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 from 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 Whitehead & Idealism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Whitehead & Idealism. Show all posts

Sunday, October 13, 2024

Whitehead and Idealism

 


Whitehead and Idealism
International Online Conference

September 30 @ 11:30 pm – October 2 @ 10:00 am PDT


The intention behind the organization of this conference is to give scholars interested in the idealist aspects of Whitehead’s philosophy the opportunity to discuss and assess the relevance of the various strands of the idealist tradition to Whitehead’s metaphysics and to process metaphysics generally, as well as the relevance of process-relational philosophy to present day anti-materialist explorations in general metaphysics and philosophy of mind.

The link to join the live sessions of this free online conference is included in the Conference Program linked blow.

Organized by Constantin Rădulescu-Motru Institute of Philosophy and Psychology of the Romanian Academy, Department of Western Philosophy


October 1, 2024


October 2, 2024

October 1, 2024 - October 2, 2024

View the Call For Papers
This event is online

Topic areas:
History of Western Philosophy
Metaphysics and Epistemology
Philosophical Traditions

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Details

Whitehead and Idealism
International Online Conference: Bucharest, Romania, 1-2 October 2024
Organizer: Constantin Rădulescu-Motru Institute of Philosophy and Psychology of the Romanian Academy, Department of Western Philosophy

CONFERENCE LINK: Conference link

Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), the celebrated British philosopher, mathematician and logician, studied and spent the first part of his teaching career in Cambridge. He was friends with W.R. Sorley, an idealist thinker, to whom he probably owed his initiation to philosophical thinking. As a graduate student he read Kant, Lotze, and Bradley, the foremost British defender of absolute idealism. As a member of the Cambridge Apostles and a junior academic he was around philosophers of idealist leaning, such as James Ward, of whom he saw a good deal, and the young G. F. Stout. He became friends with J.M.E. McTaggart, the greatest of the British personal idealists, and also an important Hegel commentator. Later, he was close to Lord Haldane, another idealist influenced by Hegel. The philosophical ambiance in which Whitehead’s thinking evolved, before the turn of the century, was idealistic.

He was seriously exposed to realism only after Russell followed Moore in his crusade against idealism, and Whitehead started collaborating with Russell. At first Whitehead was a spectator of the realist revolution in philosophy, but eventually he participated in it, during his London period, and was perceived as a member of the Neorealist school, alongside Samuel Alexander and Thomas Percy Nunn. He developed a highly original philosophy of physics, free from metaphysical considerations, i.e., independent of any doctrine concerning ‘the synthesis of the knower and the known.’ As one of the leading British specialists in Einstein’s theory of relativity, he took a position against those who thought this, the most advanced physical theory of the day, provided support for idealism.

However, when he became a metaphysician, he didn’t wholly reject idealism, nor did he ignore it as a hangover of the past, but claimed to transform ‘some main doctrines of Absolute Idealism onto a realistic basis.’ Thus Whitehead explicitly set his grand metaphysical system in the prolongation of the idealist tradition, not without acknowledging, at the same time, heavy obligations to the British and American realist schools. But what does this ‘transformation’ amount to? What is the depth and spread of the influence idealism - absolute, personalist, panpsychist, British or German, classical or contemporary - had on Whitehead’s metaphysical thinking? As an exponent of the ‘meeting of extremes in contemporary philosophy,’ in Bosanquet’s terms, did Whitehead apply Lotze’s dictum that ‘only inquiries conducted in the spirit of realism will satisfy the wishes of idealism?’ Is his metaphysical scheme a sui generis vindication of absolute idealism?

That Whitehead is a part of the idealist tradition seems to be further confirmed by the fact that the last Mohican of absolute idealism, Timothy Sprigge, discussed, adopted or transformed some main doctrines of the philosophy of organism.
The intention behind the organization of this conference is to give scholars interested in these and related aspects of Whitehead’s philosophy the opportunity to discuss and assess the relevance of the various strands of the idealist tradition to Whitehead’s metaphysics and to process metaphysics generally, as well as the relevance of process-relational philosophy to present day anti-materialist explorations in general metaphysics and philosophy of mind.

The conference will be conducted in English and organized by the Department of Western Philosophy at the Constantin Radulescu-Motru Institute of Philosophy and Psychology, Romanian Academy, Bucharest).

The conference will be held online on 1-2 October 2024.

Here you can download the program of the conference: