"Philosophy as Organism"

1. 1861-1947; born in England to an Anglican clergyman; educated at Trinity College, Cambridge and became a Fellow there; taught at University of London and then at Harvard from 1924 till retirement

2. The three major influences on his mature thinking:

a. contemporary physics--metaphysics has to explain physics (rejected the fact-

value dichotomy)

b. Plato's Timaeus--all reality is interrelated (rejected all bifurcation)

c. a Romantic view of nature, influenced by Wordsworth and Shelley (God is

involved with nature, and vice versa)

3. Bibliography--Principia Mathematica (with Russell) 1910-13; Science and the Modern World 1925; Religion in the Making 1926; Process and Reality 1929; Adventures of Ideas 1933

1. To search for the pattern in the universe; had faith in reason uncovering this pattern; this pattern is somewhat mystical in that it gives full insight in reality (a "rationalized mysticism")

2. Rationality requires a commitment to the unity of experience; ultimate arbitrariness is impossible; the pattern is found in the continuity of things, in the cosmological harmony;

a. math can express this harmony

b. math does not invent but discovers this unity

c. the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness"--the isolated fact is a myth;

connectedness is the essence of reality

3. The epistemological/metaphysical difficulty--no clear and certain starting points (i.e., axioms) from which to start the exploration for the cosmological harmony

a. all premises have to be proven but they must be "all inclusive criterion"

b. they are articulated through "imaginative rationalization"

c. philosophy shows its great usefulness through its imagination about this unity

1. Traditional philosophy has been based or similar to Newton physics--mechanistic functionalism

a. rejects "simple location" which ignores the inherently temporality of reality

b. time relativizes and interconnects all things (Plato's Timaeus--the "receptacle"

is the concept of the essential unity of the universe conceived as an

activity; nature is alive and in process)

2. It bifurcates reality into mind and matter; into spirit and nature; to overcome this dualism, need a new categorical scheme

1. Esse est sentirie, not esse est percipi ("to be is to be felt")

2. Instead of simple location, must think of reality as an event in a state of change, process

3. Prehension--the unity of all events felt in each event; there is an attraction within all events towards a grasping together

a. simplest prehension is of eternal objects--the potentiality of reality

b. it's not temporal but the potential of the temporal

4. Concrescence--the culmination of the potential into a concrete pattern

a. the process inherent to reality is the becoming of actual entities which is the

concrescence of many potentials

b. potentiality becomes actuality through choices

c. physical endurance is the process of continuously inheriting a certain identity

of character transmitted throughout a historical route of events

d. objects endure through time because of the nexus of actual occasions

5. The most primitive/basic element of reality--sympathy; feeling the feeling in another

6. What keeps nature becoming?

1. God is a metaphysical necessity

2. God is the process of becoming, the process of realization of reality, who is the cosmic sympathy and who brings all into existence through divine sympathy; creation is the victory of persuasion over force

3. To account for this continual creation, must see that God has two natures:

a. primordial--the total knowledge of all possibilities

b. consequent--God's prehension of potentialities into actualities; the principle of

limitation

c. history and nature are therefore a divine adventure

4. Religion--the vision for what happens within the flux of time

a. without religion human life is the "bagatelle of transient experience"

b. religion gives the aesthetic principle of the prehension of reality

5. Evil--discordant feelings and events; its aesthetic destruction; but God can prehend it into progress by suffering it