Process and Reality

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In philosophy, especially metaphysics, the book Process and Reality, by Alfred North Whitehead, sets out its author's philosophy of organism, also called process philosophy. The book, published in 1929, is a revision of the Gifford Lectures he gave in 1927-28.

Process philosophy lays the groundwork for a paradigm of subjectivity, which Whitehead calls a "completed metaphysical language." (p. 18)

We diverge from Descartes by holding that what he has described as primary attributes of physical bodies, are really the forms of internal relationships between actual occasions. Such a change of thought is the shift from materialism to Organic Realism, as a basic idea of physical science.

– Process and Reality, p. 471.

A signal technical feature of Process and Reality is the way its ontology is grounded in mereotopology, a mathematical formalism combining mereological and topological notions. Whitehead's exposition of his mereotopology was informal and flawed. A careful formal restatement and correction of Whitehead's theory had to await the work of Bowman Clarke (1981, 1985). For an accessible review of Clarke's work, see Simons (1987: 2.9.2). Biacino and Gerla (1991) criticised Clarke's work by proving that his connection relation coincides with the overlapping relation, which cannot be what Whitehead intended.

Contents 1 See also 2 Publication data 3 Secondary literature 4 External links

[edit] See also

• Alfred North Whitehead
• Mereotopology
• Philosophy of Organism
• Process philosophy
• Whitehead's point-free geometry

[edit] Publication data

Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929). 1979 corrected edition, edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, Free Press. ISBN 0-02-934570-7 (Part V. Final Interpretation)

[edit] Secondary literature

• Biacino L., and Gerla G., 1991, "Connection structures," Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 32: 242-247.
• Clarke, Bowman, 1981, "A calculus of individuals based on 'connection'," Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 22: 204-18.
• ------, 1985, "Individuals and Points," Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 26: 61-75.
• Lowe, Victor, 1962. Understanding Whitehead. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.
• Nicholas Rescher, 2000. Process Philosophy: A Survey of Basic issues. Univ. of Pittsburgh Press.
• Sherburne, Donald W., 1966. A Key to Whitehead's Process and Reality. Macmillan.
• Simons, Peter, 1987. Parts. Oxford Univ. Press.

[edit] External links

• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "Process Philosophy" -- by J. R. Hustwit.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "Process Philosophy" -- by Nicholas Rescher.