Perspective in Whitehead's Metaphysics

By Stephen David Ross

Subjects: Metaphysics
Series: SUNY series in Systematic Philosophy
Paperback : 9780873956581, 295 pages, June 1983
Hardcover : 9780873956574, 295 pages, June 1983

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Table of contents

PREFACE

1. PERSPECTIVE

2. CAUSATION

 

Causal Relations
The Uniformity of Nature
Natural Teleology
Inductive Knowledge
Causal Perception

 

3. FREEDOM

 

Novelty
Contingency
Self-Causation
Conceptual Reversion
Subjective Aim
The Ultimate Irrationality

 

4. EXPERIENCE

 

General Considerations
Mind and Body
Perception
Higher Experience
Subjectivity and Anthropomorphism

 

5. KNOWLEDGE

 

Propositions
Truth
Philosophical Knowedge

 

6. ORDER

 

The Order of the Universe
Social Order
The Philosophy of Organism
The Unity of the World

 

7. EXTENSION

 

The Extensive Continuum
Duration
The Presented Duration
Extensive Abstraction

 

8. REALITY

 

Actuality
Possibility
Abstraction

 

9. GOD

 

The Primordial Nature of God
The Consequent Nature of God
The Cosmological Status of God

 

10. SUMMARY AND EVALUATION

WORKS CITED

INDEX

Description

Stephen David Ross presents an extensive, detailed, and critical interpretation of Whitehead's mature thought, emphasizing the fundamental role of perspective in Whitehead's cosmology, and tracing the conflicts and difficulties therein to tensions involving perspective in relation to other central features of Whitehead's thought. Ross isolates four principles as having a fundamental role in whitehead's metaphysics: perspective, cosmology, experience, and mechanical analysis. He argues that many of Whitehead's difficulties can be eliminated by raising the principle of perspective to prominence and by revising the other central features of Whitehead's theory accordingly.

This book addresses key Whiteheadian texts and secondary interpretations of Whitehead. The discussion ranges over most of Whitehead's theory in Process and Reality, and offers a number of significant and, in some cases, novel views on different aspects of Whitehead's theory: perception, prehension, causation, objective immortality, self-causation, the extensive continuum, natural order, possiblity, concreteness, and God. Ross's concluding suggestions for modifying Whitehead's system promise to occasion much debate among process philosophers, theologians, and anyone concerned with Whitehead's thought.

Stephen David Ross is Department Chairman and Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He is the author of Transition to an Ordinal Metaphysics, Philosophical Mysteries, and A Theory of Art: Inexhaustibility by Contrast, also published by the State University of New York Press.