process studies articles @ religion online...
Volume 5 (1975)
- Number 1, Spring 1975
- A Whiteheadian Account of Value and Identity by Lynne Belaief
- The Criterion of Metaphysical Truth and the Senses of ‘Metaphysics’ by Schubert M. Ogden
- Time and Timelessness in the Philosophy of A. N. Whitehead by Reiner Viehl
Whitehead seems to find what he calls the "intuition of peace." And he would hold that the experience of the love of man achieved in this intuition supports the belief that any individual can change from an evil to a virtuous propensity, for perhaps unaccountably complex reasons.
If metaphysics is defined as the human intellect’s self-understanding, then metaphysics comprises contingent as well as necessary truths -- although even the contingent truths it comprises are such that in one sense they cannot be coherently denied and, therefore, must be believed, if only implicitly or nonreflectively..
It may be that time belongs among those objects which are very specially suited to call into question the whole idea of essences. Conversely, it may be that the concept of essence bears a particularly negative affinity to the idea of time, since it seems always to make time look as if it were a bare nothing that has no essence.
- Number 2, Summer 1975
- A Political Vision for the Organic Model by Robert W. Hoffert
- Does Whitehead’s God Possess a Moral Will? by David Platt
- Evolutionary Futurism in Stapledon’s ‘Star Maker’ by Susan A. Anderson
- Note on Whitehead and the Order of Nature by Francis Seaman
- Time in Whitehead and Heidegger: A Response by Peter B. Manchester
- Time in Whitehead and Heidegger: Some Comparisons by David H. Mason
The author states some of the analytical similarities between Deutsch (Karl W. Deutsch: The Nerves of Government) and Whitehead in the hope that they will provide an organic philosophy with a clearer sense of the terrain upon which can be discovered the form and content of its own particular political speech.
In the profoundest sense it would be strange to consider God amoral if the moral dimension in human experience is itself derived from God.
Stapledon brings together basic concerns for a viable community and a metaphysic, as his narrator questions the ultimate meaning of the only good he is able to perceive -- the symbiotic love of two human beings.
Einstein’s formation of the theory of relativity states that the geometry of the world is variable, its metric being a function of gravitational and electromagnetic field variables. Whitehead disagreed: Our knowledge of nature requires the uniformity of the spatial-temporal continuum which is a continuum of overlapping events, some of which are indefinitely large.
The author responds to David R. Mason’s article in this Journal entitled Time In Whitehead and Heidegger: Some Comparisons. Mason’s notion of ‘temporality,’ taken from his claim that is parallel to Whitehead’s ‘concrescence’, is simply that of time and misses the force of Heidegger’s careful distinction between temporality and time.
That the whole of reality is fundamentally temporal, that every actual entity is primordially temporal, but that human reality is more complex, more fully integrated, and more readily accessible to our inspection -- all this is particularly revelatory of the full structure of the temporality of Being.
- Number 3, Fall 1975
- Consciousness in Satisfaction as the Prereflective Cogito by Stefan Schindler
- Interpoints: A Model for Divine Spacetime by Margaret O'Rourke Boyle
- The Human Self: An Actual Entity or a Society? by Rem B. Edwards
- Whitehead’s Theory of Relativity by Dean R. Fowler
There are elements in Sartre’s philosophy which are applicable to the Whiteheadian cosmos.
In Whitehead’s address, "On Mathematical Concepts of the Material World," he unified geometry and physics into a single set of axioms by symbolic logic. He does not comment theologically, but his idea proposes a theory in which the mathematical abstraction suggests a model for projecting Whitehead’s understanding of God’s relation to space.
Dr. Edwards considers himself an unorthodox Whiteheadian as he objects to the epochal theory of time.
Einstein’s philosophy of nature is not compatible with Whitehead’s unless Whitehead’s system is reworked at very critical points -- his use of experience, his theory of perception, and his doctrine of causality.
- Number 4, Winter 1975
- Mental Phenomena as Causal Determinants in Brain Functions by H. W. Sperry
- The Buddhist Ground of the Whiteheadian God by Thomas J.J. Altizer
- The Metaphysical Ground of the Whiteheadian God by Marjorie Suchocki
- Wolfe Mays on Whitehead: Seeing Through a Glass Darkly by John Robert Baker
The author addresses the problem of the nature of consciousness and the mind/brain relation. As the brain process comes to be understood objectively, all mental phenomena, including the generation of values, can be treated as objective causal agents in human decision-making.
Whitehead’s language is not Buddhist as such, and not even meaningful within a Buddhist context. But the relation of mutual and total coinherence which it establishes between God and the World can be seen to be a purely religious relation. It is grounded in a religious vision, and this ground is in fundamental continuity with Mahayana Buddhism and more in continuity with Buddhism than with any religious language in the Christian world.
Dr. Suchocki proposes some answers to questions raised by John Cobb’s suggestion that greater coherence is obtained if God be considered not as an actual entity, as Whitehead thought necessary, but as a society of occasions such as obtains in living persons.
John Baker criticizes Wolfe Mays’ interpretation of Whitehead in Mays’ claims about the aesthetic-religious and the logico-mathematical. Baker holds that Mays’ interpretation is difficult to argue against, not because it is obviously incorrect, but because it is so heavily dependent upon a kind of argument from similitude whose value is difficult to assess..