process studies articles @ religion online...
Volume 20 (1991)
- Number 1, Spring 1991
- Added on Like Dome and Spire -- Wieman’s Later Critique of Whitehead by C. Robert Mesle
- In Critique of Whitehead 1 by Reto Luzius Fetz
- Must God Be Really Related to Creatures? by Schubert M. Ogden
- Sharing a Vague Vision: Wieman’s Early Critique of Whitehead by C. Robert Mesle
- The Metaphysical Status of Civilized Society by Austin Lewis
Dr. Mesle shows four major strands in Henry Nelson Wieman’s critique of Whitehead: 1. An aesthetic approach to value; 2. God as "Something;" 3. The empiricism of Whitehead; 4. Whitehead’s speculations.
Whitehead’s importance lies in the prospects of a mediation between classical and contemporary philosophy and between philosophy. Since Whitehead meant for his philosophy to be judged in the changing situation of thought, new answers are required.
Dr. Ogden holds that God must be really related to animals otherwise he cannot be really related to them. He follows up with nine points of proof derived through classical logic.
The author traces the development of four major strands in Wieman’s thought which should both clarify his relationship to the philosophy of Whitehead and illuminate the growth of his own thought. Wieman eventually expressed sharp criticism of Whitehead’s philosophy.
Dr. Lewis addresses one of the most neglected aspect of Whitehead’s philosophical system: his social philosophy in general and his views on civilization in particular. A civilized society, itself a one living in the many, and a many striving to live as one, comes to exemplify the ultimate creativity of things.
- Number 2, Summer 1991
- Foreword To the Newly Reprinted British Edition of Science and the Modern World by Robert M. Young
- Process Philosophy and the Educational Canon by George Allan
- The Conversation Continues: Rorty and Dewey by Brian Hendley
- The Process Perspective as Context for Educational Evaluation by Donald W. Sherburne
- Why Whitehead? by Robert S. Brumbaugh
Science threatens to control our lives and scramble our ethics and sense of human dignity. The author suggests that Whitehead would redefine the world view so that science and other forms of research would serve us better.
The evidence showing the failure of the American educational system to teach its young people what they need to know is said by the canonicists to be the result of the fragmentation and the collapse of any distinction between essential and unessential materials. An educational canon, properly understood, marries modernists and post-modernists.
Dr. Hendley contrasts Richard Rorty and John Dewey in their views of the meaning of human life -- in their attempts to makes sense of the multidimensional aspects of human experience.
Dr. Sherburne agrees with Whitehead that a fundamental weakness in modern education is its failure to exploit the value for education of exposure to the arts.
Whitehead and process thought offer new theoretical foundations and common sense warnings and applications, and they also directs new attention to feeling as an essential part of intellectual experience thus bridging the gap between philosophic principles and the everyday world of teaching and learning.
- Number 3, Fall 1991
- A Monistic Interpretation of Whitehead’s Creativity by John R. Wilcox
- On an Alleged Inconsistency in Whitehead by Milic Capek
- The Problem of Persons by Sharon Janusz and Glenn Webster
- Whitehead, Heidegger, and the Paradoxes of the New by James Bradley
Dr. Wilcox questions the philosophical and textual motivations of a pluralistic interpretation of Whitehead. He presents an explicitly monistic interpretation which holds that there is a sense in which creativity exists apart from its plurality of instances.
John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler claim contradictions in two of Whitehead’s works -- The Concept of Nature and Science and the Modern World. The author refutes their contradiction and shows it is only apparent.
The authors project the idea that persons are organic entities and that their actual entities are unexplained by single occasions alone.
The author discusses the two features of time as visualized by both Heidegger and Whitehead: 1. The virtue of the ultimate irreducibility of time. 2. Time’s discrete, indivisible and finite elements making it unique and unrepeatable and thus, radically new.
- Number 4, Winter 1991
- Kaufman on Kaplan and Process Theology: A Post-Positivist Perspective by H. A. Alexander
- Materialist and Panexperientialist Physician: A Critique of Jaegwon Kim’s Supervenience and Mind by David Ray Griffin
- Mordecai M. Kaplan and Process Theology: Metaphysical and Pragmatic Perspectives by William E. Kaufman
- Original Sin Revisited by Marjorie Suchocki
- Process Theism Versus Free-Will Theism: A Response To Griffin by David Basinger
- Three Types of Divine Power by Nicholas F. Gier
The author concludes that Mordecai Kaplan was a positivist and a modernist while Whitehead was one of the earliest post-positivists and post-modernists.
Dr. Griffin responds to Jaegwon Kim’s Supervenience and Mind. He shows that Kim’s acceptance of a materialist version of physicallism leads to problems.
Both Mordecai Kaplan and Whitehead see the coherence of the idea of a non-absolute God within the framework of religious naturalism as a theological and philosophical concept. Thus, they steer a middle course between unreflective supernaturalism and reductive naturalism.
Dr. Suchocki addresses the wavering fortunes of original sin in these past few centuries and explores some of the resources of process, feminist, and black theology for a contemporary development of this doctrine.
Dr. Basinger discusses the problem of evil from three perspectives: 1. Theological determinism; 2. Free-will theism; 3. Process theology.
Dr. Gier writes of God’s Omnipotence versus our freedom, contending that our freedom, not God’s authority is the our first principle.