WHITEHEAD’S PROCESS AND REALITY
THE INTERPRETIVE SCHEME
CHAPTER I. THE AIMS OF ORGANICISM
CHAPTER II. THE MAPPING SKELETON very rough & incomplete
CHAPTER III. SOME DERIVATIVE MAPPINGS
DISCUSSIONS AND RE-INTERPRETATIONS
[This list of contents will specify all chapters as they get written.]
This work is based upon a recurrence to that phase of Philosophy associated with Whitehead which was embodied definitively in the work Process and Reality. (I am using the corrected edition by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, pub. 1978 by The Free Press, a division of Macmillan Publishing Co. Inc., New York, and Collier Macmillan Publishers, London.) The philosophic scheme which that work defines for us was named in it the ‘Philosophy of Organism’ or ‘Organic Philosophy’. (I shall call it Organicism.) There is no doctrine put forward in this (present) work which cannot cite in its defence some explicit statement in that work, or in other previous works by Whitehead. But in reproducing Whitehead’s philosophy I am apt to emphasize just those elements in the writings of Whitehead which were not systematized, but had reproductive potential.
This work is divided into five parts. In the first part, the method of reproduction is explained, and the scheme of interpretation, in terms of which Organicism is to be re-framed, is stated summarily.
In the second part, an endeavour is made to exhibit this scheme of interpretation in its application to all the main terms which were employed in the text of Process and Reality. Apart from such a specific mapping of terms the summary of Part I has no application. Thus Part II at once connects this work to the text of Process and Reality, and shows the power of the scheme to put the various elements of the reproductive process being undergone into a consistent relation to the content of Organicism. In order to obtain a reasonably complete account of this reproductive process considered in relation to the issues which come to be discussed within it, the previous writings of Whitehead have been considered. Any one of these works is one-sided in its presentation of the groundwork of the reproduction; but as a whole they give a general presentation which dominates the development of Process and Reality. Do not expect this work to be much occupied with describing the divergencies from each of those writings. But a careful examination of their exact statements discloses that in the main the text of Process and Reality is a recurrence to a train of thought which already existed prior to, and alongside, the production of his previous writings. In these writings he is critical of the presuppositions underlying the inherited modes of expression in the particular issues discussed, but in order to give these criticisms a positive basis there is an occasional burst into the jargon of Process and Reality, like molten larva bursting through tiny fissures on its way to the top of the volcano. Only where the larval flows have not congealed, that is, only with those elements of Philosophy not rigidly systematized in Whitehead’s works, can Organicism reproduce itself. An endeavour has been made to highlight the exact points of transformation.
[The rest of this preface will not be completed until at least the first part of the main body has been completed.]
Throughout this work I will use the special font colour to mark out terms and expressions taken unaltered from Whitehead. Example: actual entities.