Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

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 [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write off the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Showing posts with label Philosophy and Science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Philosophy and Science. Show all posts

Saturday, January 27, 2024

The Flat Perspectivalism of Creatio Ex Nihilo Worlds...



The Flat Perspectivalism of
Creatio Ex Nihilo Worlds...

by R.E. Slater

In the writing of books and theories there is no end...
but without a beginning there can be no middle nor end;
Such is the thinking in the Land of the Living, mortal and
perishable, prone to imaginations of all sorts. Speculating
without end, forgetting the past to conjure the present,
forging the future from what once was but now is.

- re slater

Speaking generally, then specifically...

In science, it is not uncommon to alter one's thinking, if not one's beliefs, for that of a more-real form of existential reality than the one previously held on too. To understand chemistries you must accept the reality of the unseeable molecule. Similarly with mathematics, standard numerics take on newer, more helpful forms in calculi and non-linear algebraics. The same can be said of Newtonian physics when enlightened had moved rapidly to Einstinian relativities and Heisenberg-Planck-Bohr's Quantum worlds of imagination to reality.

In science all thing change... especially one's perspectives.

Hence, once learning of a previously unknown creational position within the set parameters of my former theology I had immediately grasped the newer, unknown position and as quickly - if not by necessity - rejected what I had been taught for what I was coming to rethink and reperspectivize.

What was this?


Life Is About the Struggle for Perspective -
Not the Simple Consigned Accretion of Acceptance

To rethink life's institutionalized moralities requires a bit of radicalized effort. This occurred for me far later in life than I care to admit. Most likely in my mid-fifties when breaking away from pre-scientific evangelical world to the post-evangelical reperspectizing of my Baptist beliefs when conjoining metaphysics to my earlier youth of science and math.

Such a "mid-life crisis" isn't a bad thing... in fact, though greatly disruptive in it's personal experience, I now think back on that "dark period" of my life as rare opportunity not often utilized by society to afford myself of a positively transformative experience when seeking to expand my faith towards worlds of beauty and wonder.

I still believed in God but I was beginning to see a non-Baptist view of the world and religion I couldn't see within my enculturated bubble.

I had learned science and mathematics from public school and three years of rigorous university training but then rebooted to learn my metaphysical philosophy and existential reality through my Baptist faith of church and institutional studies. That is, I obtained a BA in psychology with a minor in bible; and a Masters of Divinity degree (120 graduate credit hours in biblical theology with a minor in pastoring) along with hundreds of hours in various field ministries.

At religious school, just as I had at university, we talked about a lot things related to contemporary world and bible-world. And I tried just as hard back then to think in contemporary forms of world events and statisms when attempting to reconcile beliefs with reality and imagination.

Whether I turned to science or to religion something was missing. But life being what it was I couldn't see the forest for the trees, as the adage goes.

However, a self re-enforcing and referential existential bubble is a bubble however helpful, comforting, or nourishing it may be. For myself, coming from a quasi-religious home I had to first find a religious beginning. Thus after three years at university I turned to a qualified bible school for continuing education in theology. Though I didn't realize this at the time I was seeking a new metaphysic which was both worldly and religious after the fashion of my own thinking.

Then, like any true explorer of truth and reality, I needed to expand my existential borders-and-edges to embrace what I hadn't learned and experienced from within my own geographical and institutional settings.

...Yet this was a standard personal practice gained from holding multiple perspectives gained by extensive travel, book learning, and talking with people and listening to their experiences. Even in my youth I lived through non-standardized, rapidly transformative personal experiences. Which meant that even though when viewing myself externally from the outside everything looked staid and normalized to external eyes. my interiority of self was ever a cascading tumult of conflicting ideas and recognitions which I was quite content to hold in tension without resolving any for the simple reason that I didn't wish to. I felt too young to the immense task at hand.

And though I relied on a vast number of guides I still hadn't decided for myself in which direction I needed to go. I was waiting for that next holistic moment of explosion and reintegration which might provide a sufficiency of thought and experience my soul was seeking. Faith wasn't enough. Nor science. I needed a new world of holistic healing and sensible faith formation. I found it at last through process philosophy and theology.

This takes a bit of doing, and truth be told, may not ever be accomplished if one's religious world is sufficiently extensive and comforting in the first place, as mine was. But when profoundly collapsing into a stage of uncertainty and doubt I had at last found a productively existential way to reimagine a more expanded form of religious metaphysic than the ones I had experienced or contemplated. One which expanded all present forms, charters and beliefs of existence while simultaneously questioning them in a positively helpful, if not deconstructive, then reconstructive, form of re-educational process.


Learning to Unlearn to Relearn

In my adult maturity, and with the advantage of many years, I was able to translate and transition from a Westernized perspective of religion and dogma to a Process perspective of religion acting more philosophically when unbound from its dogmas.  This demanded an inner constitutionality of mindful growth and understanding which could not have occurred if my earlier systems hadn't collapsed in-on-themselves borne from all the external stimuli pressing down upon it.

As I have spoken to this experience many times I wish to now transition to the topic at hand... one which couldn't be allowed if I hadn't first been transformed spiritually to allow such questions and reasonings....


Let's Talk About Nothingness

This is the idea of nothingness and whether the universe had a beginning.

As stated earlier I would not have considered this perspective if I had not first allowed the question to be entertained. What was the question? Did the universe have a beginning or was it ever as it is... in cycles of evolving, devolving, over and over again and again, infinitely in progression and regression?

Come to find out, my presumption of creatio ex nihilo (creation from nothing) was a conjecture, an assumption, made by the senses and not by the sciences.

For many reasons we cannot fault the ancients of their a priori logic. But now that we have the means via quantum physics to examine the universe in which we live we may now state with more assurance that something cannot come from nothing but rather something ever comes from something.

Known as creatio continua we may now state that "our" universe is old. So old that it never had a birth and never will have a death. Radiant energy - however dense, dispersed, or defused - cannot be lost, just reconfigured in the quantum sense of things.

Just as no man is an island but finds identity and purpose in movement and relationships (sic, Alain Badiou's Being and Event metaphysic) so too can Whiteheadian metaphysics say without Being there can be no Event, and without Event there can be no Being.

That is to say that the universe always was and is and will be... that the universe is always becoming over against a state of nothingness.

We ascribe such god-like traits to God but what if God gives to pre-creational energy a nominal sense of being and in response the universe gives to God its initializing response of events. Then can we aver that the Maker of heaven and earth has quite properly, if not essentially, given to pre-creational energy it's sense of identity and purpose in relation to God's idea of things "to be and become"?


Process theology captures such a metaphysical relationship in its paradigms of processual novelty, continuum, resulting response, and organic complexity. Without saying the universe is sentient we may aver as sentient products and quotients of the universe's complexities that there is in some sense a latency - if not an extreme latency - within the universe in which we may ascribe a panpsychic quality of things most likely gained from its Organizer we claim as God.

A panpsychic experience or interiority which is best described via Whiteheadian process panentheism. Not a pantheism... panentheism. That is, the universe is not God... but something responding to God which gives to the universe it's destiny and meaning. Hence, a "panentheistic" universe responds to God's Otherness when infilled by God's inherent essence and image.

Hence, the burden of all energy, including organic life itself, is infused by the quality of God's likeness without being or becoming God itself. Divine Infusion is thus ascriptive to the very process of being and becoming.

As God is... so does creation aspire, yearn, and groan within itself towards an immortal, viable, nourishing, and benevolent life force. Whereas death defeats such possibilities in whose/which response life dies when losing purpose and meaning for mere survival and not thrival.

But in the Divine's "life blood", divine infusion (or the imago Dei of the God) may bring forward unending, continuous redemptive forces with loving, benevolent effect. This is what creatio continua (always-is creation, or "creation continually") can mean in a theologically metaphysical sense when understood to morph and evolve through its ages of revolutions against any death-like response and events attempting to disrupt and discontinue it's panentheistically-driven divine process of birthing life after life after life.

Peace,

R.E. Slater
January 27, 2024



Was The Universe Born From Nothing?
Jan 28, 2022


00:00 Introduction

04:56 The World Of Probabilities

12:05 The Quantum Of Cosmos Present

24:21 The Quantum Of Cosmos Past

31:20 The Quantum Of Cosmos Future

36:04 Looking Through The Singularity



* * * * * *


Unperspectival, Perspectival, Aperspectival:
Exploring Jean Gebser, Lesson II

by Cyntia Bourgeault  |  November 24, 2020


Jean Gebser’s cultural home base was the world of art. He was a personal friend of Pablo Picasso’s, and examples culled from art history dot the landscape of his The Ever-Present Origin, illustrating almost every significant point he makes. It’s not surprising that his master interpretive lens, perspective, should itself derive from the domain of art.

Yes, perspective. Just like you learned in elementary school art. When you first began drawing pictures, probably as a preschooler, Mommy and Daddy and your big sister were always bigger, no matter where they appeared in your picture, because that’s what they were! Then someone taught you about foreground and background, and you learned how to make things at the back of the picture smaller to show that they were farther away. You learned to turn your house at a slight angle on the page so that you could show two sides of it at once. You may or may not have consciously realized that you were learning how to proportion the various bits and pieces in relation to a hypothetical point on the horizon. But your drawings got more orderly, and they began to convey a sense of depth.

That’s exactly what we’re talking about here. Perspective. But now applied as an organizing principle for the field of consciousness.

According to Gebser, the five structures of consciousness we met up with in my November 18, 2020 post Stages Versus Structures: Exploring Jean Gebser, Lesson I (you will find the link is at the bottom of this post)—archaic, magic, mythic, mental, and integral—can be grouped into three larger categories, or three worlds, as he calls them: unperspectival, perspectival, and aperspectival. While the nomenclature may at first feel intimidating, it’s actually quite easy to master if you keep your elementary school art days in mind. Unperspectival is how you drew before you learned about foreground and background, when everything was all just jumbled onto the drawing sheet. Perspectival is the drawing sheet once you’ve learned to arrange it in relationship to that hypothetical point on the horizon. And aperspectival is what ensues once you’ve learned to convey several perspectives simultaneously, as in some of Picasso’s surrealistic artwork where he simultaneously shows you the front side and back side of a person. A heads up: in Gebser the prefix “a” always conveys the meaning of “free from.” Thus an aperspectival view is one that is free from captivity to a single central point of reference.

  • The Unperspectival World embraces the archaic, magic, and mythic structures.
  • The Perspectival World hosts the mental structure.
  • The Aperspectival World is the still-emerging integral structure.

Each of these three perspectives is properly called a world because it comprises an entire gestalt, an entire womb of meaning in which we live and move and make our connections. Each has its own distinctive fragrance, ambience, tincture. Each is an authentic pathway of participation, an authentic mode of encountering the cosmos, God, and our own selfhood. Each has its brilliant strengths and its glaring weaknesses. Compositely, they evoke “the width and length and height and depth” of our collective human journey into consciousness.


I am aware that I am walking the razor’s edge as I choose my words here, trying to escape the gravitational field of perspectival consciousness that would lock this all back into the evolutionary timeline. It is true, of course, that these three worlds broadly demarcate the three major epochs of Western human cultural history: ancient, medieval, and modern. But it’s always been a bit dicey to try to hold these timelines too tightly or to limit structures of consciousness to specific historical eras. We have stunning exemplars of the mental structure breaking through in ancient Greece and Israel, and the mythic still lives among us today in much of the American heartlands. Gebser’s model deftly sidesteps these all-too familiar cul de sacs by reminding us that the “worlds”—and the structures they encompass—are phenomenological, not developmental. While they appear to join the flow of linear time at specific entry points, they have in fact always been present and must continue to be present, for they are part of the ontology of the Whole.

Gebser’s visually oriented presentation allows him to make one additional very important point. From a visual standpoint, perspective is really a matter of dimensionality, and dimensionality is in turn a function of degree of separation. Gebser builds on this insight to draw powerful correlations between the emergence of perspective within the structures of consciousness and the emergence of the egoic—i.e., individual—selfhood so foundational to our modern self-understanding.

In the unperspectival world everything exists in guileless immediacy (remember preschooler art?). There is relatively little separation between viewer and viewed, the external world mirroring a self-structure that is still fluid and permeable. This is the world of “original participation” (as philosopher Owen Barfield once famously described it) where the cosmos is at its most numinous and communicative, and the sense of belonging is as oceanic as the sea itself.


As we enter the perspectival world, the double-edged sword begins to fall. The same growing capacity for abstraction that makes possible the perception of proportion and depth also—by the same measure—increases our sense of separation. We stand more on the outside, our attention fixed on that hypothetical point on the horizon which organizes our canvas and maintains the illusion of depth within a flat plane. Order is maintained, but at the cost of a necessary distancing and a strict adherence to the artifice that makes the illusion possible in the first place. Deception enters riding on the back of that abstractive power, as “original participation” gives way to a growing sense of dislocation and exile. That is essentially our modern world: “oscillating,” writes Jeremy Johnson in Seeing Through the World (pg. 58) “between a powerlessness to control the forces unleashed by the perspectival world on the one hand, and a total self-intoxicating power on the other”—in a word, “between anxiety and delight.”

It is my own observation here (rather than either Jeremy’s or Gebser’s) that the perspectival contains an inherently deceptive aspect since it is intentionally creating a sleight of hand—the illusion of three-dimensionality within a two-dimensional plane. But if I have not wandered too far off the mark, the observation gives me some strong additional leverage for emphasizing why resolutions to the perspectival crisis can never emerge from within the perspectival structure itself, and why the much-hyped “integral emergence” cannot simply be a new, improved version of our old mental habits—not even a vastly increased “paradox tolerance.” We need to get out of Flatland altogether.

For me, that is what aperspectival is essentially all about. It is an authentic transposition of consciousness from a two-dimensional plane to a sphere. Within that sphere, inner and outer world come back together again, and a sense of authentic belongingness returns. Numinosity returns as well: the felt-sense of a cosmos directly infused with the vivifying presence of Origin. Selfhood once again becomes fluid and interpenetrating even as presence becomes more centered and intensified.

The perspectival is at best a foreshadowing and at worst a mental simulacrum of authentic aperspectival three-dimensionality. The real deal can indeed be attained; in fact, it is now breaking in upon us whether we like it or not! But the cost of admission is not cheap: it entails the overhaul not only of our fundamental attitudes, but of our entire neurophysiology of perception.


I hope to circle back to this point in due course. For now, the most important thing to keep in mind is that in the Gebserian system perspective is not simply a point of view; it is a completely different world of seeing, unfolding according to its own protocols: its own core values and ways of making connections. To truly take in another’s perspective is not simply to take in another’s “position” and arrange the pieces dialectically on a mental chessboard. Rather, it is profoundly to take in another world and allow that world to touch our hearts and wash over us deeply until it, too, becomes our own. It is to listen in a whole new dimension. And I believe Gebser would argue that this dimension only truly opens up with the inbreaking of the aperspectival structure.
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*Jeremy Johnson’s book: Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness, is available from the publisher, here at Revelore Press.

 

Saturday, June 24, 2023

Whitehead - Process Philosophy + Biology



Whitehead - 
Process Philosophy + Biology


I didn't have time to pursue the google articles below but wanted to list them for those of you who read my past recent articles on process philosophy/theology and biology (most recently the two articles below). The "Related Resources" section are past articles of mine in which Whiteheadian Thought is further distinguished, examined, and expanded for our time.

As philosophic-theology doesn't excite anybody except people like myself trained in theology but not trained in my inherited theology's philosophical basis... I began this very important CHRISTIAN project in 2011 after writing a number of poems (unpublished) and finding I had come to the end of my epistemological foundation. I needed a more up-to-date approach to the postmodern (now metamodern) era I was finding myself in.

More simply, I needed a better philosophical foundation than the one I had inherited by my Westernized (American) BAPTIST faith once founded in Calvinistic Dispensationalist and later to evolve in college and seminary to a Calvinistic Covenant Reformed theology. After years of teaching this strain of enculturated Evangelical Christianity and by happenstance fell into  Evangelical Emergent Christianity (a bible-church form of mainstream progressive Christianity). It left me with a lot of questions and no way to answer them with my present background.

It took some time to understand Emergent Christianity which made the reasonable argument that one's faith in Jesus in nothing but empty if it doesn't also demand works of Jesus across all stratas of society. In past ministries not one aspect of church ministries had not seem by time and effort placed into people and community. And in my 40s I next participated with my public school system, youth sports, and politics from a serving citizen perspective for several decades in addition to church ministries.

But in this newer stream of Christian emphasis of FAITH + WORKS with equal emphasis on each, I also noticed that Reformed Calvinized Covenant theology was unequal to the works of Jesus at hand. Its definition of God and godly faith seemed to fail in all the wrong places. Hence, after some disruption to my existential spirituality and took my next step from personal poetic examination to strategic faith examination.

When I did I found I needed to abandon Calvinism altogether BUT KEEP the Covenant theology I had learned (with or without Reformed theology, whatever that means now-a-days). Thus my historical Baptist roots in Arminianism came to the surface to remove the Cal-Minism (Calvinism+Arminianism) I was taught. Next, Arminianism led quite naturally to a more open and relational faith to which process theology was added later.

This latter I also stumbled across while I was examining Continental philosophical thought. Little to I realize how significant it would become... not as a third Barthian way of Continentalism + Evangelicalsim but a deeply ancient organic philosophy spoke to by many in the past all the way back to ancient civilizations. More recently, we may blame Hegel for unearthing processual thought before he quickly left it to attend to other beliefs and statements in his day.

And then a master mathematician who was interested in the early quantum sciences by the name of Alfred North Whitehead retired from the University of London's Imperial College, and came overseas to America, and was hired by Harvard University at the ripe old age of 63. And for the next six years (68) Whitehead wrote out his treatise of "Process and Reality" among many other tracts and articles. The University of Chicago picked it up in the 1950s under Charles Hartshorne whose student John Cobb and other Generation-2 luminaries brought process thought to universities on the East and West coasts (Clairmont, Drew, Duke, Wilmington, etc).

It was here that I finally found a significant philosophical tradition to re-root my Westernized Christianity based in Hellenistic Platonic thought with all it's corollaries of Augustianism, Aristotilianism, Scholasticism, and Christianized Modernism. I had found an organically open and relational theology on which I might revisualize the God I knew in the bible but had become muddied by nonnatural westernized philsophic-theology.

Hence my deep labor to give to Relevancy22 readers all the tools they will need to continue our present need to once again preach Jesus and to assert a Theology of Love as versus all the other non-loving theologies which have become politically disruptive, eschatologically unhealthy, and foreign to the nature and being of man and nature.

Below are your tools. Use them. Try to understand their flavors and approaches. And ignite the chaff in today's Trumpian churches burning up the chattel that Jesus may be lifted up as a loving God who is deeply present with us, sustaining, burdening, filling us by His Spirit in good and humane ways of loving outreach and community building across all cultures, beliefs, religions, and responsibilities.

Amen,

R.E. Slater
June 24, 2023
*unedited






Alfred North Whitehead OM FRS FBA (15 February 1861 – 30 December 1947) was an English mathematician and philosopher. He created the philosophical school known as process philosophy,[21] which has been applied in a wide variety of disciplines, including ecology, theology, education, physics, biology, economics, and psychology.

In his early career Whitehead wrote primarily on mathematics, logic, and physics. He wrote the three-volume Principia Mathematica (1910–1913), with his former student Bertrand Russell. 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 Modern Library.

Beginning in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Whitehead gradually turned his attention from mathematics to philosophy of science, and finally to metaphysics. He developed a comprehensive metaphysical system which radically departed from most of Western philosophy. Whitehead argued that reality consists of processes 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. Whitehead's philosophical works – particularly Process and Reality – 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 ecological civilization and environmental ethics pioneered by John B. Cobb.


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RELATED RESOURCES


Process Cosmotheology and the Biological Universe, Part 4 - Andrew Davis' Response to Steven Dick's Naturalistic Cosmology











* * * * * *

GOOGLE SEARCH on
Process Philosophy + Biology

This ontology of things and their properties is articulated at a higher level through the concept of mechanism, the arrangement of things into structures that, ...
We identify three main empirical motivations for adopting a process ontology in biology: metabolic turnover, life cycles, and ecological interdependence. We ...
by J Seibt2012Cited by 342 — Process philosophy is based on the premise that being is dynamic and that the dynamic nature of being should be the primary focus of any ...
by DJ Nicholson2018Cited by 312 — A Manifesto for a Processual Philosophy of Biology. 3. John Dupré and Daniel J. Nicholson. Part II. Metaphysics. 2. Processes and Precipitates.
403 pages
The process view of life, at least, derives from the fact that everything is more or less connected, ecologically or symbiotically. The unity of science is a ...
John Dupré on the view of living things as deeply intertwined processes. ... Process philosophy of biology has powerful resources for challenging the ...
Process philosophy, also ontology of becoming, or processism, is an approach in philosophy that identifies processes, changes, or shifting relationships as ...
by D Sölch2016Cited by 7 — Based on his studies of the behavior of social insects, Wheeler developed a concept of superorganisms that paved the way for a theory of emergent evolution.
Sep 25, 2012 — John Dupré, Processes of Life: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology, Oxford University Press, 2012, 320pp., $55.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199691982.