Yu, Yih-hsien. "A.N. Whitehead and the Postmodern Outlook." Thunghai University College of Liberal Arts Journal 44 (July, 2003): 246-278.

俞懿嫻. “怀海特与后现代世界观.” 东海大学文学院学报 44 (7月, 2003): 246-278.

Abstract

A. N. Whitehead was one of the greatest metaphysicians in the twentieth century who has assumed his position by inveighing against the torrents of anti-metaphysics, and by defending the importance and necessity of metaphysics in philosophical pursuits. Similar to many postmodern philosophers, who are discontent with the dominance of science and technology in the modern world, Whitehead has launched a series of criticisms on scientific materialism and its presuppositions as the point of departure of his philosophical pilgrimage. However, unlike most of the postmodern philosophers, when questioning modern perversities, Whitehead did not commit himself to the task of decomposing the elements of which the modern worldview is consisted, such as ideas, reason, values, meaning, purposes, self, language, culture, etc., and thereby involved in another form of modern perversity. Instead, Whitehead contends that metaphysical speculation is the primal function of philosophy that may offer a coherent, logical and adequate scheme in which every elements of our experience can be interpreted. He also believes that both rational and empirical factors are indispensable to our cognition that may grasp directly the interrelatedness among things. According to his philosophy of organism, every actual entity is a self-creative organism and nature is a process of creative advance. Process is reality, the ultimate fact of nature, which, however, does not exclude certain eternal factors from revealing its essences. It may well be argued that Whitehead’s philosophy, once being dubbed as “organic realism,” is drastically different from most of the contemporary postmodernists, who take an anti-metaphysical, anti-realist, or anti-rationalist stance and are constantly led to the cul-de-sac of nihilism. In the past decades, the Whiteheadian scholarship has been flourished in the United States of America and the contrast between Whitehead’s philosophy, taken as constructive/positive postmodernism, and the contemporary postmodernism, taken as deconstructive/eliminative postmodernism, has been made and examined. The present paper shared with the American Whiteheadians, John Cobb and David Griffin, in their views on the relevancy of Whitehead’s philosophy to a constructive postmodern worldview which is also confirmed by some postmodern scientists.