The History of Why

Concept

1 reading

← Concepts

Structured society

Concept · 1 reading

A structured society combines subordinate forms of order within a supporting environment. Whitehead uses this complexity to resist reducing a living body to one simple line of inheritance.

All readings

1 reading · Title A–Z

  • 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.