Whitehead S Ontology

An examination of Whitehead's metaphysics through a study of his Process and Reality.

A challenging, iconoclastic study that makes clear the underlying unity of Whitehead's vision of the world. This important and provocative book on the work of Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) explores how his avowed atomism is consistent with his equally essential commitment to a view of reality as a thoroughly interconnected sphere of relations. Judith Jones challenges Whitehead's readers to reconsider certain prevailing interpretations of his organic philosophy. To Jones, a rereading of Whitehead's overall philosophic project is essential to evaluating his contributions to metaphysics and ontology. SinceWhitehead's basic worldview is holistic, a return to viewing Whitehead's work as a whole helps clarify his ontological intentions and contributions to metaphysics. For this purpose, the concept of "intensity," which Jones defines as the quality and form of feeling involved in subjective experience, is basic to Whitehead's thinking about process at all naturalistic levels and is therefore particularly useful as a lens through which to view his entire system. "Intensity" is at once Whitehead's most basic metaphysical idea and a notion useful in deciphering the overall unity of purpose in his writings. A central aim of this book is to develop an aesthetically sensitive sense of being that demonstrates the profound and original contributions of process philosophy to realism. Jones shows that a thorough understanding of the concept of intensity yields modes of thought that help overcome knotty problems in conceiving Whitehead's distinction between the private experience of individuals and the public relations those individuals experience in relationship to other entities. Drawing frequently on poetic allusions to aid her interpretations, she focuses specifically on the status of intensity in intellectual and moral experience and develops an ethics of "attention" as an elaboration of Whitehead's aesthetic metaphysics. The result is a book that should be enthusiastically greeted and debated by scholars of Whitehead and by all who are interested in the field of process thought, including students of theology, literature, and feminist studies. Jones's unorthodox conclusions, backed up with scrupulous attention to both the Whitehead canon and related secondary literature, present challenges to accepted interpretations that cannot be ignored.

This book addresses the philosophies of Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, and Alfred North Whitehead in relation to the concepts of event, ontology and politics. For Whitehead, the event is the realization of becoming, the actualization of the “groundless ontological ground” of creativity, the process of self-decision on possibilities yet undecided, the aesthetic and ethical impulse of existence. For Deleuze it is the expression of life without possession, bodies without organs, the virtual or actual reality of singularity and novelty. For Badiou, the event breaks from the situation, in which we always count (reality) as one and multiplicity as united. For all three thinkers, the event necessitates a radical politics that critiques traditional ontologies of social bodies, cultures, and art. The perspective that emerges from the book is of humanity constituted by, but also constituting a multiplicious event cycle: each person and thing bringing their own personal event into their experience of an event outside of themselves. The convergence of this multiplicity creates our complex world—a complexity not defined as aporia or impossibility, but rather infinity—that is always already still creating. Event and Decision offers the reader a live experience of this evental theory, an experience that mirrors the event of three philosophers themselves. And if the mirror you peer into shows you something foreign, something different than what you know as yourself, then this difference makes reading the book easy. The only impossibility is to lose your way.

Whitehead's magnum opus is as important as it is difficult. It is the only work in which his metaphysical ideas are stated systematically and completely, and his metaphysics are the heart of his philosophical system as a whole. Sherburne has rearranged the text in a way designed to lead the student logically and coherently through the intricacies of the system without losing the vigor of Whitehead's often brilliant prose. "The Key renders Process and Reality pedagogically accessible for the first time."—Journal of Religion

This is the first booklength account of how Maurice Merleau-Ponty used certain texts by Alfred North Whitehead to develop an ontology based on nature, and how he could have used other Whitehead texts that he did not know in order to complete his last ontology. This account is enriched by several of Merleau-Ponty's unpublished writings not previously available in English, by the first detailed treatment of certain works by F.W.J. Schelling in the course of showing how they exerted a substantial influence on both Merleau-Ponty and Whitehead, and by the first extensive discussion of Merleau-Ponty's interest in the Stoics's notion of the twofold logos—the logos endiathetos and the logos proforikos. This book provides a thorough exploration of the consonance between these two philosophers in their mutual desire to overcome various bifurcations of nature, and of nature from spirit, that continued to haunt philosophy and science since the 17th-century.

This book addresses the philosophies of Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, and Alfred North Whitehead in relation to the concepts of event, ontology and politics. For Whitehead, the event is the realization of becoming, the actualization of the "groundless ontological ground" of creativity, the process of self-decision on possibilities yet undecided, the aesthetic and ethical impulse of existence. For Deleuze it is the expression of life without possession, bodies without organs, the virtual or actual reality of singularity and novelty. For Badiou, the event breaks from the situation, in which we always count (reality) as one and multiplicity as united. For all three thinkers, the event necessitates a radical politics that critiques traditional ontologies of social bodies, cultures, and art. The perspective that emerges from the book is of humanity constituted by, but also constituting a multiplicious event cycle: each person and thing bringing their own personal event into their experience of an event outside of themselves. The convergence of this multiplicity creates our complex world a complexity not defined as aporia or impossibility, but rather infinity that is always already still creating. Event and Decision offers the reader a live experience of this evental theory, an experience that mirrors the event of three philosophers themselves. And if the mirror you peer into shows you something foreign, something different than what you know as yourself, then this difference makes reading the book easy. The only impossibility is to lose your way.

Leemon McHenry argues that Whitehead's metaphysics provides a better basis for achieving a unification of physical theory than a traditional substance metaphysics. He investigates the influence of Maxwell's electromagnetic field, Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum mechanics on the development of the ontology of events and compares Whitehead's theory to his contemporaries, C. D. Broad and Bertrand Russell, as well as W. V. Quine. In this way, McHenry defends the naturalised and speculative approach to metaphysics as opposed to analytical and linguistic methods that arose in the 20th century.

Featuring contributions by leading academics this collection is a companion to one of the most intricate of Deleuze's philosophical texts, articulating Leibnizian thought within the context of Baroque expressionism, characterized by its interdisciplinary approach to philosophy. This reader offers an incisive critical overview of its key themes