Michel Weber

There is one question that any potential reader who suspects that Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) might be important for past, contemporary, and future philosophy inevitably raises: how should I read Whitehead? How can I make sense of this incredibly dense tissue of imaginative systematizing, spread over decades of work in disciplines so different and specialized as algebra, geometry, logic, relativistic physics and philosophy of science? Accordingly, this monograph has two main complementary objectives. The first one is to propose a set of efficient hermeneutical tools to get the reader started. These straightforward tools provide answers that are highly coherent and probably the most applicable to Whitehead’s entire corpus. The second objective is to illustrate how the several parts of Process and Reality are interconnected, something that all commentators have either failed to recognise or only incompletely acknowledged.

The authors argue that the consciousness debate inhabits the same problem space today as it did in the 17th century. They attribute the lack of progress to a mindset still polarized by Descartes’ real distinction between mind and body, resulting in a standoff between humanistic and scientistic approaches. They suggest that consciousness can be adequately studied only by a multiplicity of disciplines so that the paramount problem is how to integrate diverse disciplinary perspectives into a coherent metatheory. Process philosophy is well qualified to attempt such a synthesis. The rationale for the volume is summed up in the book's unifying thesis: normal, focal-attentive consciousness is not the sui generis phenomenon it is usually taken to be, but part of a wider spectrum of experience (including marginal, deviant, and non-human experience) that can only be studied by approaches as diverse as phenomenology, psycho- and neuropathology, biology, and zoology.

Cette étude introduit au problème de la vie dans l’œuvre d’Alfred North Whitehead à l’aide d’un examen de ses conférences de Chicago . D’une part, il s’agira de comprendre l’inertie, voire l’inanition, dans laquelle la nature fut plongée par la science renaissante. D’autre part, on verra comment, et pourquoi, Whitehead propose de la ranimer à la suite de la physique des champs. Cinq traits seront respectivement mis en évidence et une courte conclusion ouvrira le débat science/sens commun.This paper provides an introduction to the problem of life in the work of Alfred North Whitehead through an examination of his Chicago lectures . On the one hand, the objective is to understand the inertia, indeed, the lifelessness into which nature was plunged by Renaissance science. On the other, it will be seen how, and why, Whitehead proposes to reanimate it consequent to a physics of fields. Five specular characteristics will be dealt with, and a short conclusion will open the debate between science and common sense

A. N. Whitehead's extensive and impressive philosophical work planted seeds that came into harvest only decades after his death and sometimes even in fields that he himself did not extensively cultivate. The philosophy of the mental sciences (broadly construed) is an example of this. As this collection demonstrates in impressive detail, Whiteheadian ideas and theories can be pressed into useful service to advance our understanding of a wide variety of uses in this area. The twenty papers that comprise this volume deal in this way with a wide variety of issues in neurophysiology, psychology, psychotherapy, and the philosophy of mind. All of them are of a high level of insight and interest and they come here to give a striking demonstration of the scope and fertility of Whiteheadian ideas throughout this wide spectrum of important issues. In reading this book, students of Whitehead will be fascinated by those applications of his thought and practitioners of the mental sciences will be impressed by the relevance and fertility of the work of this great twentieth century philosopher.&ltBR> Nicholas Rescher &ltBR> University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh

Although Whitehead’s particular style of philosophizing--looking at traditional philosophical problems in light of recent scientific advances--was part of a trend that began with the scientific revolutions in the early 20th century and continues today, he was marginalized in 20th century philosophy because of his outspoken defense of what he was doing as “metaphysics.” Metaphysics, for Whitehead, is a cross-disciplinary hermeneutic responsible for coherently integrating the perspectives of the special sciences with one another and with everyday experience. The program of such a meta-discipline is challenging to philosophical orthodoxy because it enlarges, rather than narrows, the range of empirical evidence that philosophy must acknowledge. This places Whitehead’s philosophy in a perennial tradition that seeks to resolve fundamental antinomies through synthesis and reconciliation rather than reduction or elimination.