Abstract

The focus of Jones’s essay is the role that the notion of intensity either plays or ought to play in a Whiteheadian ontology. This two-fold focus, exegetical and revisionary, results from Jones’s conviction that the notion of intensity represents Whitehead’s most basic and revolutionary metaphysical insight, but that Whitehead failed to develop his ontology in a manner fully consistent with that insight. Accordingly, Jones not only provides an interpretation of Whitehead’s concept of intensity, but also critiques and revises Whitehead’s ontology in order to expand the role intensity plays in it and to purge it of whatever doctrines or distinctions endanger or cloud what she takes to be the notion’s absolute fundamentality. This done, Jones tackles yet a third task: to bring her understanding of intensity to bear on the development of an ethical theory based on the metaphysics of Whitehead and on the moral philosophy of Iris Murdoch.