process studies articles @ religion online...
Volume 3 (1973)
- Number 1, Spring 1973
- Nonstandard Mathematics and a Doctrine of God by Granville C. Henry, Jr.
- Regional Inclusion and Psychological Physiology by John B. Cobb Jr. and Donald W. Sherburne
- Subjective Becoming: Unwarranted Abstraction? by Frank G. Kirkpatrick
An understanding of standard mathematics conditions the doctrine of God’s immutability. Contemporary developments in mathematics affect a contemporary doctrine of God. The author works with process theology to work with these two subjects.
This exchange between John Cobb and Donald Sherburne concerns their continuing debate over "Regional Inclusion and the Extensive Continuum." Although Whitehead does not develop such a theory, the argument is whether such a theory would be compatible with Whitehead’s basic principle. Cobb claims in would, Sherburne claims it is an incoherent concept.
The process view has difficulty making sense out of the notion of a subject when the concepts appropriate to a subject are applied only to the becoming which produces a subject. The process view separates being and becoming to the extent that what is still becoming is not yet a being which is an abstraction.
- Number 2, Summer 1973
- Metaphysics and ‘Valid Inductions’ by Ann Plamondon
- The Feeling for the Future: A Comment on Ann Plamondon’s Essay by James W. Felt
- Whitehead’s Moral Philosophy by Richard S. Davis
The author attempts to elucidate what seems to be a necessary condition for the metaphysical understanding of "valid inductive inference" patterns.
Professor Felt attempts to show that Plamondon’s discussion on "valid inductive inference" from a Whiteheadian perspective has left something out which is of key metaphysical importance. (see Plamondon, "Metaphysics and ‘Valid Inductions")
Whitehead sees moral theory as inseparable from social philosophy and the self-transcendence involved in the external life of the individual. To the contrary, it is religion that is ultimately concerned with the internal relevance of past and future to present self-realization.
- Number 3, Fall 1973
- Charles Hartshorne: A Secondary Bibliography by Dorothy C. Hartshorne
- Openness to the New in Apocalyptic and in Process Theology by William A. Beardslee
- Persuasive and Coercive Power in Process Metaphysics by J. E. Barnhart
- The ‘Natures’ of Whitehead’s God by John W. Lansing
- The Necessity Today of the Philosophy of Nature by Ivor Leclerc
Charles Hartshorne’s wife has compiled this list of books referred to by Harshorne in his works.
Process thinking needs interaction with the field of imaginative exploration. The process perspective may serve to renew and reshape imaginative possibilities, so that we may refresh our vision of life as dramatic encounter and story.
The author attempts to clarify some important differences between persuasive power and coercive power as encountered in our daily social experiences, and then see how the differences apply in metaphysical discourse.
To Whitehead, the nature of God is primordial as a unified actual entity. As a result of God’s prehension of the world he is consequent as a unified actual entity. And as a unified actual entity, God is "superjective" in that he is present to and immanent in the world.
In the past, science and philosophy were separated and apart, each going it alone. Today we face the need for a radical change in this dichotomy, a philosophy of nature where the metaphysical and physical be conjoined.
- Number 4, Winter 1973
- Evil and Persuasive Power: A Response to Hare and Madden by Dalton D. Baldwin
- Perception and Causality: Whitehead and Aristotle by Shielah O'Flynn Brennan
- Whitehead and Newton on Space and Time Structure by Robert R. Llewellyn
Whitehead’s conceptuality explains the rise of good and the rise of evil without making God responsible for any evil which cannot be justified. (A response to Evil and Persuasive Power by Peter H. Hare and Edward H. Madden).
Aristotle took objects to be peculiar to conscious experience and the causal efficacy to be the more general factor lying at the base of consciousness. Whitehead took the subject-object structure as general and fundamental and interpreted causal efficacy in terms of it.
Whiteheadian cosmology embraces the notion of a uniform metric structure for the space-time continuum that is independent of the material objects commonly said to be "in" space-time and also that is independent of the material objects appropriated as standards of spatio-temporal measurement. His theory is "relational" with regard to the fundamental nature of space-time and is "absolutist" with regard to a structure exhibited within and sustained by the extensional relations of events.