Text
9 readings
Process and Reality
Text · 9 readings
Whitehead’s speculative method runs from becoming, enduring order, perception and judgment to the disputed role of God. The readings reconstruct how the scheme connects and test what its explanations leave unresolved.
A place to begin
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.
All readings
9 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 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 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 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.
Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world · Lesson 2 of 9
What becomes actual?
Whitehead begins with occasions of becoming rather than enduring things, and treats even nonconscious actuality as experiential. What does he gain by doing so, and what does he still owe?
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.
Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world · Lesson 6 of 9
What do we encounter when we perceive?
Whitehead separates presentational immediacy, a thing’s clear appearance, from causal efficacy, its felt influence, and joins them through symbolic reference. How does that joining make perception useful, and how can it mislead?
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.