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 Societal Evolution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Societal Evolution. Show all posts

Friday, September 29, 2023

Deep Roots of Humanity Project



Deep Roots of Humanity Project


Welcome to the Deep Roots of Humanity project, an investigation of early technological change in south-central Africa.

We are an international and interdisciplinary team of researchers examining a fundamental change in the way early humans planned and made tools. The time period spans 500,000 years to 300,000 years ago (the Early to Middle Stone Age transition). During this period a new way of creating tools emerged which we rely on today for making most everything we use.

For the first time in human history tools were made by combining two or more parts to make a single tool. Sounds simple but it was a revolutionary idea: everyday actions such as cutting, scraping, chopping, drilling and piercing were made more efficient with the addition of a handle. Imagine using a screwdriver which didn’t have a handle or try chopping down a tree with an axe blade, but with no handle. You’ll soon appreciate the advantages of hafting (the process of combining parts into a functioning whole).

The Deep Roots team is working to determine when this invention took place in what is now Zambia and put the Zambian evidence in the broader context of the Early to Middle Stone Age transition in Africa. We are also interested in why the invention of hafting came about when it did. Did climate change play a role, and were there regional differences in the take-up of this technology? Afterall, the large hand-held tools of the Early Stone Age, such as handaxes and cleavers, had been the standard tools for well over a million years. Why change what does the job? These are some of the basic questions driving our research.

We are documenting our research in more detail on the Deep Roots project website.

Excavating the evidence

Our five year programme of excavation and research aimed to enrich the database of evidence from existing African archaeological records, expand its geographical coverage and serve as a model which future researchers can adapt to locations in other parts of Africa.

Between 2017 and 2022 an interdisciplinary team worked in Zambia excavating in three key locations:Victoria Falls
Kalambo Falls

Previous excavations have found evidence in these places for the Early to Middle Stone Age transition (Mode 2/Mode3). This transition pre-dates the evolution of Homo sapiens and is characterised by a radical change in the way tools were imagined and made, with multiple parts combined into a whole. This is known as hafting or combinatorial technology.

Everything we make today is produced using tools made using other tools made of multiple parts. This research aims to unravel when and why this fundamentally new way of thinking about technology occurred. Part of understanding this transformation is learning what advantages this technology offered over older ways of making tools.‌

Well preserved wood being recovered from Early
Stone  Age deposits at Kalambo Falls, Zambia.

Fieldwork, April 2022

The videos here are from our final brief season of fieldwork in April 2022 when we returned to the area of Victoria Falls, a World Heritage Site, where we the project had started in 2017. The aim was to collect sediments from our excavations for environmental analyses and to record an area excavated in 1950 by Prof Desmond Clark. This excavation is located just near the entrance to the falls and a museum was built over the site. The deep pit preserves a long Stone Age sequence, including the important Early to Middle Stone Age transition, but baboons had found their way in and the excavations needed to be tidied up.

On our final morning before heading to the airport we explored a new area beyond the town of Livingstone and made an unexpected discovery. We share with you those early moments of excitement.

Expert crafting, local knowledge and
educational resources

The project has gathered information from local communities living near Victoria Falls and Kalambo Falls about plants that are used today for making handles for tools and adhesives for attaching cutting edges to the handles. This information has fed into our experimental work and helped us replicate hafted tools that work well in cutting, chopping, scraping and digging – basic tasks today and in the past.

Our use-wear specialists are using this information as a reference collection for interpreting evidence that survives on the stone tools excavated from waterlogged deposits at Kalambo Falls.

For those living near our excavations there were open days for the public, and especially for school groups to see the work in progress and handle artefacts.

We are currently providing activity sessions for local primary schools in the Liverpool region, helping teachers and their students to understand the importance of the development of hafting to our lives today. A longer-term aim is to make the knowledge gained from the project accessible for teachers in Zambia to use as part of the junior secondary school curriculum in the teaching of human evolution and climate change.

A recent activity session took place on Thursday 16th February, where Professor Larry Barham, Dr. Peter Hommel and students from the Archeology Department visited a school and provided an introduction to Living in the stone age. The class learnt about the importance of handles and hafts to the development of human societies, where they had the opportunity to handle some artefacts and replicas themselves. Students also conducted a chromatography experiment to see how ancient glues were made.


Our team

Our international team of researchers includes:

archaeologists - expert in innovative approaches to the study of stone tool use, notably use-wear and residue analysis
geographers - to help us understand the formation of the sites
geoscientists - who can date the deposits.
Find out more about us: Larry Barham (Liverpool, UK),
Ian Candy (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK)
Geoff Duller (Aberystwyth, UK)
Andy Hein (Edinburgh, UK)
Maggie Katongo (Livingstone Museum, Zambia)
Karl Lee (professional technologist, UK)
Perrice Nkombwe (Moto Moto Museum, Zambia)
Veerle Rots (Liège, Belgium)
Noora Taipale (TraceoLab, University of Liege),
Dave Thomas (Oxford, UK)
Sumiko Tsukamoto (Hannover, Germany)

The Deep Roots of Humanity project is funded by the Art & Humanities Research Council, UK (grant AH/N08804/1)


Deep Roots blogs

Larry Barham blogs about what it's like to excavate in Zambia, as he heads off to begin his research into stone age tools.

Researchers Explore Cultural Evolutionary Roots of Religion


amazon link

Religion has been a central part of human experience since at least the dawn of recorded history. The gods change, as do the rituals, but the underlying desire remains—a desire to belong to something larger, greater, most lasting than our mortal, finite selves.
 
But where did that desire come from? Can we explain its emergence through evolution? Yes, says biological anthropologist Barbara J. King—and doing so not only helps us to understand the religious imagination, but also reveals fascinating links to the lives and minds of our primate cousins.
Evolving God draws on King’s own fieldwork among primates in Africa and paleoanthropology of our extinct ancestors to offer a new way of thinking about the origins of religion, one that situates it in a deep need for emotional connection with others, a need we share with apes and monkeys.
Though her thesis is provocative, and she’s not above thoughtful speculation, King’s argument is strongly rooted in close observation and analysis. She traces an evolutionary path that connects us to other primates, who, like us, display empathy, make meanings through interaction, create social rules, and display imagination—the basic building blocks of the religious imagination. With fresh insights, she responds to recent suggestions that chimpanzees are spiritual—or  even religious—beings, and that our ancient humanlike cousins carefully disposed of their dead well before the time of Neandertals.
 
King writes with a scientist’s appreciation for evidence and argument, leavened with a deep empathy and admiration for the powerful desire to belong, a desire that not only brings us together with other humans, but with our closest animal relations as well.

* * * * * * *




By way of personal commentary. If I understood the article below a'right it is proposing to research humanity's belief in God as:

  • God as a Meme
  • God as a Social Construct
  • God as a survival method of grouping with like-believing hominin groups

Of course we can think of a few more caveats to research:

  • God as a deep need to share connection with one another and nature
  • God as a derivative of the hologram we live in
  • God as a necessary religious construct in evolutionary development
  • God as imaginary, non-existent social construct
  • God as an AI perturbation placed upon us

And then there is the general opinion of many...

  • that God is real and it is the nature of our being to ask questions about God's veracity as well as our own.

R.E. Slater
September 29, 2023


* * * * * * *


This ambitious, interdisciplinary book seeks to explain the origins of religion using our knowledge of the evolution of cognition. A cognitive anthropologist and psychologist, Scott Atran argues that religion is a by-product of human evolution just as the cognitive intervention, cultural selection, and historical survival of religion is an accommodation of certain existential and moral elements that have evolved in the human condition.

* * * * * * *


Graphic: Caroline Norman



The evolution of religion and morality:
Researchers explore cultural evolutionary roots of religion

February 25, 2013


Researchers at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Human Evolution, Cognition and Culture (HECC) have received a $3 million grant from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for a project “aimed at exploring the cultural evolutionary roots of religion.”

The Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium (CERC) project brings together scholars, both local and international (partner universities include Oxford and Harvard), from a range of disciplines. Researchers from the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences will focus on understanding the complex origins of religious behaviour and morality.

The HECC’s purpose, according to its website, is “to create a research and training hub that will simultaneously advance understanding of the human species within the framework of Darwinian evolutionary theory, and encourage evolutionary scientists to incorporate cultural learning and cultural evolution in explanations of human thought and behaviour.”

The CERC’s primary question, whether religious beliefs and behaviours are linked to within-group solidarity and cooperation, will be the focus of research, from which related questions about cognition and historical/cultural processes may emerge.

UBC researcher and primary investigator of the CERC, Edward Slingerland, calls for consilience between the humanities and the sciences to properly engage the project’s research. In a recent paper titled “Religious Studies as a Life Science” (coauthored by Joseph Bulbulia), Slingerland states, “progress in the study of religion requires extensive collaboration between life scientists and classical scholars of religion.”

Slingerland adopts this view on the study of religion, noting, “while preliminary results from the biology of religion are impressive, much of the science of religion is conducted by scholars who have only a casual acquaintance with religious facts.”

These biologists of religion include Richard Dawkins, who labels religion as a “meme” (i.e., a cultural unit of evolution) or collection of memes. Memes, which include “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions,” are a possible explanation for the emergence of religion or belief in god.

“God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value or infective power,” claims Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene.

Others such as David S. Wilson have theorized religion as the product of multi-level selection, a biological position that claims natural selection works on multiple levels, such as the gene, the individual, and the group.

  • Slingerland notes three evolutionary models of religion proposed by biologists of religion. Some researchers understand religions as “cultural by-products” and consider religious traits to be “by-products of functional designs.” Dawkins’ memetic theory of religion falls into this group.
  • Others view religion as somehow conferring individual adaptations for cooperation, in which religiosity and associated characteristics are thought to possess survival value for the individual organism.
  • Lastly, the “cultural group adaptations” view asserts that “religious cultures evolve to benefit religious groups.” Wilson’s idea of multi-level selection would fall under this third category.

The CERC is dedicated to bridging an overplayed dichotomy between science and other fields of inquiry. Slingerland states, “biological approaches to religion are not merely optional.” However, classically trained scholars too must inform scientists, as Slingerland cautions, “a science without facts is not a science.”

Ultimately, the CERC is an excellent example of multidisciplinary research and strong Canadian scholarship in a global initiative. These researchers are digging at a fertile bed of knowledge that requires both the modern tools of science and, despite those who deem them outmoded, the tools of religious studies to penetrate and extract rich facts about religion and morality.

The study of religious behaviour and morality provides insight into one of life’s endless forms—the human mind—to which illumination can only make it all the more beautiful and wonderful.

The CERC is expected to report its results in 2018.

Nathan Fifield - The Evolution of God



The Evolution of God


The Bible is usually read as a grand narrative from creation to apocalypse. This straight-forward reading presents some paradoxes. For example, the Biblical God commands wrathful genocides alongside loving forgiveness. At times He demands uncompromising nationalism and at other times He promotes generous universalism. For centuries, armies of apologists have been busy justifying these paradoxes, anxious to clear up doubts that could arise about the divine origins of Bible. Robert Wright’s monumental book The Evolution of God gives a much simpler explanation for God’s schizophrenic nature: the God of the Bible is actually an amalgamation of different Canaanite gods. According to Wright the Bible is a selectively edited compilation of sacred middle eastern texts and traditions forged together into a cohesive narrative by Jewish scholars during the Babylonian captivity (697 BC) and then added to by Christian fathers in the 3rd century AD. It was only during the Babylonian captivity that true monotheism emerged.

In Wright’s narrative, the Jews were actually much less genocidal than the Biblical narrative suggests they were. In the Old Testament, God is a wrathful champion of an ISIS-like nation cruising from victory to victory as long as they were loyal to Him. However Wright suggests that Israel was actually a loose coalition of polytheistic tribes fighting off gigantic empires surrounding them. Within this pressure cooker Israelites faced impossible decisions: whether to accept humiliating vassalage at the hands of oppressive empires or to stand bravely against them. Not everyone can relate to the genocidal Jews in the literal Biblical account. But everyone can relate to Wright’s narrative of a nation afflicted and beset by unresolvable dilemmas. Under these circumstances it’s easy to see how some of the more troubling views about God emerged. Israelis were always the “little guys,” but they were inspired by stories that made them and their God out to be just as great or greater than the ruthless empires they were forced to take on.

The above diagram is an attempt to illustrate Wright’s account of the evolution of the Judaeo-Christian God from ancient Canaanite polytheism. It is meant to be a kind of family tree with the ancestral gods depicted at the bottom and evolving over time to form the Holy Trinity at the top. Wright is quick to point out that this narrative is not universally accepted, especially among the religiously devout. Nevertheless it utilizes some of the more mainstream theories about the development of Judaeo-Christianity from the historical and archaeological perspective. And nothing in this account precludes belief in the divine origins of the Bible. In fact the emergence of monotheism from polytheism represents a kind of miracle in and of itself. The Jews were uniquely important in the history of the world and not because of dramatic miracles like the crossing of the Red Sea. They were, in a much more important sense, divinely inspired.

Canaan as a Syncretic Pressure Cooker

Wright argues that Judaeo-Christian monotheism evolved from Canaanite polytheism through a process called syncretism (wherein two or more gods combine to form a new god). Much of Wright’s book analyzes how and why this happened. My illustration attempts to show how the empires surrounding Canaan acted as a kind of imperial pressure cooker leading to new deity combinations not unlike the pressures inside a nuclear reactor which force individual particles to combine to form new ones.

The Ancient Canaanite Trinity: Ywh (the flame), Baal (the husband), El (the father)

There were many deities in ancient Canaan, but three of them are central to the evolution of monotheism: Ywh, Baal, and El. Ywh (also Yhwh or Yahweh) was originally a warrior god with transcendent attributes. He enters the archeological record as a deity of the Shasu people, a religious minority persecuted in Egypt who later settled in Southern Canaan (the possible origin of the Exodus story). I’ve illustrated Ywh as an upside down triangle in an attempt to show that he represents the transcendence of heaven coming down into the human heart as a “still small voice” or a “fire in the bones.” Elsewhere in the Bible he takes the form of a burning bush or fire from heaven. I’ve therefore given Ywh the subtitle “the flame.”

Baal was a popular storm god who brought rain to farmers and fertility to families. Like Ywh I’ve illustrated Baal as an upside down triangle because he is also a sky god who comes down from heaven. Baal is also the Hebrew name for “husband,” and in a sense the god Baal was the archetypal husband: protector, provider, and inseminator of the land. (See analysis of Psalm 29)

El was the head god in a large pantheon of sons, daughters and wives and a popular god in Northern Canaan. He was a nomadic deity who dwelt in a tent or tabernacle and displayed the kind of patriarchal leadership that was emulated by kings and chieftains. I’ve illustrated him as a right-side-up triangle to emphasize the fact that he acts within a hierarchy. (El is also the generic term for “god” in Hebrew, so it is sometimes confusing distinguishing between El Shaddai, the proper name for this god, Eloheim, the name for El’s pantheon, and el, the name used for god generically.)

Although Wright doesn’t go into this, I want to highlight the archetypal connotations of this ancient Canaanite trinity. The archetypes Father, Husband, and Flame are remarkably similar to the Catholic trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. El the Father and God the Father both the crown the hierarchies of their respective theologies. The “Son” in Catholic theology is often described as a husband or bridegroom, an archetype similar to the “husband” Baal. The Holy Ghost also has remarkable similarities to the Biblical depictions of Ywh as a flame of fire or a still small voice. While there may not be a direct link between these ancient deities and the development of the Catholic trinity, monotheistic conceptions of God seem to reflect many of the ancient polytheistic archetypes.

Syncretic Alliances

There were two major syncretic events in ancient Canaan that were central to the formation of monotheism. One was a 9th century BC anti-Egyptian alliance between Ywh worshipers in the south and El worshipers in the north. This alliance may have been the origin of the covenant rites of Israelite worship wherein various tribes of Canaanites gathered together around important shrines to swear allegiance to El and appeal for his protection from their aggressive imperial neighbors. An anti-Egyptian alliance would make sense from the perspective of the Shasu, who had been persecuted by the Egyptians before. In this alliance El retains his position as the top god and Ywh becomes one of his sons (see Mark S. Smith analysis of Psalm 82 in Origins of Biblical Monotheism). El’s importance in Canaan was reduced after the Northern Kingdoms were carried away captive by the Assyrians in 722 BCE, the so called “lost ten tribes.”

The second major syncretic event occurred during a 7th century BC alliance between the Israelite nations and the Phoenician Empire. According to Wright this event influenced the merger of Baal and Ywh which happened not through cooperation but through competition. The Bible gives a dramatic account of this competition in 1 Kings which tells the story of a conflict between the Israelite King Ahab, his Queen Jezebel and the Prophet Elijah. Jezebel was a Phoenician princess loyal to Baal, and her marriage to the Israelite Ahab represented an important alliance with Phoenicia that would help fend off threats from the aggressive Assyrian Empire. This gave political clout to worshipers of Baal and marginalized those loyal to Ywh. The worshipers of Ywh refused to go down without a fight. Their prophets decried the alliance and attempted to demonstrate that not only was Ywh a better god than Baal, he could also best Baal at his own game: bring rain in times of drought and stave off an Assyrian onslaught without the help of the Phoenicians. This conflict is depicted in the famous contest between the priests of Baal and Elijah. While this story was written long after it had supposedly occurred, it is nevertheless a remarkable illustration of the political situation at the time. Ywh upped his game, taking on the attributes of Baal in addition to his own so that he could be touted as a legitimate substitute for those who were partial to Baal and his generative powers.

Josiah

If there is any figure that comes closest to embodying the ugly Biblical violence celebrated in the Book of Joshua and elsewhere it is the Jewish king Josiah (641–610 BCE), who slaughtered the priests of other gods and enforced the complete domination of the cult of Ywh. While his reforms didn’t survive his reign, his accomplishments were celebrated by later Jewish scholars during the Babylonian captivity who recast him as a reformer reinstating an ancient monotheism laid down by the legendary prophets Moses and Abraham.

The Babylonian Captivity and a New Monotheism

The Babylonian captivity is the most important event in the creation of Jewish monotheism. During the captivity Jewish scholars compiled and edited what would become today’s Old Testament. Traditions associated with each of the three gods (Ywh, Baal, and El) were combined into a cohesive narrative and the three gods became one: a new, all powerful deity who wasn’t just better than the gods of other nations but was in fact the only God in existence. Exactly how this happened is the subject of much controversy but the most well known theory is called the documentary hypothesis. While many of the details of the documentary hypothesis are disputed, historians generally agree that there were various factions among the exiled Jews, each loyal to different traditions and conceptions of God. Their contributions resulted in a Biblical God who is quite diverse, at times nationalistic and at times internationalist, both pro-ritual and anti-ritual, both interventionist and non-interventionist, etc.

Complicating the picture is the fact that Babylon was overtaken by the Persian Empire during the period of the captivity. The Persians allowed the Jews return to their homeland, but not without pressing the Jews to adopt a more globalist outlook. The Persians granted their people local control throughout the empire but wouldn’t tolerate belligerence. The so called “priestly source” of the documentary hypothesis was likely a pro-Persian faction among the Jews, one that emphasized the international, universal aspects of God as opposed to the nationalist Ywh. The priestly source uses El, not Ywh as God’s name and narrates stories from Elohist tradition like the story of Abraham. In my chart I attempt to illustrate the Elohist emphasis during the captivity by enlarging the right-side-up triangle of El and merging it with Ywh’s upside-down triangle to create a new “star of David.”

The Evolution of Christianity

Jesus was a messianic Jew crucified by the Romans. However it wasn’t obvious to his followers what his death and resurrection was supposed to mean. There were many early versions of Christianity and they had widely divergent views. Wright examines three main branches: Ebionite Christianity, Marcionism, and Pauline Christianity.

The Ebionites denied that Jesus was divine in any way. He was a messiah for the Jewish people and Christians were to continue to obey the Jewish laws of the Old Testament. Thus for Ebionite Christians, Jewish conceptions of God stayed intact. Marcionism on the other hand held that Jesus had been sent by the true God and that he had defeated the evil god of the Old Testament. Therefore, the entire Jewish conception of God was to be done away with.

Somewhere in between the extremes of Marcionism and Ebionite Christianity is Pauline Christianity. A Jew himself, Paul believed that Jesus was the fulfillment of old Jewish law but that he did not overthrow the Jewish God. Rather Jesus was in some sense the God of both the Old and New Testament. This was a conception that would later evolve into the Catholic Trinity. Wright gives an extensive analysis as to why Pauline Christianity succeeded where other versions failed. Here is a brief summary: Christian missionaries relied initially on converts from the Jewish diaspora (which had occurred due to the collapse of the Alexandrian empire.) Jews scattered around the Hellenistic world were well regarded by the Greeks (who had also been scattered around the Mediterranean by the collapse of the Alexandrian empire). In fact many Greeks wanted to become Jews themselves although they balked at all the formal rules involved, particularly circumcision. Christianity was an attractive alternative. However Ebionite Christianity was too harsh and demanding, too much like existing Judaism. And Marcionism treated the Jews with contempt. In the end, Pauline Christianity represented a more ideal balance between Greek and Jewish culture. The newly baptized Greeks proclaimed that Jesus was “Socrates for the masses” and celebrated the God of both Old and New Testament as a single, universal Logos (stoicism) or One (neo-platonism).

Wright’s thesis is informed by game theory and its notions of zero-sum and non-zero sum thinking. Both Marcionism and Ebionite Christianity were zero-sum religions. They either excluded the Jews or excluded the Gentiles. Pauline Christianity on the other hand was a non-zero sum phenomenon that allowed Greeks and Jews to come together in a way that enhanced the cultures and prospects of both groups.

Wright’s book goes on to discuss the development of Islam and skips over the development of the Catholic Trinity. At the top of my illustration however I’ve added a ven diagram with stocism and neo-platonism intersecting with Pauline Christianity. In my view, the Holy Trinity emerges from the combination of these three philosophical and religious traditions. This emergence was formalized by the great 4th and 5th century theologian St. Augustine. It’s a complicated topic I intend to cover more deeply in future posts. For this analysis I’ll only note that the Catholic conception of God was perhaps the greatest non-zero sum accomplishment of the human race up to that point. As Philosopher John Vervaeke points out, St. Augustine took the best philosophy (neoplatonic), the best theology (Christian), and the best psychology (stoic) of his day and melded it into a cohesive worldview so powerful that it would endure for over a thousand years, eventually giving birth to the modern world.


Wednesday, September 8, 2021

R.E. Slater - In the Processual Beginning

 



In the Processual Beginning
by R.E. Slater


"And God said let there be process; and
God divided one process from another;
then God saw everything he had made,
and behold, it was very good. And the
evening and the morning were the first day."

"And behold, wherever man looked he saw process;
Then man said to himself let us divide one process
from another; and behold, it was very good. And the
era of ecohumanity and social justice commenced a
healing of processual processes for both man and God."


R.E. Slater
May 19, 2021
rev. September 8, 2021

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications
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Process philosophy

[Illustrations added by R.E. Slater]

Process philosophy, also ontology of becoming, or processism,[1] defines processes in the ordinary everyday real world as its only basic or elementary existents. It treats other real existents (examples: enduring physical objects, thoughts) as abstractions from, or ontological dependents on, processes. In opposition to the classical view of change as illusory (as argued by Parmenides) or accidental (as argued by Aristotle), process philosophy posits transient occasions of change or becoming as the only fundamental things of the ordinary everyday real world.

Since the time of Plato and Aristotle, classical ontology has posited ordinary world reality as constituted of enduring substances, to which transient processes are ontologically subordinate, if they are not denied. If Socrates changes, becoming sick, Socrates is still the same (the substance of Socrates being the same), and change (his sickness) only glides over his substance: change is accidental, and devoid of primary reality, whereas the substance is essential.

Philosophers who appeal to process rather than substance include HeraclitusFriedrich NietzscheHenri BergsonMartin HeideggerCharles Sanders PeirceWilliam JamesAlfred North WhiteheadMaurice Merleau-PontyThomas NailAlfred KorzybskiR. G. CollingwoodAlan WattsRobert M. PirsigRoberto Mangabeira UngerCharles HartshorneArran GareNicholas RescherColin WilsonTim IngoldBruno LatourWilliam E. Connolly, and Gilles Deleuze. In physics, Ilya Prigogine[2] distinguishes between the "physics of being" and the "physics of becoming". Process philosophy covers not just scientific intuitions and experiences, but can be used as a conceptual bridge to facilitate discussions among religion, philosophy, and science.[3][4][original research?]

Process philosophy is sometimes classified as closer to Continental philosophy than analytic philosophy, because it is usually only taught in Continental departments.[5] However, other sources state that process philosophy should be placed somewhere in the middle between the poles of analytic versus Continental methods in contemporary philosophy.[6][7]

History

In ancient Greek thought

Heraclitus proclaimed that the basic nature of all things is change.

The quotation from Heraclitus appears in Plato's Cratylus twice; in 401d as:[8]

τὰ ὄντα ἰέναι τε πάντα καὶ μένειν οὐδέν
Ta onta ienai te panta kai menein ouden
"All entities move and nothing remains still"

and in 402a[9]

"πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει" καὶ "δὶς ἐς τὸν αὐτὸν ποταμὸν οὐκ ἂν ἐμβαίης"
Panta chōrei kai ouden menei kai dis es ton auton potamon ouk an embaies
"Everything changes and nothing remains still ... and ... you cannot step twice into the same stream"[10]

Heraclitus considered fire as the most fundamental element.

"All things are an interchange for fire, and fire for all things, just like goods for gold and gold for goods."[11]

The following is an interpretation of Heraclitus's concepts into modern terms by Nicholas Rescher.

"...reality is not a constellation of things at all, but one of processes. The fundamental "stuff" of the world is not material substance, but volatile flux, namely "fire", and all things are versions thereof (puros tropai). Process is fundamental: the river is not an object, but a continuing flow; the sun is not a thing, but an enduring fire. Everything is a matter of process, of activity, of change (panta rhei)."[12]

An early expression of this viewpoint is in Heraclitus's fragments. He posits strife, ἡ ἔρις (strife, conflict), as the underlying basis of all reality defined by change.[13] The balance and opposition in strife were the foundations of change and stability in the flux of existence.

Twentieth century

In early twentieth century, the philosophy of mathematics was undertaken to develop mathematics as an airtight, axiomatic system in which every truth could be derived logically from a set of axioms. In the foundations of mathematics, this project is variously understood as logicism or as part of the formalist program of David HilbertAlfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell attempted to complete, or at least facilitate, this program with their seminal book Principia Mathematica, which purported to build a logically consistent set theory on which to found mathematics. After this, Whitehead extended his interest to natural science, which he held needed a deeper philosophical basis. He intuited that natural science was struggling to overcome a traditional ontology of timeless material substances that does not suit natural phenomena. According to Whitehead, material is more properly understood as 'process'. In 1929, he produced the most famous work of process philosophy, Process and Reality,[14] continuing the work begun by Hegel but describing a more complex and fluid dynamic ontology.

Process thought describes truth as "movement" in and through substance (Hegelian truth), rather than substances as fixed concepts or "things" (Aristotelian truth). Since Whitehead, process thought is distinguished from Hegel in that it describes entities that arise or coalesce in becoming, rather than being simply dialectically determined from prior posited determinates. These entities are referred to as complexes of occasions of experience. It is also distinguished in being not necessarily conflictual or oppositional in operation. Process may be integrative, destructive or both together, allowing for aspects of interdependence, influence, and confluence, and addressing coherence in universal as well as particular developments, i.e., those aspects not befitting Hegel's system. Additionally, instances of determinate occasions of experience, while always ephemeral, are nonetheless seen as important to define the type and continuity of those occasions of experience that flow from or relate to them.


Whitehead's Process and Reality

Alfred North Whitehead began teaching and writing on process and metaphysics when he joined Harvard University in 1924.[15]

In his book Science and the Modern World (1925), Whitehead noted that the human intuitions and experiences of science, aesthetics, ethics, and religion influence the worldview of a community, but that in the last several centuries science dominates Western culture. Whitehead sought a holistic, comprehensive cosmology that provides a systematic descriptive theory of the world which can be used for the diverse human intuitions gained through ethical, aesthetic, religious, and scientific experiences, and not just the scientific.[3]

Whitehead's influences were not restricted to philosophers or physicists or mathematicians. He was influenced by the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941), whom he credits along with William James and John Dewey in the preface to Process and Reality.[14]

Process metaphysics

For Whitehead, metaphysics is about logical frameworks for the conduct of discussions of the character of the world. It is not directly and immediately about facts of nature, but only indirectly so, in that its task is to explicitly formulate the language and conceptual presuppositions that are used to describe the facts of nature. Whitehead thinks that discovery of previously unknown facts of nature can in principle call for reconstruction of metaphysics.[16]

The process metaphysics elaborated in Process and Reality[14] posits an ontology which is based on the two kinds of existence of an entity, that of actual entity and that of abstract entity or abstraction, also called 'object'.[17]

Actual entity is a term coined by Whitehead to refer to the entities that really exist in the natural world.[18] For Whitehead, actual entities are spatiotemporally extended events or processes.[19] An actual entity is how something is happening, and how its happening is related to other actual entities.[19] The actually existing world is a multiplicity of actual entities overlapping one another.[19]

The ultimate abstract principle of actual existence for Whitehead is creativity. Creativity is a term coined by Whitehead to show a power in the world that allows the presence of an actual entity, a new actual entity, and multiple actual entities.[19] Creativity is the principle of novelty.[18] It is manifest in what can be called 'singular causality'. This term may be contrasted with the term 'nomic causality'. An example of singular causation is that I woke this morning because my alarm clock rang. An example of nomic causation is that alarm clocks generally wake people in the morning. Aristotle recognizes singular causality as efficient causality. For Whitehead, there are many contributory singular causes for an event. A further contributory singular cause of my being awoken by my alarm clock this morning was that I was lying asleep near it till it rang.

An actual entity is a general philosophical term for an utterly determinate and completely concrete individual particular of the actually existing world or universe of changeable entities considered in terms of singular causality, about which categorical statements can be made. Whitehead's most far-reaching and radical contribution to metaphysics is his invention of a better way of choosing the actual entities. Whitehead chooses a way of defining the actual entities that makes them all alike, qua actual entities, with a single exception.

For example, for Aristotle, the actual entities were the substances, such as Socrates. Besides Aristotle's ontology of substances, another example of an ontology that posits actual entities is in the monads of Leibniz, which are said to be 'windowless'.



#965: Primer on Whitehead’s Process Philosophy as a Paradigm Shift & Foundation
for Experiential Design
, by Matthew Segall: "Footnotes to Plato"

Whitehead's actual entities

For Whitehead's ontology of processes as defining the world, the actual entities exist as the only fundamental elements of reality.

The actual entities are of two kinds, temporal and atemporal.

With one exception, all actual entities for Whitehead are temporal and are occasions of experience (which are not to be confused with consciousness). An entity that people commonly think of as a simple concrete object, or that Aristotle would think of as a substance, is, in this ontology, considered to be a temporally serial composite of indefinitely many overlapping occasions of experience. A human being is thus composed of indefinitely many occasions of experience.

The one exceptional actual entity is at once both temporal and atemporal: God. He is objectively immortal, as well as being immanent in the world. He is objectified in each temporal actual entity; but He is not an eternal object.

The occasions of experience are of four grades. The first grade comprises processes in a physical vacuum such as the propagation of an electromagnetic wave or gravitational influence across empty space. The occasions of experience of the second grade involve just inanimate matter; "matter" being the composite overlapping of occasions of experience from the previous grade. The occasions of experience of the third grade involve living organisms. Occasions of experience of the fourth grade involve experience in the mode of presentational immediacy, which means more or less what are often called the qualia of subjective experience. So far as we know, experience in the mode of presentational immediacy occurs in only more evolved animals. That some occasions of experience involve experience in the mode of presentational immediacy is the one and only reason why Whitehead makes the occasions of experience his actual entities; for the actual entities must be of the ultimately general kind. Consequently, it is inessential that an occasion of experience have an aspect in the mode of presentational immediacy; occasions of the grades one, two, and three, lack that aspect.

There is no mind-matter duality in this ontology, because "mind" is simply seen as an abstraction from an occasion of experience which has also a material aspect, which is of course simply another abstraction from it; thus the mental aspect and the material aspect are abstractions from one and the same concrete occasion of experience. The brain is part of the body, both being abstractions of a kind known as persistent physical objects, neither being actual entities. Though not recognized by Aristotle, there is biological evidence, written about by Galen,[20] that the human brain is an essential seat of human experience in the mode of presentational immediacy. We may say that the brain has a material and a mental aspect, all three being abstractions from their indefinitely many constitutive occasions of experience, which are actual entities.

Time, causality, and process

Inherent in each actual entity is its respective dimension of time. Potentially, each Whiteheadean occasion of experience is causally consequential on every other occasion of experience that precedes it in time, and has as its causal consequences every other occasion of experience that follows it in time; thus it has been said that Whitehead's occasions of experience are 'all window', in contrast to Leibniz's 'windowless' monads. In time defined relative to it, each occasion of experience is causally influenced by prior occasions of experiences, and causally influences future occasions of experience. An occasion of experience consists of a process of prehending other occasions of experience, reacting to them. This is the process in process philosophy.

Such process is never deterministic. Consequently, free will is essential and inherent to the universe.

The causal outcomes obey the usual well-respected rule that the causes precede the effects in time. Some pairs of processes cannot be connected by cause-and-effect relations, and they are said to be spatially separated. This is in perfect agreement with the viewpoint of the Einstein theory of special relativity and with the Minkowski geometry of spacetime.[21] It is clear that Whitehead respected these ideas, as may be seen for example in his 1919 book An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge[22] as well as in Process and Reality. In this view, time is relative to an inertial reference frame, different reference frames defining different versions of time.

Atomicity

The actual entities, the occasions of experience, are logically atomic in the sense that an occasion of experience cannot be cut and separated into two other occasions of experience. This kind of logical atomicity is perfectly compatible with indefinitely many spatio-temporal overlaps of occasions of experience. One can explain this kind of atomicity by saying that an occasion of experience has an internal causal structure that could not be reproduced in each of the two complementary sections into which it might be cut. Nevertheless, an actual entity can completely contain each of indefinitely many other actual entities.

Another aspect of the atomicity of occasions of experience is that they do not change. An actual entity is what it is. An occasion of experience can be described as a process of change, but it is itself unchangeable.

The reader should bear in mind that the atomicity of the actual entities is of a simply logical or philosophical kind, thoroughly different in concept from the natural kind of atomicity that describes the atoms of physics and chemistry.


Topology

Whitehead's theory of extension was concerned with the spatio-temporal features of his occasions of experience. Fundamental to both Newtonian and to quantum theoretical mechanics is the concept of momentum. The measurement of a momentum requires a finite spatiotemporal extent. Because it has no finite spatiotemporal extent, a single point of Minkowski space cannot be an occasion of experience, but is an abstraction from an infinite set of overlapping or contained occasions of experience, as explained in Process and Reality.[14] Though the occasions of experience are atomic, they are not necessarily separate in extension, spatiotemporally, from one another. Indefinitely many occasions of experience can overlap in Minkowski space.

Nexus is a term coined by Whitehead to show the network actual entity from universe. In the universe of actual entities spread[18] actual entity. Actual entities are clashing with each other and form other actual entities.[19] The birth of an actual entity based on an actual entity, actual entities around him referred to as nexus.[18]

An example of a nexus of temporally overlapping occasions of experience is what Whitehead calls an enduring physical object, which corresponds closely with an Aristotelian substance. An enduring physical object has a temporally earliest and a temporally last member. Every member (apart from the earliest) of such a nexus is a causal consequence of the earliest member of the nexus, and every member (apart from the last) of such a nexus is a causal antecedent of the last member of the nexus. There are indefinitely many other causal antecedents and consequences of the enduring physical object, which overlap, but are not members, of the nexus. No member of the nexus is spatially separate from any other member. Within the nexus are indefinitely many continuous streams of overlapping nexūs, each stream including the earliest and the last member of the enduring physical object. Thus an enduring physical object, like an Aristotelian substance, undergoes changes and adventures during the course of its existence.

In some contexts, especially in the theory of relativity in physics, the word 'event' refers to a single point in Minkowski or in Riemannian space-time. A point event is not a process in the sense of Whitehead's metaphysics. Neither is a countable sequence or array of points. A Whiteheadian process is most importantly characterized by extension in space-time, marked by a continuum of uncountably many points in a Minkowski or a Riemannian space-time. The word 'event', indicating a Whiteheadian actual entity, is not being used in the sense of a point event.


Whitehead's abstractions

Whitehead's abstractions are conceptual entities that are abstracted from or derived from and founded upon his actual entities. Abstractions are themselves not actual entities. They are the only entities that can be real but are not actual entities. This statement is one form of Whitehead's 'ontological principle'.

An abstraction is a conceptual entity that refers to more than one single actual entity. Whitehead's ontology refers to importantly structured collections of actual entities as nexuses of actual entities. Collection of actual entities into a nexus emphasizes some aspect of those entities, and that emphasis is an abstraction, because it means that some aspects of the actual entities are emphasized or dragged away from their actuality, while other aspects are de-emphasized or left out or left behind.

'Eternal object' is a term coined by Whitehead. It is an abstraction, a possibility, or pure potential. It can be ingredient into some actual entity.[18] It is a principle that can give a particular form to an actual entity.[19][23]

Whitehead admitted indefinitely many eternal objects. An example of an eternal object is a number, such as the number 'two'. Whitehead held that eternal objects are abstractions of a very high degree of abstraction. Many abstractions, including eternal objects, are potential ingredients of processes.

Relation between actual entities and abstractions stated in the ontological principle

For Whitehead, besides its temporal generation by the actual entities which are its contributory causes, a process may be considered as a concrescence of abstract ingredient eternal objects. God enters into every temporal actual entity.

Whitehead's ontological principle is that whatever reality pertains to an abstraction is derived from the actual entities upon which it is founded or of which it is comprised.

Causation and concrescence of a process

Concrescence is a term coined by Whitehead to show the process of jointly forming an actual entity that was without form, but about to manifest itself into an entity Actual full (satisfaction) based on datums or for information on the universe.[18] The process of forming an actual entity is the case based on the existing datums. Concretion process can be regarded as subjectification process.[19]

Datum is a term coined by Whitehead to show the different variants of information possessed by actual entity. In process philosophy, datum is obtained through the events of concrescence. Every actual entity has a variety of datum.[18][19]


Commentary on Whitehead and on process philosophy

Whitehead is not an idealist in the strict sense.[which?] Whitehead's thought may be regarded as related to the idea of panpsychism (also known as panexperientialism, because of Whitehead's emphasis on experience).[24]

On God

Whitehead's philosophy is very complex, subtle and nuanced and in order to comprehend his thinking regarding what is commonly referred to by many religions as "God", it is recommended that one read from Process and Reality Corrected Edition, wherein regarding "God" the authors elaborate Whitehead's conception.

"He is the unconditioned actuality of conceptual feeling at the base of things; so that by reason of this primordial actuality, there is an order in the relevance of eternal objects to the process of creation (343 of 413) (Location 7624 of 9706 Kindle ed.) Whitehead continues later with, "The particularities of the actual world presuppose it ; while it merely presupposes the general metaphysical character of creative advance, of which it is the primordial exemplification (344 of 413) (Location 7634 of 9706 Kindle Edition)."

Process philosophy, might be considered according to some theistic forms of religion to give God a special place in the universe of occasions of experience. Regarding Whitehead's use of the term "occasions" in reference to "God", it is explained in Process and Reality Corrected Edition that

"'Actual entities'-also termed 'actual occasions'-are the final real things of which the world is made up. There is no going behind actual entities to find anything [28] more real. They differ among themselves: God is an actual entity, and so is the most trivial puff of existence in far-off empty space. But, though there are gradations of importance, and diversities of function, yet in the principles which actuality exemplifies all are on the same level. The final facts are, all alike, actual entities; and these actual entities are drops of experience, complex and interdependent.

It also can be assumed within some forms of theology that a God encompasses all the other occasions of experience but also transcends them and this might lead to it being argued that Whitehead endorses some form of panentheism.[25] Since, it is argued theologically, that "free will" is inherent to the nature of the universe, Whitehead's God is not omnipotent in Whitehead's metaphysics.[26] God's role is to offer enhanced occasions of experience. God participates in the evolution of the universe by offering possibilities, which may be accepted or rejected. Whitehead's thinking here has given rise to process theology, whose prominent advocates include Charles HartshorneJohn B. Cobb, Jr., and Hans Jonas, who was also influenced by the non-theological philosopher Martin Heidegger. However, other process philosophers have questioned Whitehead's theology, seeing it as a regressive Platonism.[27]

Whitehead enumerated three essential natures of God. The primordial nature of God consists of all potentialities of existence for actual occasions, which Whitehead dubbed eternal objects. God can offer possibilities by ordering the relevance of eternal objects. The consequent nature of God prehends everything that happens in reality. As such, God experiences all of reality in a sentient manner. The last nature is the superjective. This is the way in which God's synthesis becomes a sense-datum for other actual entities. In some sense, God is prehended by existing actual entities.[28]



Legacy and applications

Biology

In plant morphologyRolf Sattler developed a process morphology (dynamic morphology) that overcomes the structure/process (or structure/function) dualism that is commonly taken for granted in biology. According to process morphology, structures such as leaves of plants do not have processes, they are processes.[29][30]

In evolution and in development, the nature of the changes of biological objects are considered by many authors to be more radical than in physical systems. In biology, changes are not just changes of state in a pre-given space, instead the space and more generally the mathematical structures required to understand object change over time.[31][32]

Ecology

With its perspective that everything is interconnected, that all life has value, and that non-human entities are also experiencing subjects, process philosophy has played an important role in discourse on ecology and sustainability. The first book to connect process philosophy with environmental ethics was John B. Cobb, Jr.'s 1971 work, Is It Too Late: A Theology of Ecology.[33] In a more recent book (2018) edited by John B. Cobb, Jr. and Wm. Andrew Schwartz, Putting Philosophy to Work: Toward an Ecological Civilization[34] contributors explicitly explore the ways in which process philosophy can be put to work to address the most urgent issues facing our world today, by contributing to a transition toward an ecological civilization. That book emerged from the largest international conference held on the theme of ecological civilization (Seizing an Alternative: Toward an Ecological Civilization) which was organized by the Center for Process Studies in June 2015. The conference brought together roughly 2,000 participants from around the world and featured such leaders in the environmental movement as Bill McKibbenVandana ShivaJohn B. Cobb, Jr.Wes Jackson, and Sheri Liao.[35] The notion of ecological civilization is often affiliated with the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead—especially in China.[36]

Mathematics


Somewhat earlier, exploration of mathematical practice and quasi-empiricism in mathematics from the 1950s to 1980s had sought alternatives to metamathematics in social behaviours around mathematics itself: for instance, Paul Erdős's simultaneous belief in Platonism and a single "big book" in which all proofs existed, combined with his personal obsessive need or decision to collaborate with the widest possible number of other mathematicians. The process, rather than the outcomes, seemed to drive his explicit behaviour and odd use of language, as if the synthesis of Erdős and collaborators in seeking proofs, creating sense-datum for other mathematicians, was itself the expression of a divine will. Certainly, Erdős behaved as if nothing else in the world mattered, including money or love, as emphasized in his biography The Man Who Loved Only Numbers.In the philosophy of mathematics, some of Whitehead's ideas re-emerged in combination with cognitivism as the cognitive science of mathematics and embodied mind theses.

Medicine

Several fields of science and especially medicine seem[vague] to make liberal use of ideas in process philosophy, notably the theory of pain and healing of the late 20th century. The philosophy of medicine began to deviate somewhat from scientific method and an emphasis on repeatable results in the very late 20th century by embracing population thinking, and a more pragmatic approach to issues in public healthenvironmental health and especially mental health. In this latter field, R. D. LaingThomas Szasz and Michel Foucault were instrumental in moving medicine away from emphasis on "cures" and towards concepts of individuals in balance with their society, both of which are changing, and against which no benchmarks or finished "cures" were very likely to be measurable.

Psychology

In psychology, the subject of imagination was again explored more extensively since Whitehead, and the question of feasibility or "eternal objects" of thought became central to the impaired theory of mind explorations that framed postmodern cognitive science. A biological understanding of the most eternal object, that being the emerging of similar but independent cognitive apparatus, led to an obsession with the process "embodiment", that being, the emergence of these cognitions. Like Whitehead's God, especially as elaborated in J. J. Gibson's perceptual psychology emphasizing affordances, by ordering the relevance of eternal objects (especially the cognitions of other such actors), the world becomes. Or, it becomes simple enough for human beings to begin to make choices, and to prehend what happens as a result. These experiences may be summed in some sense but can only approximately be shared, even among very similar cognitions with identical DNA. An early explorer of this view was Alan Turing who sought to prove the limits of expressive complexity of human genes in the late 1940s, to put bounds on the complexity of human intelligence and so assess the feasibility of artificial intelligence emerging. Since 2000, Process Psychology has progressed as an independent academic and therapeutic discipline: In 2000, Michel Weber created the Whitehead Psychology Nexus: an open forum dedicated to the cross-examination of Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy and the various facets of the contemporary psychological field.[37]

Philosophy of movement

The philosophy of movement is a sub-area within process philosophy that treats processes as movements. It studies processes as flows, folds, and fields in historical patterns of centripetal, centrifugal, tensional, and elastic motion.[38] See Thomas Nail's philosophy of movement and process materialism.

See also

Concepts
People

References

  1. ^ Nicholas RescherProcess Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Philosophy, SUNY Press, 1996, p. 42.
  2. ^ Ilya Prigogine, From being to becomingDavid Bohm, "Wholeness and the Implicate Order", W. H. Freeman and Company, San Francisco, 1980.
  3. Jump up to:
  4. ^ Cf. Michel Weber (ed.), After Whitehead: Rescher on Process Metaphysics, Frankfurt / Paris / Lancaster, Ontos Verlag, 2004.
  5. ^ William Blattner, "Some Thoughts About "Continental" and "Analytic" Philosophy"
  6. ^ Seibt, Johanna. "Process Philosophy". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  7. ^ Nicholas Gaskill, A. J. Nocek, The Lure of Whitehead, University of Minnesota Press, 2014, p. 4: "it is no wonder that Whitehead fell by the wayside. He was too scientific for the "continentals," not scientific enough for the "analytics," and too metaphysical—which is to say uncritical—for them both" and p. 231: "the analytics and Continentals are both inclined toward Kantian presuppositions in a manner that Latour and Whitehead brazenly renounce."
  8. ^ Cratylus Paragraph Crat. 401 section d line 5.
  9. ^ Cratylus Paragraph 402 section a line 8.
  10. ^ This sentence has been translated by Seneca in Epistulae, VI, 58, 23.
  11. ^ Harris, William. "Heraclitus: The Complete Philosophical Fragments"Middlebury College. Retrieved 3 October 2015.
  12. ^ Rescher, Nicholas (2000). Process philosophy a survey of basic issues. [Pittsburgh]: University of Pittsburgh Press. p. 5ISBN 0822961288.
  13. ^ Wheelwright, P. (1959). Heraclitus, Oxford University Press, Oxford UK, ISBN 0-19-924022-1, p.35.
  14. Jump up to:
    a b c d Whitehead, A. N. (1929). Process and Reality, Macmillan, New York.
  15. ^ "Alfred North Whitehead".
  16. ^ Whitehead, A. N. (1929), pp. 13, 19.
  17. ^ Palter, R.M. (1960). Whitehead's Philosophy of Science, University of Chicago Press, Chicago IL, p. 23.
  18. Jump up to:
    a b c d e f g Robert Audi. 1995, The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. Cambridge: The Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge. 851–853.
  19. Jump up to:
    a b c d e f g h John B. Cobb and David Ray Griffin. 1976, Process Theology, An Introduction. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press.
  20. ^ Siegel, R. E. (1973). Galen: On Psychology, Psychopathology, and Function and Diseases of the Nervous System. An Analysis of his Doctrines, Observations, and Experiments, Karger, Basel, ISBN 978-3-8055-1479-8.
  21. ^ Naber, G. L. (1992). The Geometry of Minkowski Spacetime. An Introduction to the Mathematics of the Special Theory of Relativity, Springer, New York, ISBN 978-0-387-97848-2
  22. ^ Whitehead, A. N. (1919). An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK.
  23. ^ Cf. Michel Weber (ed.), After Whitehead: Rescher on Process Metaphysics, Frankfurt / Paris / Lancaster, Ontos Verlag, 2004 (ISBN 3-937202-49-8).
  24. ^ Seager, William. "Whitehead and the Revival (?) of Panpsychism"University of Toronto Scarborough. University of Toronto at Scarborough. Retrieved 14 June 2017.
  25. ^ Cooper, John W. (2006). Panentheism--The Other God of the Philosophers: From Plato to the Present. Grand Rapids MI: Baker Academic. p. 176. ISBN 978-0801049316.
  26. ^ Dombrowski, Daniel A. (2017). Whitehead's Religious Thought: From Mechanism to Organism, From Force to Persuasion. Albany: State Univ of New York Pr. pp. 33–35. ISBN 978-1438464299.
  27. ^ Hustwit, J. R. "Process Philosophy"Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP). Retrieved 15 June 2017.
  28. ^ Viney, Donald. "Process Theism"Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosoph. Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), Stanford University. Retrieved 15 June 2017.
  29. ^ Sattler, R (1990). "Towards a more dynamic plant morphology". Acta Biotheoretica38 (3–4): 303–315. doi:10.1007/BF00047245S2CID 84421634.
  30. ^ Sattler, R (1992). "Process morphology: structural dynamics in development and evolution". Canadian Journal of Botany70 (4): 708–714. doi:10.1139/b92-091.
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Works cited

  • Whitehead, A. N. (1929). Process and Reality, Macmillan, New York.
  • Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality corrected edition, Griffin, David Ray and Sherburne, Donald W., The Free Press, New York (Kindle Edition).

External links