Volume 86, Issue 4, October-December 2023
DOSSIER
Whitehead: Adventure, and the world. A categorical revision of metaphysics
Vincent Berne & Christiane Chauviré, Foreword
Ulysse Gadiou, Whitehead on the place of the mind in nature. Toward impartial emergentism
By comparing Whitehead’s thought with the philosophy of emergence, especially as it was developed by Samuel Alexander, Conwy Lloyd Morgan, and Charlie Dunbar Broad, we may gain a better understanding of the relationship between his processual approach of philosophy and his effort to recognize the reality of meaning as an essential character of the universe. For all of these authors, one task of philosophy is to explain how the features of the mind belong to nature itself, and that it does not have to be discarded into some metaphysical “nowhere.” But the specificity of Whitehead’s thought is that he tries to do so in an impartial manner, by decentering the notion of “mind” from any exclusive reference to human mentality.
Didier Debaise, Nature and abstraction: Whitehead’s multiple forms of experience
The notion of abstraction lies at the heart of Whitehead’s thought. From logical-mathematical formalisms to speculative schemas, the status of physical entities and aesthetic forms, the question of abstractions pervades the entirety of Whitehead’s work. Yet the question of abstractions has remained relatively unexamined. It has to be said that Whitehead unfailingly gave them a special and, to say the least, unusual status. They are, in his thinking, at the heart of tangible experience; they define beings in their very constitution; they offer a gateway onto the possible worlds that accompany all existence. The aim of this article is to propose an interpretation of Whitehead’s thought based on the singular status he accords to abstractions.
Pierre Livet, Whitehead’s process ontology
In this article, we will attempt to see how taking the fluent character of processes seriously implies a duality but also an indissoluble link between the potential for connections and the actualization of connecting processes. We will also ask how this may or may not be compatible with the enterprise of a synthesis between a fundamental ontology in terms of processes and an ontology that would assure the validity of knowledge; and finally, to what extent Whitehead was justified in adopting, in his “philosophy of the organism,” an all-encompassing point of view, including God and the world, as a basis for this assurance.
Luca Vanzago, The link between concrescence and transition and its ontological significance in the work of Whitehead
The Whiteheadian notion of process is not fully fleshed out in his epistemological works, and requires a metaphysical elaboration that could be achieved by its generalization to the universe as a whole: the process is ultimately construed in terms of experience. Reality is therefore conceived as a constantly evolving whole, composed of interconnected parts. This conception derives from Whitehead’s criticism of Aristotle’s substantialism and from his preference for a relationist ontology. The result is a twofold notion of process, which Whitehead sees as the two faces of the creative advance of nature.
Franck Robert, The concept of organism according to Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty: Toward a renewed conception of being
Whitehead called his philosophy “the philosophy of the organism.” Taking up the philosophical renewal imposed by the development of the concept of organism in the nineteenth century, he described its meaning and generalized it to all entities in the world. This research was echoed in the work of Merleau-Ponty. Like Whitehead, Merleau-Ponty discovered the fruitfulness of a renewed conception of the organism. He made it one of the elements of his ontology of the flesh. It is the importance of the concept of organism for Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty that this article seeks to explore.
Ali Benmakhlouf, Whitehead, the becoming of propositions
Whitehead’s project was to radicalize empiricism. The metaphysics he intended to promote was an organic cosmology whose aim was to grasp the most concrete elements of everyday life. It is from this perspective that Whitehead revisited the concept of proposition: 1) by shifting it from the linguistic to the ontological field; 2) by situating it in the domain of becoming, so that the proposition is in phase with reality as a process. These two aspects bring him into line with the pragmatist tradition, which is sensitive to the existential effects of propositions.
Vincent Berne, Sense and sensibility in Whitehead. The development of a deictic tensive space in the Harvard trilogy
With the cosmology of the philosophy of organism, Whitehead extends his investigation concerning the principles of natural knowledge in order to match direct phenomenological data with the physics of his time. By taking the perceiving human body as a model, this metaphysics considers enduring individuals as the basis from which objective knowledge is elaborated. We gain security and coherence in a world of perpetual change, where the laws of nature are themselves contingent. But the generative process of meaning studied in Part III of Process and Reality begs the question: prior to any ontology, isn’t the tensive space that the theory of prehensions places at the center of discussions rather a matter of semiotic existence?
VARIA
Emmanuel Patard, Introduction to « The three basic forms of systems in the first part of the 19th century » from Wilhem Dilthey
Wilhelm Dilthey, The three basic forms of systems in the first part of the 19th century
In this study translated into French, the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), after having criticized several authoritative works on the history of modern philosophy, proposes a classification of the philosophical systems of nineteenth-century Europe according to three fundamental forms, which he names materialism or positivism, objective idealism, and idealism of freedom, grounded on “worldviews. »
READING NOTES
« When Habermas analyzes the process of secularization », on:
- Jürgen Habermas, Une histoire de la philosophie. (Tomes I et II) La constellation occidentale de la foi et du savoir
et Liberté rationnelle. Traces des discours sur la foi et le savoir
by Frédéric Menager
« Music & Philosophy », on:
- Theodor W. Adorno, Beethoven. Philosophie de la musique
- Robert Muller, Puissance de la musique
- Santiago Espinosa, Schopenhauer et la musique
- Pauline Nadrigny, Le Voile de Pythagore. Du son à l’objet
by Victor Bougrel