![]() ![]() The Polysemiality of the Concept of “Pure Experience” 5. Introduction-Whitehead’s Reading of James and Its Context 2. Table of Contents Abbreviations-Whitehead Abbreviations-James 0. I submit that it is time to rediscover James from the perspective of his radical empiricism. This double interpretational shift has allowed James to keep a fair amount of visibility on the academic scene but, over the years, it has significantly obliterated his vision-just as Whitehead has been saved from oblivion by theologians. ![]() After one hundred years of scholarship, it appears that James’s legacy has mainly been studied from the perspective of his own blend of pragmatism and that this blend has moreover chiefly been put into dialogue with Peirce and analytic philosophy at large. It will be a pragmatic dialogue looking for two types of synergy: to establish the relevance of a Jamesian background to read Whitehead, and to adumbrate how Whitehead can help us understand the stakes of James’s works. ![]() We now seek to bring him in dialogue with James. Whitehead's Pancreativism-The Basics has provided tools to understand Whitehead secundum Whitehead. These essays give the opportunity to travel through most aspects of Whitehead’s legacy: anthropology, ecology, education, epistemology, metaphysics, psychology, political theory and relativity physics. 40 €) Drawing upon the major Harvard works -Science and the Modern World (1925), Process and Reality (1929) and Adventures of Ideas (1933)-, the essays gathered here on the occasion of the creation of the Applied Process Metaphysics Summer Institute, seek, first, to introduce into Whitehead’s thought by clarifying what is at stake in his philosophy and by providing a synoptic vision of his key categories in light of their historical development and, second, to foster a creative dialogue among all participants. Applied Process Metaphysics Summer Institute Memorandum, Louvain-la-Neuve, Les Éditions Chromatika, 2010. Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity."Ronny Desmet & Michel Weber (edited by), Whitehead. And yet all occasions proclaim themselves as actualities within the flux of a solid world, demanding a unity of interpretation. Elements which shine with immediate distinctness, in some circumstances, retire into penumbral shadow in other circumstances, and into black darkness on other occasions. The methodology of rational interpretation is the product of the fitful vagueness of consciousness. Every scientific memoir in its record of the ‘facts’ is shot through and through with interpretation. If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography. Our habitual experience is a complex of failure and success in the enterprise of interpretation. Its search for a rationalistic scheme is the search for more adequate criticism, and for more adequate justification, of the interpretations which we perforce employ. Philosophy does not initiate interpretations. When thought comes upon the scene, it finds the interpretations as matters of practice. Thus the understanding of the immediate brute fact requires its metaphysical interpretation as an item in a world with some systematic relation to it. But such universals, by their very character of universality, embody the potentiality of other facts with variant types of definiteness. “Whenever we attempt to express the matter of immediate experience, we find that its understanding leads us beyond itself, to its contemporaries, to its past, to its future, and to the universals in terms of which its definiteness is exhibited. Philosophy never reverts to its old position after the shock of a great philosopher.” A new idea introduces a new alternative and we are not less indebted to a thinker when we adopt the alternative which he discarded. The depositions of Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz,† Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel, merely mean that ideas which these men introduced into the philosophic tradition must be construed with limitations, adaptations, and inversions, either unknown to them, or even explicitly repudiated by them. This misapprehension of philosophic method has veiled the very considerable success of philosophy in providing generic notions which add lucidity to our apprehension of the facts of experience. Under the influence of mathematics, deduction has been foisted onto philosophy as its standard method, instead of taking its true place as an essential auxiliary mode of verification whereby to test the scope of generalities. “The primary method of mathematics is deduction the primary method of philosophy is descrip- tive generalization. ![]()
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