Concept
4 readings
Actual occasions
Concept · 4 readings
Actual occasions are Whitehead’s basic temporal becomings. An enduring thing involves many occasions; familiar objects and whole human actions cannot simply be identified as single occasions.
All readings
4 readings · Title A–Z
Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world · Lesson 8 of 9
How can occasions share space and time?
Whitehead distinguishes genetic analysis, which follows an occasion’s becoming, from coordinate analysis, which divides its completed extent. What does that distinction explain about continuity, measurement and abstraction?
Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world · Lesson 4 of 9
How can something new arise from what is given?
Whitehead distinguishes the conditions an occasion inherits, the pure possibilities it can draw on and the experience it achieves. Why does he invoke God’s valuation of possibilities, and what does the occasion’s self-determination leave unexplained?
Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world · Lesson 2 of 9
What becomes actual?
Whitehead begins with occasions of becoming rather than enduring things, and treats even nonconscious actuality as experiential. What does he gain by doing so, and what does he still owe?
Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world · Lesson 5 of 9
Why do things endure?
For Whitehead, a society of occasions is held together by inherited order, not by resemblance alone. Do such societies explain the endurance of familiar things, or only assume it?
Study this in sequence
Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world
An experience receives a world it did not make, yet becomes something that was not there before. How can both be true? Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality builds a philosophy around that difficulty, asking us to begin with occasions of becoming and to explain enduring things, perception, judgment and value through their relations.