I find Whitehead’s notion of process akin to Eric Fromm’s interpretation of the meaning of “Yahweh,” the response from the burning bush to Moses’ question, “Whom shall I say sends me?” Eric Fromm discusses the Hebrew meaning of the word, Yahweh: it is not the present tense of the verb “to be,” but the imperfect form of that verb, i.e., “I am becoming.” Yahweh reasonably might be interpreted, “I am in process.” Whitehead’s complaint of Newtonian physics was its “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” Rather than a notion of frozen moments in time, Whitehead preferred the description “actual entities” or “actual occasions.” As Stumpf describes it at page 397,īecause an actual occasion is not a material thing, it is better understood as an experience. They appear to be the most unlikely of collaborators: Russell at times claiming atheism, and Whitehead professing a theism in process. He collaborated with Bertrand Russell to examine the extent to which reality was accessible to mathematical thinking in Principia Mathematica. Whitehead explores further the nature of all life as process, not as isolated moments in time. Whitehead would agree with Bergson that all sensation, and therefore all thought, must be model – based, or “as if” thinking. Philosophy – History and Problems at 395. Is the modern problem of philosophy and science.” Although he shared similar concerns with Bergson, Whitehead brought a different intellectual background to their solution and produced a novel, speculative metaphysics. Whitehead was convinced that the “the status of life in nature. Thus, “the red glow of the sunset should be as much a part of nature as are the molecules and electrical waves by which men of science would explain the phenomenon.” The function of natural philosophy, he taught, is “to analyze how these various elements of nature are connected.” ![]() His main theme was that “connectedness is the essence of all things.” What science seeks to isolate, philosophy must try to see in context life should be viewed as an organic unity. Whitehead reacted, as Bergson had, against the analytic mode of thought, which assumed that facts exist in isolation from other facts.
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