This article brings together Alfred North Whitehead and Śaṅkara, the eminent eighth-century teacher of Advaita Vedanta, in a dialogue on causation. After arguing that comparative philosophical encounter is possible, the article investigates how Whitehead might benefit Śaṅkara in his critique of the Buddhist doctrine of momentariness and how Śaṅkara may assist Whitehead in responding to criticisms of his own doctrine of causation and his critique of Hume.
This article investigates the impact of constructive postmodernism and the idea of a Second Enlightenment in China and on the current ecological situation in that country. The article investigates the theoretical and practical principles of constructive postmodernism and their application to developing a comprehensive and systematic mode of solving environmental problems.
This article examines the time duration of individual occasions in the light of the discovery that temporal succession produces frequency ratios. The frequency ratios are used to define energy ratios and the quantum. The manifold and the common particles are constructed graphically using the arrows of time, with the mass-ratios of the particles derivable from the graphs. The formal reduction of physics to time compels us to adopt Whitehead's conception of the physical universe as occasions of experience engaged in temporal/causal succession. The relative duration of the constituent occasions of the particles are determined by their graphs. In the final section, a refined account of the mind-brain interaction sequence confirms the duration of a human occasion as one tenth of a second.
Charles Hartshorne highlights sympathy as a core element of God's love that is undervalued in Christian theology. A detailed understanding of the relationship between loving God and loving others and loving others as oneself is developed based on God's sympathetic love. A comparison between Hartshorne's sympathetic love and Confucian empathetic ren is possible since both eliminate the estrangement between the subject loving and the subject loved and both expand love to others beyond the limited scope of love in human moral practice.
Prey-catching behavior (PCB) in frogs and toads has been the focus of intense neuroethological research from the mid-twentieth century to the present and epitomizes some major themes in science and philosophy during this period. It reflects the movement from simple reflexology to more complex views of instinctive behavior, but it also displays a neural reductionism that denies subjectivity and individual agency The present article engages contemporary PCB research but provides a philosophically more promising picture of it based on Whitehead's nonreductionist "philosophy of organism," which proposes that the flow of events from stimulus to response in organisms of all kinds is mediated by "the intervening touch of mentality " This approach resolves some basic mind-body and mind-nature issues that have long bedeviled modern philosophy and presents an image of a postmodern frog for a constructively postmodern science.
The Extensive Continuum is most often seen as an empty form that awaits the accommodation of actuality. Contrary to this popular interpretation, I argue that extension is completely immanent to actual occasions and their prehensive relations. Whitehead's doctrine of internal relations entails that extension cannot be separated from actual occasions, just as actual occasions cannot be separated from extension. To prehend is to extend. Furthermore, any strict separation of form and actuality is shown to bifurcate nature into publicity and privacy. Only with the immanence of extension is nature truly one.
This short article discusses the Chinese concept of harmonism as developed in a book by Zhihe Wang titled Process and Pluralism: Chinese Thought on the Harmony of Diversity. This book develops themes in Whitehead's philosophy as they illuminate the concept of harmonism and constructive postmodernism.
This article explores the relationship between "the God of religion" and "the God of philosophy" via four key concepts: existence, actuality, reality, and mystical experience. The exploration of these key concepts relies heavily on the thought of Charles Hartshorne, but it also relies on crucial insights from Charles Sanders Peirce and Simone Weil.
In this article, a proposal for Christian theology is constructed in relation to racial injustice. This proposal involves "strategic essentialism," which is informed by feminist theory. This proposal will be explored in light of the views of John Cobb and James Cone.
A Frequency Ratio Account of Temporal Atomism