scholarly journals Creativity and God In Whitehead's Process Philosophy

2012 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-159
Author(s):  
Thomas Hidya Tjaya
Keyword(s):  
Modern Science ◽  
Process Philosophy ◽  
Fundamental Question ◽  
Alfred North Whitehead ◽  
Central Position ◽  
Speculative Philosophy ◽  
Fine Line

Abstract: The category of creativity unquestionably occupies a central position in Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of organism. Its employment is hardly surprising given his project to establish a speculative philosophy that is compatible with modern science. This article examines the use of such a category in this project and argues that the separation between creativity and God causes several problems, including the absence of an ontological principle that may ground the interaction of the various elements in this metaphysical scheme. A more fundamental question is also raised concerning the nature of this project, which walks a fine line between philosophy and science. Keywords: Whitehead, creativity, the Category of the Ultimate, metaphysics, Aristotle, organism, God. Abstrak: Kategori kreativitas jelas memperoleh tempat sentral dalam filsafat organisme Alfred North Whitehead. Kehadiran kategori ini tidaklah mengherankan mengingat usahanya untuk membangun sebuah filsafat spekulatif yang selaras dengan sains modern. Artikel ini hendak mengevaluasi penggunaan kategori ini dan menyampaikan argumen bahwa pemisahan antara kreativitas dan Tuhan memuat sejumlah masalah, termasuk ketiadaan sebuah prinsip ontologis yang dapat menyatukan interaksi berbagai unsur dalam skema metafisika ini. Sebuah pertanyaan lebih mendasar juga diajukan terkait dengan hakikat proyek ini sendiri yang memperlihatkan tipisnya batas antara filsafat dan sains. Kata-kata Kunci: Whitehead, kreativitas, Kategori Pokok, metafisika, Aristoteles, organisme, Tuhan.

Foundations and Introduction of Islamic Economics: Role and Trends

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 121-138
Author(s):  
Dr. Bilal Ahmad Khan
Keyword(s):  
Modern Science ◽  
Central Position ◽  
Islamic Philosophy ◽  
Moral Training ◽  
Human Ability ◽  
The Status ◽  
Distribution Of Resources ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Specific Concept ◽  
The Individual

Islamic economics based on specific concept of universe and the creation of man is contradictory to the concept adopted and accepted by modern science. Islamic economics postulates although ability and expertise is required for progress and growth but distribution of resources completely dependent on it would be cruel, inhuman and bereft of kindness, and lead to oppression. Islamic economics does not favor making human ability and expertise the fulcrum of resource distribution. It should be kind, considerate and based on justice and fairness. This is because according to Islamic philosophy, ownership is considered to be a trust from Allah which has been bestowed on the rich so that they may utilize it correctly. In Islamic economics the role of the individual, has inclinations and his aims and objectives occupy a central position and are vitally important. He is definitely a rational being but his level of rationality is not confined to the calculations of cost and profit. An individual does not want merely to obtain monetary profit and physical pleasure and leisure but he also wants and aims for something beyond what the material world has to offer. The main aim of the study is to find out the relationship between Islam and economics. In Islamic economics the comprehensive moral training of the individual, his technical and educational ability, his aims and his priorities are of primary importance. According to Islamic economics the means of acquiring wealth has the same importance as wealth itself. Dishonesty, abuse of trust and earning of wealth through fraudulent ways and means may perhaps increase the status of an individual but the society suffers because of it on the whole. This leads to an unjust and oppressive economic system.

Taking Sides

2021 ◽  
pp. 226-242
Author(s):  
Steven L. Goldman
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Public Support ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Belief System ◽  
Fundamental Question ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Academic World ◽  
Contentious Issue ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
The World

From the 1970s on, the treatment of modern science as simultaneously an induction-based account of experience and a deduction-based account of reality became an increasingly contentious issue in the academic world. A great deal was at stake in how one answered the question of whether scientific knowledge was objective and validated by its correspondence with reality. Respect and privileged social status were accorded to science, not to mention public support for research. At the same time, however, scientists faced the more fundamental question of whether there existed a neutral arbiter of questions relating to truth, or at least truths about the world. Philosophers and social scientists lined up on both sides of this issue, either attacking scientific knowledge as a socially constructed belief system or defending it as objective and correlated with reality.

Pragmaticism, Science, and Theology or How to Answer the Riddle of the Sphinx?

2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-161
Author(s):  
Søren Brier ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Modern Science ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
Process Philosophy ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Unique Form ◽  
Types Of Knowledge ◽  
Process View ◽  
Science And Theology ◽  
The Many ◽  
Semiotic Process

This text is written in the honor of my scholarly friend John Deely, discussing the claims regarding the relation of modern science and religion put forth in Ashley and Deely, How Science Enriches Theology. I view it as the confrontation of a Peircean and a Thomist philosophical view of modern science and its relation to religion. I argue that the book demonstrates the problems inherent in the dialogue between a Thomist theist and a Peircean panentheist process view. Furthermore, that they are central to the contemporary philosophy of science discussion of the relation between the types of knowledge produced in the sciences and in theology. The important choice seems to be whether the link between science and religion should be based on a panentheist process concept of the divine as arising from a pure zero or on a theology with a personal god as the absolute and eternal source. I argue that Peirce’s triadic semiotic process philosophy is a unique form of panentheism in the way it draws on a combination of Schelling, Unitarianism, plus Emerson, and the transcendentalist’s spiritual ecumenical reading of Buddhist emptiness ontology and non-dualist Advaita Vedanta. This and Peirce’s synechism produce a non-confessional theological process philosophy. The surprising conclusion is that, because of its extended process philosophical grounding in emptiness, this panentheism does not assume any supernatural quality about the divine force of reasoning that drives Cosmogony. Rather Peirce’s pragmaticist formulation stands out as a true non-reductionist alternative to logical positivism’s reductionist unity science, especially in its form of mechanicism based on a concept of transcendental absolute law. The panentheism process view is also an alternative to the many forms of radical constructivism and postmodernism on the other hand. This is one of the reasons why Deely insightfully named Peirce the first true postmodernist.

Process philosophy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Ray Griffin
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
Process Philosophy ◽  
Alfred North Whitehead ◽  
Equal Weight ◽  
Divine Omnipotence ◽  
Self Consistent ◽  
Scientific Materialism ◽  
Charles Hartshorne ◽  
Charles Peirce

In the broad sense, the term ‘process philosophy’ refers to all worldviews holding that process or becoming is more fundamental than unchanging being. For example, an anthology titled Philosophers of Process(1965) includes selections from Samuel Alexander, Henri Bergson, John Dewey, William James, Lloyd Morgan, Charles Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead, with an introduction by Charles HARTSHORNE. Some lists include Hegel and Heraclitus. The term has widely come to refer in particular, however, to the movement inaugurated by Whitehead and extended by Hartshorne. Here, process philosophy is treated in this narrower sense. Philosophy’s central task, process philosophers hold, is to develop a metaphysical cosmology that is self-consistent and adequate to all experienced facts. To be adequate, it cannot be based solely on the natural sciences, but must give equal weight to aesthetic, ethical and religious intuitions. Philosophy’s chief importance, in fact, derives from its integration of science and religion into a rational scheme of thought. This integration is impossible, however, unless exaggerations on both sides are overcome. On the side of science, the main exaggerations involve ‘scientific materialism’ and the ‘sensationalist’ doctrine of perception. On the side of religion, the chief exaggeration has been the idea of divine omnipotence. Process philosophy replaces these ideas with a ‘panexperientialist’ ontology, a doctrine of perception in which nonsensory ‘prehension’ is fundamental, and a doctrine of divine power as persuasive rather than coercive.

Konsep Tuhan dan Agama Menurut Alfred North Whitehead

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-184
Author(s):  
Agustinus Nicolaus Yokit
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Process Philosophy ◽  
Alfred North Whitehead ◽  
Entry Point ◽  
Main Issue ◽  
Concept Of God ◽  
Actual Entity ◽  
Actual Event ◽  
Scientific Materialism

This article discusses the concept of God and religion according to Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy. The main issue is how to describe Whitehead's concept of God and its implications for religious life. Whitehead's critique of scientific materialism is an entry point to understand the characteristics of his thought. This criticism leads to Whitehead's cosmology in which each actual entity is in the process of becoming. God is not excluded from this cosmological scheme. In this way of thinking, God is the source of eternal objects or values. God experiences every actual event that occurs in the temporal world. Thus, God can be understood from two perspectives: the former refers to a cosmological frame, while the latter refers to religious experience. In Whitehead's language, God has two distinct natures, a primordial nature, and a consequent nature. From the perspective of religious life, Whitehead's concept of God seems to put more emphasis on divine immanence.

Wondering the World Directly – or, How Movement Outruns the Subject

2014 ◽  
Vol 20 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 162-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Manning
Keyword(s):  
Process Philosophy ◽  
The Body ◽  
Alfred North Whitehead ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Moment

Turning to the moment when phenomenology (Maurice Merleau-Ponty) meets process philosophy (Alfred North Whitehead), this article turns around three questions: (a) How does movement produce a body? (b) What kind of subject is introduced in the thought of Merleau-Ponty and how does this subject engage with or interfere with the activity here considered as ‘body’? (c) What happens when phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty) meets process philosophy (Alfred North Whitehead)? and builds around three propositions (a) There is never a body as such: what we know are edgings and contourings, forces and intensities: a body is its movement (b) Movement is not to be reduced to displacement (c) A philosophy of the body never begins with the body: it bodies.

Yes, the Universe Is on Our Side

2021 ◽  
pp. 144-163
Author(s):  
Bruce Ledewitz
Keyword(s):  
Quantum Physics ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Process Philosophy ◽  
Alfred North Whitehead ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Stability ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Final Proof

Lonergan’s question is for all of us, including religious believers. The process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead renders the yes plausible, allowing us to understand the universe as more than dead matter and blind forces. There is no possibility of a final proof in answering Lonergan’s question, but there is knowledge. Kronman is not only the culmination of the no, he is the commencement of the yes. Accepting mortality engenders all human possibilities, including tenderness. The universe is emergent and creative. In its processes, the universe moves in the direction of life, complexity, intelligence, and morality. The stability and universality of the laws of nature support a friendly universe. The Earth maintains conditions for life. Quantum physics demonstrates our connection to matter. History is not circular but directional. Human life is purposeful. None of this is accidental.

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