Concept
2 readings
Subjective aim
Concept · 2 readings
A subjective aim guides the unity a subject is becoming in Whitehead’s account, with no finished inner chooser behind it. Questions about self-determination remain unresolved.
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2 readings · Title A–Z
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 3 of 9
How does the past enter a new experience?
Whitehead describes how a new occasion takes in its past through prehension. The lesson separates the source of an inheritance from its contribution to a new feeling, and tests his account of selective causal reception.
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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.