Concept
2 readings
Misplaced concreteness
Concept · 2 readings
A description can select real features while leaving much of an event out. Whitehead’s warning about misplaced concreteness concerns treating such an abstraction as the full actuality it helps us describe.
All readings
2 readings · Title A–Z
Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world · Lesson 1 of 9
How can a philosophy answer to experience?
Whitehead sets four demands on a speculative scheme: coherence, logical consistency, applicability and adequacy. The lesson separates an illuminating example from a reason to accept the scheme’s general claims.
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?
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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.