- Causation, Consciousness, Phenomenology, Process Philosophy, Aristotle, Stoicism, and 20 moreSkepticism, 17th Century & Early Modern Philosophy, Hellenistic Philosophy, History of Philosophy, Metaphysics, Freedom, Edmund Husserl, Subjectivity, David Hume, Materialism, Alfred North Whitehead, Idealism, Descartes, Conscience, Modern Philosophy, Reductionism, Dualism, Justification, Passive Mind, and Real Distinctionedit
This collection opens a dialogue between process philosophy and contemporary consciousness studies. Approaching consciousness from diverse disciplinary perspectives—philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, neuropathology, psychotherapy,... more
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 anticipated to show how it can advance current debates beyond well-known sticking points. This has trenchant consequences for epistemology and suggests fresh and promising new perspectives on such topics as the mind-body problem, the neurobiology of consciousness, animal consciousness, the evolution of consciousness, panpsychism, the unity of consciousness, epiphenomenalism, free will, and causation.
Contents:
Introduction, Michel Weber & Anderson Weekes
I. Setting the Stage
1. Process Thought as a Heuristic for Investigating Consciousness, Michel Weber & Anderson Weekes
2. Whitehead as a Neglected Figure of 20th Century Philosophy, Michel Weber & Anderson Weekes
3. Consciousness as a Topic of Investigation in Western Thought, Anderson Weekes
4. Whitehead’s Unique Approach to the Topic of Consciousness, Anderson Weekes
II. Psychology and Philosophy of Mind
5. Consciousness as a Subjective Form, David Ray Griffin
6. The Interpretation and Integration of the Literature on Consciousness from a Process Perspective, Michael W. Katzko
7. Windows on Nonhuman Minds, Donald R. Griffin
III. From Metaphysics to (Neuro)Science and Back Again
8. Panexperientialism, Quantum Theory, and Neuroplasticity, George W. Shields
9. The Evolution of Consciousness, Max Velmans
10. The Carrier Theory Of Causation, Gregg H. Rosenberg
IV. Clinical Applications: Consciousness as Process
11. The Microgenetic Revolution in Contemporary Neuropsychology and Neurolinguistics, Maria Pachalska and Bruce Duncan MacQueen
12. From Coma to Consciousness, Avraham Schweiger, Michael Frost, Ofer Keren
13. Consciousness and Rationality from a Process Perspective, Michel Weber
V. History (and Future?) of Philosophy
14. Consciousness, Memory, and Recollection according to Whitehead, Xavier Verley
15. Consciousness and Causation in Light of Whitehead’s Phenomenology of Becoming, Anderson Weekes
Contents:
Introduction, Michel Weber & Anderson Weekes
I. Setting the Stage
1. Process Thought as a Heuristic for Investigating Consciousness, Michel Weber & Anderson Weekes
2. Whitehead as a Neglected Figure of 20th Century Philosophy, Michel Weber & Anderson Weekes
3. Consciousness as a Topic of Investigation in Western Thought, Anderson Weekes
4. Whitehead’s Unique Approach to the Topic of Consciousness, Anderson Weekes
II. Psychology and Philosophy of Mind
5. Consciousness as a Subjective Form, David Ray Griffin
6. The Interpretation and Integration of the Literature on Consciousness from a Process Perspective, Michael W. Katzko
7. Windows on Nonhuman Minds, Donald R. Griffin
III. From Metaphysics to (Neuro)Science and Back Again
8. Panexperientialism, Quantum Theory, and Neuroplasticity, George W. Shields
9. The Evolution of Consciousness, Max Velmans
10. The Carrier Theory Of Causation, Gregg H. Rosenberg
IV. Clinical Applications: Consciousness as Process
11. The Microgenetic Revolution in Contemporary Neuropsychology and Neurolinguistics, Maria Pachalska and Bruce Duncan MacQueen
12. From Coma to Consciousness, Avraham Schweiger, Michael Frost, Ofer Keren
13. Consciousness and Rationality from a Process Perspective, Michel Weber
V. History (and Future?) of Philosophy
14. Consciousness, Memory, and Recollection according to Whitehead, Xavier Verley
15. Consciousness and Causation in Light of Whitehead’s Phenomenology of Becoming, Anderson Weekes
Research Interests:
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... more
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 find in Fichte, Feuerbach, and Marx. The rationale for the concept of species-being brings to light important social and political implications of Whitehead's cosmology.
Keywords: Actual entity, Individuality, Monism, Pluralism, Relations,
Species-being
Keywords: Actual entity, Individuality, Monism, Pluralism, Relations,
Species-being
Research Interests:
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... more
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 estate would be happy to see his project, with due acknowledgment, publicized and continued.
Keywords: Active Voice Bias, Concrescence, Middle Voice, Sociogeny, Solidarity, Substance
Keywords: Active Voice Bias, Concrescence, Middle Voice, Sociogeny, Solidarity, Substance
Research Interests:
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... more
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, by contrast, insists on a conceptual distinction: there can no more be body without mind than mind without body (at least at the level of ultimate constituents). Key to this integration is Whitehead’s understanding that mind, at its most rudimentary, is simply the intrinsic temporality of a physical event. Thus, the resulting form of “panpsychism” is more naturalistic than commonly supposed, and it solves both the composition problem (traditionally fatal to panpsychism) and the “hard problem.”
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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,... more
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 countable thing, but a pure potentiality. This rejection was motivated by an acute sense of the mind’s fallible subjectivity. While conditioned by recent historical events, the 17th century’s pervasive sense of subjectivity also reveals a heavy debt to Hellenistic philosophy, which had been recently rediscovered. But whereas Hellenistic thought, mistrustful of theoria, only reifies conscience, early modern thinking, more mistrustful of praxis and seeking its grounding in theoria, goes a step further and reifies consciousness. Partly modeled on theological ideas, the resulting concept of consciousness is plagued by paradoxes that have becomes notorious for their intractability. But essentially the same model of consciousness underwrites contemporary theory, embroiling contemporary debates in the same controversies that dominated the 17th century. Sidestepping these difficulties by returning to the Scholastic-Aristotelian theory of mind would be a tall order, but it is not impossible. Alfred North Whitehead's theory of consciousness offers an example. His novel theory of time enables Whitehead to rehabilitate the Aristotelian concept of passive mind in a wholly naturalistic way.
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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... more
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 intelligible and appealing to mainstream analytic philosophy, it leaves behind the more daring ideas of Bergson, James, and Whitehead, all of whom envisioned the primordial reality of process in a radical ontology of becoming. This variant of process thought can be construed as coherent and self-consistent, but not without relinquishing the correspondence theory of truth and embracing challenging ideas that bring us in close proximity to existentialism, apophatic theology, and Buddhism.
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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... more
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-phenomenological models drawn from James’ postulate of psycho-physical parallelism. Habit, like causation, poses an unmet challenge to phenomenological methods. In his critique of Gerald Edelman, Pred notes that Edelman falls prey to a metaphysical bias inherent in modern Indo-European languages. But Pred’s acuity in exposing a latent linguistic bias in phenomenological data is a two-edged sword. Revealing an invisible dependence of appearance on language, it casts doubt on the project of getting beyond language to "appearances-in-themselves."
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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... more
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 is that thought and sense-perception target different kinds of objects. The view mostly associated with modern philosophy (although it was introduced by the Stoics) is that thought and sense-perception are different ways of targeting the same objects. These differences have specific consequences for theories of individuation, which are assessed historically in Part III and then applied to Whitehead’s difficult texts in part IV.
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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... more
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 them related in this way. According to Whitehead, a tempting but false phenomenology of consciousness obscures temporality and leads to the causation problem, which then makes consciousness itself seem causally inexplicable. Bringing the processual nature of consciousness back into view discloses causation at work in the moment-to-moment emergence of consciousness, and it reveals that causation operates in a logically fuzzy domain where the skeptical critique of causality finds no foothold.
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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... more
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 to what nature must be if it can generate something like consciousness. The justification for this approach can be found in Whitehead’s implicit indictment of descriptive phenomenology. According to Whitehead, the seemingly insoluble problem of explaining consciousness naturalistically is an artifact created by the assumption that consciousness faithfully samples the world, when in fact it obscures the very aspects of nature that are indispensable to understanding how anything, including consciousness itself, could emerge through a physical process.
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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... more
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 discoveries of the 20th century, quantum theory and special relativity, Whitehead sought to resolve the conflict between objectifying, causal explanations of the world and its inhabitants and the “folk” attitudes defended and elaborated by humanistic psychologies and philosophies. The result was his theory of the “dipolar actual occasion” as the fundamental unit of existence. Recent work by leading scientists continues this effort to elaborate a nonreductive monism that accounts for both meaning and causation.
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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,... more
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 coherent metatheory. Process philosophy is well qualified to attempt such a synthesis. The rationale for the volume is summed up in the book's unifying thesis: normal, focal-attentive consciousness is not the sui generis phenomenon it is usually taken to be, but part of a wider spectrum of experience (including marginal, deviant, and non-human experience) that can only be studied by approaches as diverse as phenomenology, psycho- and neuropathology, biology, and zoology
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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... more
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 special sciences with one another and with everyday experience. The program of such a meta-discipline is challenging to philosophical orthodoxy because it enlarges, rather than narrows, the range of empirical evidence that philosophy must acknowledge. This places Whitehead’s philosophy in a perennial tradition that seeks to resolve fundamental antinomies through synthesis and reconciliation rather than reduction or elimination.
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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... more
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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In Chapter Four of Untying the Gordian Knot, Tim Eastman draws attention to a convergence between his own theory of causation and the theory I arrive at in a series of publications devoted to the interpretation of Whitehead. For the... more
In Chapter Four of Untying the Gordian Knot, Tim Eastman draws attention to a convergence between his own theory of causation and the theory I arrive at in a series of publications devoted to the interpretation of Whitehead. For the fourth session of the Cobb Institute’s conversation series "Tim Eastman Unties the Gordian Knot," I summarized the papers he references. The summary focuses on how Whitehead responded to Kant’s challenge (How are synthetic propositions a priori possible?) by rehabilitating the same quaint-seeming ideas from Aristotle (about “passive mind” being a pure potentiality) that early modern philosophy famously rejected. I explain how this novel use of traditional ideas led Whitehead to a naturalistic solution to the mind–body problem and how it forces the conclusion that causation is fundamentally non-Boolean in nature. This is one of several striking ways Whitehead’s philosophically generated theory matches up with the theory of causation Eastman develops by reflecting on the theoretical challenges posed by discoveries in quantum physics.
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Nirenberg elegantly shows how the battle between humanities and timeless sciences has always been with us. That fact alone tells us something. Human beings can’t make do without both kinds of truths, despite the row that results. That... more
Nirenberg elegantly shows how the battle between humanities and timeless sciences has always been with us. That fact alone tells us something. Human beings can’t make do without both kinds of truths, despite the row that results. That tells us monolithic theories can’t be right: neither the ones (like Nirenberg’s) that oppose the good truths of time to the specious truths of eternity, nor the ones (like Alan Sokal’s) that oppose the good truths of eternity to the specious truths of time.
Interpretations of Xunzi’s meta-ethics run the gamut from relativist and constructivist to absolutist and realist. But, as David Wong argues in “Xunzi’s Metaethics” (2016), the fact that each of these readings finds textual support in the... more
Interpretations of Xunzi’s meta-ethics run the gamut from relativist and constructivist to absolutist and realist. But, as David Wong argues in “Xunzi’s Metaethics” (2016), the fact that each of these readings finds textual support in the Xunzi suggests that none of them is right. Xunzi is occupying some kind of middle position that eludes our dichotomies. Taking a step back, I show that Xunzi’s ambivalence about meta-ethics is far from the exception. The same patterns are evident in western natural law theory, as I document by looking at Protagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Ockham, Suarez, Hobbes, and Burke. Although we tend to associate “natural law” with inflexible absolutism and extreme realism in meta-ethics, we need only read with the same circumspection Wong affords the Xunzi to see that neither the tradition as a whole, nor any single representative of it, gives unambiguous answers to meta-ethical questions. As a political philosopher, Xunzi was doing nothing unusual to characterize norms in each of these seemingly opposed ways or to think a correct account of norms would have to combine all of them. Comparison with the western figures highlights several ways Xunzi’s combined position, although paradoxical on the surface, may be logically coherent.
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I recently posted to Academia.edu a skeletal summary of my writing pedagogy. Readers rightly had many questions. Most pedagogy is content-centered and assumes learning is a passive process of extrinsically-motivated assimilation. My... more
I recently posted to Academia.edu a skeletal summary of my writing pedagogy. Readers rightly had many questions. Most pedagogy is content-centered and assumes learning is a passive process of extrinsically-motivated assimilation. My "self-correcting" approach to pedagogy is student-centered and assumes learning is an active process of intrinsically-motivated problem solving. What I posted under the title "The Self-Correcting Loop: A Failsafe Way to Teach Writing to Undergraduates" was not meant to be a complete explanation of my writing pedagogy. The present paper, without requiring any familiarity with the prior posting, delivers the fuller account. It explains the underlying rationale for the self-correcting approach, surveys the evidence supporting its efficacy, and describes how the Self-Correcting Loop works as a pedagogical instrument.
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This draft describes a basic technique for teaching good argumentative writing to undergraduates even if they have no writing skills.
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The paper explains why I use Homer's Iliad as primary source reading for an introduction to normative ethics.
Simple background on the extant two speeches of Antisthenes illustrating a contest at law.
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NOTE TO COLLEAGUES: I have written this essay specifically for the undergraduate students in my Introduction to Philosophy class focusing on ancient Greek ethical thought. I have used a simple, conversational style and, for the most part,... more
NOTE TO COLLEAGUES: I have written this essay specifically for the undergraduate students in my Introduction to Philosophy class focusing on ancient Greek ethical thought. I have used a simple, conversational style and, for the most part, eliminated both footnotes and quotations. Footnotes would make comprehension seem formidable. Quotations would release students from the necessity of doing their own thoughtful analysis of the primary sources in order to verify (or contest) the correctness of these interpretations. How these supplementary readings fit into my pedagogy will become clear as I post more materials relating specifically to my pedagogy. In the meantime, those who know the relevant source material and secondary literature may find the interpretations advanced here of interest. I welcome comments and feedback.
Research Interests:
NOTE TO COLLEAGUES: I have written this essay specifically for the undergraduate students in my Introduction to Philosophy class focusing on ancient Greek ethical thought. I have used a simple, conversational style and, for the most part,... more
NOTE TO COLLEAGUES: I have written this essay specifically for the undergraduate students in my Introduction to Philosophy class focusing on ancient Greek ethical thought. I have used a simple, conversational style and, for the most part, eliminated both footnotes and quotations. Footnotes would make comprehension seem formidable. Quotations would release students from the necessity of doing their own thoughtful analysis of the primary sources in order to verify (or contest) the correctness of these interpretations. How these supplementary readings fit into my pedagogy will become clear as I post more materials relating specifically to my pedagogy. In the meantime, those who know the relevant source material and secondary literature may find the interpretations advanced here of interest. I welcome comments and feedback.
Research Interests:
NOTE TO COLLEAGUES: I have written this essay specifically for the undergraduate students in my Introduction to Philosophy class focusing on ancient Greek ethical thought. I have used a simple, conversational style and, for the most part,... more
NOTE TO COLLEAGUES: I have written this essay specifically for the undergraduate students in my Introduction to Philosophy class focusing on ancient Greek ethical thought. I have used a simple, conversational style and, for the most part, eliminated both footnotes and quotations. Footnotes would make comprehension seem formidable. Quotations would release students from the necessity of doing their own thoughtful analysis of the primary sources in order to verify (or contest) the correctness of these interpretations. How these supplementary readings fit into my pedagogy will become clear as I post more materials relating specifically to my pedagogy. In the meantime, those who know the relevant source material and secondary literature may find the interpretations advanced here of interest. I welcome comments and feedback.
Research Interests:
NOTE TO COLLEAGUES: I have written this essay specifically for the undergraduate students in my Introduction to Philosophy class focusing on ancient Greek ethical thought. I have used a simple, conversational style and, for the most part,... more
NOTE TO COLLEAGUES: I have written this essay specifically for the undergraduate students in my Introduction to Philosophy class focusing on ancient Greek ethical thought. I have used a simple, conversational style and, for the most part, eliminated both footnotes and quotations. Footnotes would make comprehension seem formidable. Quotations would release students from the necessity of doing their own thoughtful analysis of the primary sources in order to verify (or contest) the correctness of these interpretations. How these supplementary readings fit into my pedagogy will become clear as I post more materials relating specifically to my pedagogy. In the meantime, those who know the relevant source material and secondary literature may find the interpretations advanced here of interest. I welcome comments and feedback.
Research Interests:
NOTE TO COLLEAGUES: I have written this essay specifically for the undergraduate students in my Introduction to Philosophy class focusing on ancient Greek ethical thought. I have used a simple, conversational style and eliminated both... more
NOTE TO COLLEAGUES: I have written this essay specifically for the undergraduate students in my Introduction to Philosophy class focusing on ancient Greek ethical thought. I have used a simple, conversational style and eliminated both footnotes and quotations. Footnotes would make comprehension seem formidable. Quotations would release students from the necessity of doing their own thoughtful analysis of the primary sources in order to verify (or contest) the correctness of these interpretations. How these supplementary readings fit into my pedagogy will become clear as I post more materials relating specifically to my pedagogy. In the meantime, those who know the relevant source material and secondary literature may find the interpretations advanced here of interest. I welcome comments and feedback.