The History of Why

Concept

2 readings

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Proposition in Whitehead

Concept · 2 readings

A proposition in Whitehead’s account brings a possible pattern to bear on particular actualities. It can lure feeling and affect experience whether or not it is true.

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2 readings · Title A–Z

  • Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world · Lesson 7 of 9

    How can a possibility matter without being true?

    For Whitehead, a proposition can engage us whether or not it is true. The lesson compares affirmation, denial and suspended judgment without making usefulness the test of truth.

  • 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.