Concept
3 readings
Genetic and coordinate analysis
Concept · 3 readings
Genetic analysis concerns the constitution of an occasion; coordinate analysis divides its achieved extent. Whitehead’s distinction prevents measured intervals from being treated as successive internal phases of becoming.
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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 9 of 9
What can last in a world that perishes?
Whitehead holds that the past goes on having effects and proposes that God preserves what the world achieves. The lesson tests what either claim establishes about personal survival and suffering, and ends the study with a cumulative checkpoint.
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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.