process studies articles @ religion online...
Volume 9 (1979)
- Number 1-2, Spring-Summer 1979
- Russell, Poincaré, and Whitehead’s ‘Relational Theory of Space’ by Patrick J. Hurley
- Subjective Immortality Revisited by Lori E. Krafte
- Temporal Concepts: A Schematic Analysis by Peter Miller
- The Ethereal Body as a Means of Survival by Frank W. Quillen
The author discusses: extensive abstraction, the problem of contiguous physical objects, causal transmission and temporal dimension.
Lori Krafte challenges Ford and Suchocki in "A Whiteheadian Reflection on Subjective Immortality" concerning the subjectifying and objectifying an experience.
It is difficult to answer what time is because of the paradoxes of being and non-being, the experiential and emotional weightiness of the subject and the metaphysical centrality of time in understanding such things as substances, events, causation, and consciousness. Dr. Miller explores especially the existence of a plurality of sometimes discordant temporal concepts.
Philosophers have been unwilling to affirm the crude notion of resurrection when understood as the reanimation of a physical corpus. The notion of an ethereal or "astral" body, however, deserves much more consideration from philosophers than it has previously received. The etheric body conceived in terms of Whiteheadian occasions of experience might not be so far-fetched.
- Number 3-4, Fall-Winter 1979
- Explaining the Historical Process by Dale H. Porter
- God’s Nescience of Future Contingents: A Nineteenth-Century Theory by William McGuire King
- On Behalf of the Unhappy Reader: A Response to Lee F. Werth by Elizabeth M. Kraus
- The Incoherence of Whitehead’s Theory of Perception by Charles A. Kimball
- The Untenability of Werth’s Untenability Essay by Bowman L. Clarke
Whitehead’s scheme for analyzing the temporal emergence of particular events provides a justification and explanation for the dynamics of historical narrative and also a set of concepts that could satisfy the demands of analytical critics.
Dr. King comments on the thoughts of Lorenzo Dow McCabe who attempted to challenge the metaphysical foundations of traditional Christian theology: If theological reconstruction is to meet the needs of philosophy, scriptural exegesis, and religious experience, thought McCabe, then theology must reassess its traditional theistic assumptions in such a way that it can speak of a God who is capable of relating fully to the contingencies of personal life and historical change.
The author examines Lee F. Werth’s critique of Whitehead’s theory of extensive connection. She adds: It’s a serious challenge to the coherence of the philosophy of organism. The attack and the doctrine attacked are so arcane and abstruse as to render them inaccessible and/or uninteresting to all but a few specialists in the philosophical community, with the end result that both are, in practice, passed over."
Whitehead’s theory of perception is unable to reconcile its opposing tendencies of realism and mediatism. Whitehead does not provide sufficient evidence for the unification of his two pure modes of perception, and his theory fails to overcome the traditional difficulties which prevent the consistent unification of the phenomenological (Or sense-datum) or the causal (or physiological) accounts of perception.
Dr. Clarke presents a critique of Lee F. Werth’s critique of Whitehead’s Theory of Extensive Connection. Clarke says, "If Werth has succeeded in demonstrating anything, it is the need for someone to cast Whitehead’s theory of extensive connection and abstraction in a systematic form and in logical notation."