Dziadkowiec Jakub - Beyond Whitehead: recent advances in process thought

Beyond Whitehead

Contemporary Whitehead Studies

Series Editors: Roland Faber (Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University) and Brian G. Henning (Gonzaga University)

Contemporary Whitehead Studies, cosponsored by the Whitehead Research Project, is an interdisciplinary book series that publishes manuscripts from scholars with contemporary and innovative approaches to Whitehead studies by giving special focus to projects that:

explore the connections between Whitehead and contemporary Continental philosophy, especially sources, like Heidegger, or contemporary streams like poststructuralism,

reconnect Whitehead to pragmatism, analytical philosophy and philosophy of language,

explore creative East/West dialogues facilitated by Whiteheads work,

explore the interconnections of the mathematician with the philosopher and the contemporary importance of these parts of Whiteheads work for the dialogue between sciences and humanities,

reconnect Whitehead to the wider field of philosophy, the humanities, the sciences and academic research with Whiteheads pluralistic impulses in the context of a pluralistic world,

address Whiteheads philosophy in the midst of contemporary problems facing humanity, such as climate change, war and peace, race, and the future development of civilization.

Titles in the Series:

Beyond Whitehead: Recent Advances in Process Thought, edited by Jakub Dziadkowiec and ukasz Lama

Tragic Beauty in Whitehead and Japanese Aesthetics , by Steve Odin

Creaturely Cosmologies : Why Metaphysics Matters for Animal and Planetary Liberation , by Brianne Donaldson

Thinking with Whitehead and the American Pragmatists: Experience and Reality , edited by Brian G. Henning, William T. Myers, and Joseph D. John

The Divine Manifold , by Roland Faber

Foundations of Relational Realism : A Topological Approach to Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Nature , by Michael Epperson and Elias Zafiris

Butler on Whitehead : On the Occasion , edited by Roland Faber, Michael Halewood, and Deena Lin

Beyond Whitehead

Recent Advances in Process Thought

Jakub Dziadkowiec and ukasz Lama

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Dziadkowiec, Jakub, editor.

Title: Beyond Whitehead : recent advances in process thought / edited by Jakub Dziadkowiec and Lukasz Lamza.

Description: Lanham : Lexington, 2017. | Series: Contemporary Whitehead studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017027974 (print) | LCCN 2017028562 (ebook) | ISBN 9781498554695 (Electronic) | ISBN 9781498554688 (cloth : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Process philosophy.

Classification: LCC BD372 (ebook) | LCC BD372 .B49 2017 (print) | DDC 146/.7dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017027974

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Herman Greene

Karl-Friedrich Kiesow

Helmut Maaen

Sophie Frei

Yuzo Yamaura

Anderson Weekes

Vesselin Petrov

Maria-Teresa Teixeira

Jakub Dziadkowiec

Mathias Hassenfratz-Coffinet

Maria Regina Brioschi

We would like to thank Dr. Bogdan Ogrodnik, President of Whitehead Metaphysical Society, for his continuing support and mentoring, an inexhaustible kindness, and years of co-operation that, among many other things, have given us the drive to publish this volume. We would also like to mention other members of Whitehead Metaphysical Society, including Dr. Kleofas Grdek OFM, Dr. Janusz Mczka SDB, Dr. Mirosaw Patalon and many others, that helped us on different stages of our philosophical developement. We thank Dr. Roland Faber and Dr. Brian G. Henning, the editors of Contemporary Whitehead Studies , for their kind invitation and support during publication of this volume.

Special and the most personal thanks go to our wives, Katarzyna, and Zuzanna, whose love and high tolerance for philosophical eccentricity give us the strength and motivation to aim higher and higher.

Jakub Dziadkowiec & ukasz Lama Lublin-Bdzin, January 1st, 2017

During most of the twentieth century, the process paradigm, with its seemingly nonintuitive basis and a hermetic philosophical language created by A.N. Whitehead, had a hard time battling for influence and popularity in philosophy against more traditional worldviews cultivated by both the analytic tradition (e.g., logical positivism, naturalism, or language philosophy) and the continental tradition (e.g., phenomenology, existentialism, or deconstruction). Not belonging to either of these two main currents of 20th-century philosophy, process thought often remained at the margins of philosophy, falling out of fashion after a period of initial interest brought by the publication of Whiteheads main works (for an introduction to the history and main tenets of process philosophy, see e.g., Lucas 1983 and Rescher 1996).

Things have changed. The foundation of the Center for Process Studies at the Claremont School of Theology in 1973 was a turning point that eventually led to the present flourishing of process thought. A continual rediscovery of Whiteheads metaphysical scheme, with its methodology of a dynamic balance between speculation and empirical evidence, has resulted in more and more advanced studies that take the processual fabric of the world seriously. Process philosophy successively draws the attention of scientists from various fields such as ecology, biology, physics, education, economy, psychology, business administration, and organizational theory. Recent theoretical development has led to the foundation of many Whiteheadian societies all over the globe, including Australia, Belgium, Bulgaria, China, France, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Korea, Poland, and the United States. There is a huge expansion of process thought in China, where its society meets the challenges of industrialism and modernism and thinkers try to combine traditional Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism with the Whiteheadian constructive postmodernism. There are an impressive number of local and global events, festivals, conferences, summer schools, and workshops on process thought arranged each year around the world.

As any rich philosophical tradition in a period of intensive growth, process philosophy may therefore seem confusing to the uninitiated, or even to the well initiated. There is simply so much going on that one may, so to speak, lose the forest for the trees. The purpose of this book is to organize and arrange selected examples of contemporary work in process philosophy, with opening commentaries by leading Whiteheadian scholars, to give the reader a taste of the global vision of process currently expressed within this field of philosophy.

The book is split into two parts: the first discussing the historical roots of and future perspectives for basic concepts of process thinking, and the second presenting original contemporary work in extending and reinterpreting the basic metaphysical structure of process.