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473The Many Streams in Ralph Pred’s Onflow (review)Chromatikon 2 227-244. 2006.This study of Ralph Pred’s Onflow (MIT Press, 2005) expands on Pred’s arguments and raises doubts about the viability of phenomenology. Showing that Pred’s method is indeed phenomenological, I validate his interpretations of William James as phenomenologist and his critique of John Searle in light of James, which documents the extent to which the role of habit in the constitution of experience is neglected by philosophers. In explaining habit, however, Pred himself reverts to non-phenomenologica…Read more
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261Process thought as a heuristic for investigating consciousnessIn Michel Weber & Anderson Weekes (eds.), Process Approaches to Consciousness in Psychology, Neuroscience, and Philosophy of Mind, State University of New York Press. pp. 37-56. 2010.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 cohere…Read more
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326Acknowledging Ralph PredIn Jakub Dziadkowiec & Lukasz Lamza (eds.), Beyond Whitehead: Recent Advances in Process Thought, Lexington Books. 2017.At the time of his death in May of 2012, Ralph Pred was working on a critical social theory inspired by process philosophy. In the book manuscript he left unfinished, Syntax and Solidarity, he develops a “radically empirical” sociology that enables him to identify and critically evaluate the different forms that social solidarity has taken in the history of civilization. The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the importance of his unfinished project. The executors of Pred’s literary e…Read more
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375Consciousness and causation in Whitehead's phenomenology of becomingIn Michel Weber & Anderson Weekes (eds.), Process Approaches to Consciousness in Psychology, Neuroscience, and Philosophy of Mind, State University of New York Press. pp. 407-461. 2010.The problem causation poses is: how can we ever know more than a Humean regularity. The problem consciousness poses is: how can subjective phenomenal experience arise from something lacking experience. A recent turn in the consciousness debates suggest that the hard problem of consciousness is nothing more than the Humean problem of explaining any causal nexus in an intelligible way. This involution of the problems invites comparison with the theories of Alfred North Whitehead, who also saw the…Read more
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3880The Mind-Body Problem and Whitehead’s Nonreductive MonismJournal of Consciousness Studies 19 (9-10): 40-66. 2012.There have been many attempts to retire dualism from active philosophic life, replacing it with something less removed from science, but we are no closer to that goal now than fifty years ago. I propose breaking the stalemate by considering marginal perspectives that may help identify unrecognized assumptions that limit the mainstream debate. Comparison with Whitehead highlights ways that opponents of dualism continue to uphold the Cartesian “real distinction” between mind and body. Whitehead…Read more
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434Whitehead's unique approach to the topic of consciousnessIn Michel Weber & Anderson Weekes (eds.), Process Approaches to Consciousness in Psychology, Neuroscience, and Philosophy of Mind, State University of New York Press. pp. 137-172. 2010.Conventional approaches to consciousness assume that our current science tells us within tolerable limits what physical nature is. Because nature so understood cannot explain consciousness as we seem to experience it ourselves, explaining consciousness becomes a problem. One solution is to rethink what consciousness is so that it becomes the sort of thing our current natural science could in principle explain. Whitehead takes the opposite approach, using the existence of consciousness as a clue …Read more
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377Whitehead as a neglected figure of 20th century philosophyIn Michel Weber & Anderson Weekes (eds.), Process Approaches to Consciousness in Psychology, Neuroscience, and Philosophy of Mind, State University of New York Press. pp. 57-72. 2010.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 s…Read more
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350Intersubjectivity, Species-Being, Actual Occasions: Social Ontology from Fichte to WhiteheadIn Lamza Lukaszc & Dziadkowiec Jakub (eds.), Recent Advances in the Creation of a Process-Based Worldview: Human Life in Process, Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2016.Whitehead claims there is only one type of individual in the universe—the actual entity—but there are necessarily multiple tokens of this type. This turns out to be paradoxical. Nevertheless, a type of individuality that is necessarily plural because, for each token, relations to other tokens are constitutive is something familiar from ordinary language, everyday politics, and, not least, 19th century German social thought. Whitehead’s actual entity generalizes the notion of species-being we fin…Read more
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1Psychology and Physics Reconciled: Whitehead’s Vision of MetaphysicsIn Franz Riffert Michel Weber (ed.), Searching for New Contrasts: Whiteheadian Contributions to Contemporary Challenges in Neurophysiology, Psychology, Psychotherapy, and the Philosophy of Mind, Peter Lang. 2003.Major schools of thought in the 20th century agreed in repudiating metaphysical speculation, but the agreement was superficial, for what they repudiated as “metaphysical” was often one another. Whitehead’s defense of speculative philosophy as “productive of important knowledge” singled him out for scorn from all sides at the same time that it enabled him to move beyond dogmatic standoffs . Employing the same method of speculative generalization that led to the most celebrated theoretical disco…Read more
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189IntroductionIn Michel Weber & Anderson Weekes (eds.), Process Approaches to Consciousness in Psychology, Neuroscience, and Philosophy of Mind, State University of New York Press. pp. 1-34. 2010.The Introduction highlights the three main themes of the book: (1) the ontological and epistemological status of everyday human consciousness, (2) the distribution of consciousness in the natural world, and (3) panpsychism. The individual contributions to the book are summarized and related literature is briefly discussed.
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Between Positivism and Phenomenology: Brentano's Philosophy of ScienceDissertation, State University Of New York at Stony Brook. 1996.Brentano plays a paradoxical role in the history of philosophy. He is the key transitional figure between two antithetical traditions: although a profound influence to phenomenology, Brentano himself was inspired by the positivism of Comte and Mill. While his students found in his teachings both a reason and the means to combat the spirit of positivism, Brentano himself believed "the true method of philosophy was nothing other than the method of the natural sciences." The incoherence of his hist…Read more
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879Abstraction and Individuation in Whitehead and Wiehl: A Comparative Historical ApproachIn Michel Weber Pierfrancesco Basile (ed.), Subjectivity, Process, and Rationality, Ontos Verlag. pp. 31-119. 2006.This paper looks at the history of the problem of individuation from Plato to Whitehead. Part I takes as its point of departure Reiner Wiehl’s interpretation of the different meanings of “abstract” in the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead and arrives at a corresponding taxonomy of different ways things can be called concrete. Part II compares the way philosophers in different periods understand the relation between thought and intuition. The view mostly associated with ancient philosophy i…Read more
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426The Many Streams in Ralph Pred’s Onflow: A Review EssayChromatikon II. Annuaire de la Philosophie En Procès - Yearbook of Philosophy in Process 2 229-246. 2006.This study of Ralph Pred’s Onflow (MIT Press, 2005) expands on Pred’s arguments and raises doubts about the viability of phenomenology. Showing that Pred’s method is indeed phenomenological, I validate his interpretations of William James as phenomenologist and his critique of John Searle in light of James, which documents the extent to which the role of habit in the constitution of experience is neglected by philosophers. In explaining habit, however, Pred himself reverts to non-phenomenologica…Read more
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97Process Approaches to Consciousness in Psychology, Neuroscience, and Philosophy of Mind (edited book)State University of New York Press. 2010.This collection opens a dialogue between process philosophy and contemporary consciousness studies. Approaching consciousness from diverse disciplinary perspectives—philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, neuropathology, psychotherapy, biology, animal ethology, and physics—the contributors offer empirical and philosophical support for a model of consciousness inspired by the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947). Whitehead’s model is developed in ways he could not have anticipat…Read more
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409Consciousness as a topic of investigation in Western thoughtIn Michel Weber & Anderson Weekes (eds.), Process Approaches to Consciousness in Psychology, Neuroscience, and Philosophy of Mind, State University of New York Press. pp. 73-136. 2010.Terms for consciousness, used with a cognitive meaning, emerged as count nouns in the 17th century. This transformation repeats an evolution that had taken place in late antiquity, when related vocabulary, used in the sense of conscience, went from being mass nouns designating states to count nouns designating faculties possessed by every individual. The reified concept of consciousness resulted from the rejection of the Scholastic-Aristotelian theory of mind according to which the mind is not a…Read more
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3388Process Philosophy: Via Idearum or Via Negativa?In Michel Weber (ed.), After Whitehead: Rescher on process metaphysics, Ontos Verlag. pp. 223-266. 2004.Nicholas Rescher’s way of understanding process philosophy reflects the ambitions of his own philosophical project and commits him to a conceptually ideal interpretation of process. Process becomes a transcendental idea of reflection that can always be predicated of our knowledge of the world and of the world qua known, but not necessarily of reality an sich. Rescher’s own taxonomy of process thinking implies that it has other variants. While Rescher’s approach to process philosophy makes it int…Read more
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Fairfield UniversityAssistant Professor