Stump herself remarks in a review, no subsequent discussions of the topic will be able to neglect. It is also a mine of information about discussions of this venerable topic, ancient, medieval, and modern, with special emphasis on contemporary controversies. After plainly setting out his working assumptions, Leftow examines the possibility of the timeless and the logic of eternity. He argues that timeless entities do, or at least can, exist, whether or not God exists and is timeless. He argues further that if God exists and is timeless, " coexisting " with time does not make God temporal. Proper discourse of the eternal requires its own peculiar " eternal-present" tense. The author then turns to the classic discussions of these topics in Augustine, Boethius, and Anselm. His treatment of Boethius is mainly based on the contemporary interpretation by Eleanor Stump and Norman Kretzmann-indeed a great deal of the first half of the book consists in fencing with their view. Leftow argues that Stump and Kretzmann are correct in concluding that the Boethian concept of eternity is that of " atemporal duration," though he thinks they arrived at this conclusion for the wrong reasons. Having argued that one can understand Boethian eternity in terms of a form of duration, Leftow goes on to maintain that one can also understand it on the model of an extensionless point. At the same time, he maintains that God's life has earlier and later "positions" in a manner that this reviewer finds reminiscent of the Whiteheadian view 526 BOOK 1mvrnws of the genetic analysis of an actual occasion, or perhaps even of White· head's conception of divine everlastingness. In the long run, however, Leftow finds the Boethian view (at least as interpreted by Stump and Kretzmann) unsatisfactory. The reason is, if I have got it right, that he thinks that for Boethius as well as for Thomas Aquinas and others, God is aware of temporal things inasmuch as they are "present to God" in God's eternity. At the same time Leftow supposes (mistakenly) that for Aquinas God's knowledge is that of an observer, and he goes on to write: "Now if a temporal thing is really present to God, it seems to fallow that God and that thing exist simultaneously" (161, my emphasis). I fail to grasp how that seems to follow, unless one confuses the ontological order with the intentional, hut on the supposition that it does follow, Leftow argues that Boethius can't have it both ways: that God's knowledge, not being simultaneous with temporal events, is not foreknowledge and so does not impede human freedom, yet is truly omniscient, and so simultaneous with temporal events after all. Leftow then turns to the view of Anselm, which he judges more defensible, for he believes he finds in Anselm a position in which the temporal events that God knows are in a real sense thereby in God, and so simultaneous with God's knowledge of them. "On this alternative,... temporal events occur all at once in eternity, in addition to occurring at various points in time.... Temporal events occur at once for God and really do occur at once, in eternity" (219... (shrink)

Traditional Christian belief in the existence of human life after death within a transformed material universe should be capable of rational justification if one chooses carefully the philosophical scheme underlying those claims. One should not have to appeal simply to the power of a loving God to justify one's beliefs. A revision of Whitehead's metaphysical scheme is proposed that allows one to render these classical Christian beliefs at least plausible to a broad range of contemporary thinkers as a consequence of (...) a cosmology based on the principle of universal intersubjectivity and the need for a common ground between opposing subjectivities. (shrink)

We begin by a summary of the standardized version of the model of the interaction between scientific activities and values (elaborated fully in Lacey and Mariconda, 2015), and based on it we argue that there is a profound incoherence in the self- understanding of the modern scientific tradition, and that the main options actually available to ensure continuity with the positive realizations of this tradition can be well represented by two sorts of ideal types that we name, respectively,“commercially orientated technoscience” (...) and “multi-strategic research”. Then, in the light of the predominance that commercially oriented technoscience has gained in contemporary scientific institutions, we argue for the importance of developing multi-strategic research in areas such as agriculture. This is needed so that adequate evaluation of the potential risks of large scale applications of technoscience, as well as harm they may have actually occasioned, can be made; and also so that these applications can be rigorously compared with scientifically informed practices, such as agroecology, which are not as problematic for human health and the environment and which explore the regenerative powers of nature itself. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 5, Issue 2, pp 290 - 322 Einstein's special theory, as interpreted by Herman Minkowski, suggests that an understanding of space and time requires the replacement of three-dimensional space and one dimensional time with a four-dimensional spacetime continuum, as a natural kind of thing with a characteristic, geometrical, structure. Issues of space and time in general, and of special relativity in particular, are not addressed in Bhaskar's _A Realist Theory of Science_, and their treatment in subsequent realist (...) writings has been patchy and indecisive. Some of Bhaskar's observations in later writings, including his defence of fundamental ontological asymmetries between space and time, and between present, past and future, appear incompatible with a relativistic perspective. Equally problematic, from a critical realist perspective, is the apparent ontological prioritisation of events, and causation as action-by-contact, within the Minkowski interpretation of special relativity. This paper argues that the four-dimensional spacetime continuum of special relativity occupies its own level at the base of the ontological hierarchy of natural kinds, providing lower-order components and laws for higher-order physical, chemical, biological and social structures. While providing no definitive reconciliation of relativistic and realist perspectives, this paper does suggest that A. N. Whitehead's idea of atomic events, or ‘actual occasions’, could pave the way for some possible future reconciliation. (shrink)

Immanent creativity activates the concrescence of each actual occasion. Transcendent creativity lies beyond all occasions and is the sourceof their creativity. God, here conceived as purely temporal, is the subjectivity of transcendent creativity.

Major schools of thought in the 20th century agreed in repudiating metaphysical speculation, but the agreement was superficial, for what they repudiated as “metaphysical” was often one another. Whitehead’s defense of speculative philosophy as “productive of important knowledge” singled him out for scorn from all sides at the same time that it enabled him to move beyond dogmatic standoffs . Employing the same method of speculative generalization that led to the most celebrated theoretical discoveries of the 20th century, quantum theory (...) and special relativity, Whitehead sought to resolve the conflict between objectifying, causal explanations of the world and its inhabitants and the “folk” attitudes defended and elaborated by humanistic psychologies and philosophies. The result was his theory of the “dipolar actual occasion” as the fundamental unit of existence. Recent work by leading scientists continues this effort to elaborate a nonreductive monism that accounts for both meaning and causation. (shrink)

As against the analysis of the structure of the actual entities we find a different kind of analysis in Whitehead: that of the constitutive elements of the entities. "Such formative elements are not themselves actual and passing... They constitute the formative character of the actual and temporal world." This kind of analysis, being an analysis of elements, destroys the integral essence of the actual entities. The Platonic attitude of Whitehead's theory becomes manifest in the fact that (...) the formative elements which are discovered through removing life and temporality from the actual entities are not just abstract concepts. They are entities of a particular ontological status of their own. With those formative elements Whitehead lists: creativity, that is to say, that feature of the actual entities which provides for the temporal passage; the ideal entities or forms which characterize the actual entities and provide the potentialities which lie ahead of them; God, the entity whereby the indetermination of mere creativity is transmuted into a determinate freedom, the entity which directs the shift from mere creativity to a specific conjunction of eternal objects and actual occasions. (shrink)

This essay offers a process-ontological account of work, addressing two challenges in particular. First, I try to show that even though the phenomenon of work is extremely diverse, all occurrences to which the word work correctly applies — according to the current semantic intuitions of the relevant linguistic community — share the feature of being: the creation of something of value. Second, guided by this initial conceptual delineation of the phenomenon, I argue that traditional ontology would face fundamental difficulties in (...) giving an ontological analysis of work, which can be surmounted in a Whiteheadian framework. I take Whitehead's analysis of an actual occasion as a model for an analysis of work that explains how toil (exertion of effort) can result in the accomplishment of a desired end. On this basis of this explanatory model the complex dynamicity that we experience in work as the creation of something of value can be accounted for in the well-defined terms of an ontological theory. (shrink)

In this chapter I provide an elementary exposition of the development of Whitehead's view of objectivity and his theory of extension, with particular focus on explaining how macroscopic objects of ordinary perception and the whole structure of space-time arise out of the units of his ontology, namely, the actual occasions. I also review the scholarship on Whitehead's view of extension and discuss the major problems that arise in connection with the theory in his magnum opus, Process and Reality.

The principal goal of this essay is to examine the manner and extent to which one actual occasion can have value for others according to Whitehead. This question divides into two, depending upon whether we are considering the relation of an entity to its past or to its future. The essay closes with a defense of the monistic interpretation of creativity in Whitehead.

Whitehead’s initial decision to treat actual occasions as unqualifiedly indivisible rendered the notion of succession in becoming highly problematic. Temporal phases would divide the indivisible. Thus Whitehead had originally recourse to genetic analysis. Many have interpreted this as nontemporal becoming, which is not clearly distinguished from the eternity of eternal objects. Besides, Whitehead reserved the term ‘nontemporal’ for the primordial nature. Finally Whitehead came to see that the indivisibility of occasions meant only that they could not be divided into (...) smaller actual occasions (PR 69), which allowed for genetic division. (shrink)

If the universe is a machine, consciousness is not possible. If the universe is more than a machine, then physics is incomplete. Since we are both part of the universe and conscious, physics must be incomplete and the understanding required to construct conscious mechanisms must be sought through the advancement of physics not the continued application of inadequate concepts. In this paper I will show that an impediment to this advancement is the confusion arising through the use of terms such (...) as 'physical reality' to refer to an absolute a priori Kantian 'Ding an Sich' when they should both be recognized as referring to data structures holding the knowledge upon which we act and nothing more. Once this confusion has been clarified, I will go on to suggest that the cycle of activity updating physical reality becomes a candidate for a conscious process. I will show how implementing algorithms in modern computers can mimic this process but if actual consciousness is to be achieved the update activity must correspond to a cycle in time. Such cycles have been identified with Whitehead's 'actual occasions' and thus I will argue that fundamental events should replace fundamental particles as the building blocks of the universe if consciousness is to be explained. (shrink)

This study investigates rehabilitation team members’ interactive accomplishments of their domains of work and responsibility in rehabilitation team conferences in Japan. A combination of membership categorization analysis and sequential analysis is adopted to systematically illustrate the situated productions of professional sense-making practices. Analysis focuses on the segment in which a physician asks a series of questions regarding a patient’s functional status and disability coded in the functional assessment record (FAR). A close examination of data shows that a physician does not (...) always choose a respondent with his or her gaze when asking a question because s/he is continuously reading the FAR displayed on a computer screen. Despite this, a physician’s mention of a topic generates a professional’s domain of work and responsibility in a local division of labor which is used by members to assume who the relevant categorial respondent is. Further, members demonstrate these assumptions by shifting their gazes toward the computer screen, back to the document on the desk, and turning toward co-participants, thus embodying professional roles and responsibilities in situ. This study utilizes the analyst’s ethnographic understanding of the routines and division of labor at the rehabilitation ward as a resource to explicate professional sense-making practices, thus utilizing Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological studies of work. Together with sequential and categorial resources offered by Sacks, this study elucidates inferences and normative expectations which rehabilitation team members bring together to reproduce the endogenous logic of rehabilitation culture in actual occasions of the institutional life. (shrink)

A comparative study to determine the significance of essence in the doctrine of three philosophers. By his method of reduction husserl disclosed his version of essence and used it to establish phenomenology as a rigorous science and to see phenomena solely as phenomena. Whitehead identified essence with his "eternal objects" and this identification protected his "actual occasions" from the limitations of empiricism. By means of essence seen exclusively as appearance and relations, Santayana supports his ingenious thesis that nothing given (...) exists. Conclusion: essence is a cardinal element in the philosophy of all three men. (shrink)

This study is divided into two main parts: exposition of the main themes of Process and Reality and criticism. The exposition is organized around the twin motifs of "freedom" and "condition." The former refers to such notions as mental pole, conceptual feelings, final causation, novelty, flux, and subjective aim. The latter refers to things like physical pole, physical feelings, efficient causation, conformation of feeling, permanence, and objectification. The exposition, quite naturally and justifiably, is laid out with an eye to the (...) criticisms which will follow it. The points of criticism all relate to the general problem of the tension between the factor of freedom and the factor of condition. For example, the author tries to resolve the incompatibility between the indivisible unity of an actual occasion and the fact that it undergoes successive modifications of its subjective aim. He points out the difficulty in maintaining the doctrine of freedom when the modification of the subjective aim is effected by determinate elements. Pols feels that Whitehead's system places the seat of power in the eternal objects. It is they that are really effecting the difference between real and general potentiality. It is this special status of the eternal objects that, for Pols, constitutes "The Platonism of Whitehead." In general, the book is a tough minded refusal to allow Whitehead to eat and still have his metaphysical cake.--S. 0. H. (shrink)

In conversation analysis, through Sacks, Schegloff, Jefferson, and others, the conceptual architecture is joined at the hip to a technical architecture of transcripts, sequence, and turn productions. That the conceptual was to be found and demonstrated in the material detail of temporal productions was central to CA’s extraordinary innovations. As with CA, an Epistemic CA has the task of giving evidence of its conceptual order in actual materials, and thus animating the materials to show them. The task and relationship (...) are emblematically reflexive: we shall find the expression ‘Oh’ indexing ‘changes of state’ or ‘inapposite inquiries’, for example, as of the account-able animations of turns and sequences of turns. Our shared attachments to sequential analysis deliver the expectation that we shall see how Epistemic order is achieved on actual occasions, through actual materials, rendered as transcript. The discussion turns to how the Epistemic Program engages and acquits this analytic expectation. (shrink)

The traditional ontology within which chemistry has developed involved various versions of a general substance/attribute scheme. Recently this has been challenged by two versions of Dynamism. One version is derived from the writings of A. N. Whitehead and the other from several sources, including G. Leibniz and I. Kant. Both involve the idea of flux of actual occasions. Unlike the former scheme, the latter involves a foundation of causal powers and the energetics of field theory. The situation has been (...) made more interesting because of the revival of trope theory, based on an ontology of particularized attributes. This notion is claimed to resolve philosophical problems about the nature of universals and of substances through the introduction of spatial and temporal sequences of tropes. While trope theory seems, at first sight, to work as an attractive alternative to substance/attribute close inspection shows that it is beset with difficulties that are more problematic that the dynamist ontology based on casual powers, dispositions and affordances. (shrink)

Process philosophy is a longstanding philosophical tradition that emphasizes becoming and changing over static being. Though present in many historical and cultural periods, the term “process philosophy” is primarily associated with the work of the philosophers Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) and Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000). -/- Process philosophy is characterized by an attempt to reconcile the diverse intuitions found in human experience (such as religious, scientific, and aesthetic) into a coherent holistic scheme. Process philosophy seeks a return to a neo-classical realism (...) that avoids subjectivism. This reconciliation of the intuitions of objectivity and subjectivity, with a concern for scientific findings, produces the explicitly metaphysical speculation that the world, at its most fundamental level, is made up of momentary events of experience rather than enduring material substances. Process philosophy speculates that these momentary events, called “actual occasions” or “actual entities,” are essentially self-determining, experiential, and internally related to each other. (shrink)

Among the reasons that Whitehead is such an interesting philosopher is that his work resonates across philosophical traditions. This collection develops connections between Whiteheadian concepts and recent European thinkers. The purpose is not simply to compare, however, but, as editor Jeremy Fackenthal suggests, to develop a Whiteheadian thinking “in tandem” with European philosophers in order to create disruptions or “dislocations” in thought that can engender creative approaches to contemporary problems.One general feature of the book deserves mention at the outset, though (...) I will return to it later in the review: although phenomenology and hermeneutics are each represented in the volume, roughly half of the essays focus on the work of Gilles Deleuze (if we group these together with essays focused on “new materialism,” which is connected with Deleuze, the proportion is more like two-thirds). This will be no surprise, since Deleuze is the European philosopher who was most appreciative of Whitehead. And yet, the result is that the conversation with “continental philosophy” is highly selective.The book is organized into three parts, each comprised of three essays. In part 1, “Technological and Systematic Dislocations,” William S. Hamrick brings Whitehead into conversation with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concept of “the flesh” to suggest an ecological ontology capable of overcoming the instrumentalization of nature. Hamrick's strategy is to read Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty as contributing to an “ontological foundation” for a sustainable civilization (18). Bo Eberle writes about the “quantified self” suggested in new, wearable self-monitoring technologies. Drawing on Whitehead's notion of causal efficacy, Eberle argues that devices such as Fitbit give us access to bodily states that bypasses the standard ways we are aware of ourselves (i.e., through consciousness). He goes further to argue that, like all ways of knowing, wearable technologies are selective, and that the selection reflects the interests of the manufacturers and promotes a certain kind of subjectivity (in the case of Fitbit, a subjectivity that is oriented toward “getting your steps in”). Whitehead's epistemology thus enables the critic of wearable technologies to understand how contemporary experience and self-understanding is shaped not simply by recent technological mediations but by the material interests embedded in them. J.R. Hustwit and Carl Dyke take on what they call “activist” uses of Whitehead that naively (in their judgment) suggest that a non-relational substance metaphysics is to blame for most of our social ills. They employ the theory of complex adaptive systems in conversation with Whitehead and Antonio Gramsci to show that, in fact, achieving significant social change is far more difficult and even unpredictable than mere insertion of better ideas into public discourse. Dominant hegemonies have ways of adapting and absorbing attempts to undermine them. Here Hustwit and Dyke draw on the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur to suggest that resistance to the dominant hegemony is nevertheless always possible because of the vagueness of discourse, allowing a plurality of competing interpretations and thus fractures in the dominant hegemony. However, even this kind of resistance is impossible to control and its effects incapable of being entirely predicted. To the essay's titular question, “Can Whitehead save the world?” the authors answer, “No.”In part 2, “Animal/Human Dislocations,” Jeremy Fackenthal draws on the new materialism of Rosi Braidotti (and Deleuze) along with Whitehead to argue for a “process-relational” nomadism that culminates in a “becoming-imperceptible.” His reading together of Whitehead and Braidotti creates the opportunity to recast the former's concept of objective immortality in such a way that it does not refer to death so much as to being diffused into a relational network. The satisfaction of an actual occasion may be taken as its translation into its effects among its relations. Fackenthal argues that this becoming-imperceptible makes possible a sustainable presence within a fragile network of life. Deena M. Lin uses Whitehead, Braidotti, and Judith Butler to lay out a vision of human life as precarious and deserving attention, care, and solidarity. She presses this vision as a direct moral assault on US (Trump's) policy toward Syrian refugees. Going further, she draws on Braidotti's posthuman account of zoe to argue for universal connection and solidarity with all life that should foster, as the title of her essay puts it, “Welcoming of Syrian Life.” Tano Posteraro offers an intriguing essay drawing on Jakob von Uexküll's account of animal experience. Posteraro argues that Uexküll's notion of an animal's Umwelt, shaped by its distinctive perceptual apparatus, needs to be supplemented by Whitehead's notion of prehension to account for the active dimension of animal perception. Rather than a passive registering of animal environments, Posteraro argues that the latter are constructed, and that concepts (or conceptual prehensions) should be understood as tools with which such environments are constructed.In part 3, “Time, the World, and Abstraction,” three essays probe ways that Whiteheadian and Deleuzian themes may resonate critically and constructively. Kris Klotz brings the thought of Whitehead and Deleuze together to inquire about how alternatives to present social forms are envisioned. He argues that, for Whitehead, every actual occasion involves a selection of some features of the past, and, further, that every selection is also an abstraction from the concrete welter of influences impinging on it. For Whitehead, then, to envision alternatives involves a critique of abstractions, a reinstatement of the concrete plurality of possibilities. This, for Whitehead, is what rationality does: it works at restoring the concrete, and, with it, a series of alternatives that have been eclipsed. To this Whiteheadian analysis, Klotz adds Deleuze and Guattari's critique of “opinion.” For Deleuze and Guattari, opinion is not an idiosyncrasy but a consensus to which differences of experience are subjected. Philosophy, for Deleuze and Guattari, must always struggle against opinion in order to bring alternatives to light. These conceptions of reason/philosophy, Klotz argues, represent useful ways to critique inequalities and other social wrongs that are embedded in the social forms that are routinely taken for granted. Elijah Prewitt-Davis uses a scene from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, along with philosophical innovations of Foucault, Deleuze, and Whitehead, to offer a distinctive account of power. Prewitt-Davis calls attention to Deleuze's important book on Leibniz, The Fold, and to how Whitehead's concept of prehension lies at its center. The upshot is that power is not reduced to dominance but, instead, is at work wherever any occasion of experience persists amid the onslaught of the influence of other occasions. Power, as Deleuze wrote, is the capacity to be affected—and to decide how to constitute oneself anew. Keith Robinson offers a detailed account of Whitehead's epistemology along with a reading of Deleuze's analysis of temporality to suggest that there is a common trajectory that seeks to undermine what the title of the essay describes as the “Bifurcation of Nature” (i.e., the separation of natural phenomena and human experience) within the dominant Western philosophical tradition.There is much of value in the volume as a whole. Aside from staging what Spinoza might have called good encounters between Whitehead and a number of continental philosophers, enhancing the conceptual power of each, the contributors are able to make a case that these philosophical trajectories, when read together, have much to contribute to our understanding of and response to the pressing issues of the day. In addition, readers who are interested in the relationship between Whitehead and the new materialism will find this volume to be a helpful resource, stocked with fine examples of how to sharpen new materialist thinking with Whitehead and how to read contemporary contexts through these lenses. On the other hand, this book is not a handbook nor a comprehensive reference. The organizational logic behind its division into sections is murky and the amount of attention given to particular continental philosophers as opposed to others appears somewhat arbitrary: there are recent continental philosophers who get little to no attention at (Derrida, Malabou, Žižek, Agamben, Latour, Nancy, for example), several of whom might prove to be quite interesting to read “in tandem” with Whitehead. Perhaps that is just to say that there are many more essays to be written. (shrink)

Whitehead’s cosmology centers on the self-creation of actual occasions that perish as they come to be, but somehow do combine to constitute societies that are persistent agents and/or patients. “Instance Ontology” developed by D.W. Mertz concerns unification of relata into facts of relatedness by specific intensions. These two conceptual systems are similar in that they both avoid the substance-property distinction: they differ in their understanding of how basic units combine to constitute complex unities. “Process Structural Realism” (PSR) draws from (...) both of these approaches in developing an account of how combinations of processes may produce ontologically significant coherences. When a group of processes achieves such closure that a set of states recurs continually, the effects of that coherence differ from what would occur in the absence of that closure. Such altered effectiveness is an attribute of the system as a whole, and would have consequences. This indicates that the network of processes, as a unit, has ontological significance. The closed network of processes, together with the conditions that prevail, constitute the form of definiteness of the coherence. That form continues to obtain as long as the coherence persists. Constituents contribute to, rather than share, that characteristic. Aspects of some recent research in systems biology, microeconomics, and social psychology illustrate the application of PSR. (shrink)

Some Whiteheadians argue that past actual entities only exist and are available for prehension by later actual entities within the divine consequent nature. Others insist that past actual entities are objectively immortal and available for prehension within the extensive continuum. Based on an interpretation of Whiteheadian societies as structured fields of activity for their constituent actual occasions, this article proposes that the world has an objective reality even apart from the existence of God, and that past (...) actual entities arereflected in the current structure of the cosmic process. Yet the world still needs God as its ultimate source of creativity. (shrink)

Alfred North Whitehead published no book or article strictly on aesthetics. Nonetheless, in his philosophical writings he mentions several times that aesthetic experience is the key to his metaphysics. In fundamental places of his philosophical system, moreover, he uses expressions like ‘aesthetic experience’, ‘aesthetic fact’, ‘aesthetic unity’, and ‘aesthetic order’. These expressions do not, however, refer to human conscious experience alone, but to all entities of the universe. That has led some scholars to the conviction that these terms are used (...) in a purely technical sense and therefore do not refer to the sphere of aesthetics. The author of the current article seeks to demonstrate that these terms do refer to the sphere of aesthetics. The argument set out here consists in three steps. In the first, the author presents Whitehead’s philosophical method of imaginative generalization. In the second step, the author presents the fundamental ontological unit (the actual occasion) of Whitehead’s philosophy, and points out that Whitehead describes it using aesthetic terms that are employed in a broad sense. In the third step the author presents Whitehead’s view of aesthetic understanding. At the end of the article, it is demonstrated that although Whitehead did not develop his analysis of aesthetic understanding into a consistent theory, it forms the background to all his metaphysical books. (shrink)

The article recovers the earlier meaning of event as found in Alfred North Whitehead’s works, Principles of Natural Knowledge and Concept of Nature. In the early Whitehead, the event is considered as the metaphysical ultimate; such that events are the metaphysical building blocks in order to account for the temporal and spatial extensiveness of reality. The recuperation of the pre-PR concept of event is expressive of a dynamic of extending over, or passing into, of one event to another. This dynamic (...) is explicitly absent in the actual occasion of Process and Reality, after Whitehead’s “turn to atomism.”. (shrink)

This paper explores the meaning of time from three points of view: (1) David Bohm's concepts of "vertical implicate order" and "holomovement"; (2) Alfred North Whitehead's idea of the "actual occasion"; and (3) the author's notion of "nondual duality." The author argues that Bohm and Whitehead alike implicitly divide time into dual and nondual aspects and that, in failing to adequately reconcile these, time, in effect, is denied. The alternative offered seeks to thoroughly integrate dual and nondual (holistic) (...) modalities in the understanding that time as becoming entails a dynamic interpenetration of its opposing aspects. Visual geometry and topology are employed to flesh out the "nondual duality" of temporal structure. (shrink)