Traditional Christian belief in the existence of human life after death within a transformed material universe should be capable of rational justification if one chooses carefully the philosophical scheme underlying those claims. One should not have to appeal simply to the power of a loving God to justify one's beliefs. A revision of Whitehead's metaphysical scheme is proposed that allows one to render these classical Christian beliefs at least plausible to a broad range of contemporary thinkers as a consequence of (...) a cosmology based on the principle of universal intersubjectivity and the need for a common ground between opposing subjectivities. (shrink)

Panentheism has become a familiar term in contemporary Christian systematic theology and philosophy, for it is widely believed to be an appropriate way to overcome the alleged dualism found in the classical God-world relationship. But what is meant by the term panentheism, and how does it work so as to avoid becoming still another form of pantheism or cosmic monism? In 2004 Philip Clayton and the late Arthur Peacocke published a set of papers on the topic of panentheism that came (...) from a conference in England on that topic in 2001.1 Yet, while there were certain broad affinities in approach and content among many of the papers, none of them used precisely the same conceptual model for analysis of the concept. As.. (shrink)

In this article I argue against the claim that “actual entity” and “actual occasion” are synonymous in Whitehead. My examination of these terms will help to illuminate the role of “society” in Whitehead’s philosophy and to prepare the way for a fruitful comparison of process thought and contemporary systems theory in the sciences.

Joseph Bracken examines key writings of process-oriented philosophers like Alfred North Whitehead along with systems-oriented thinkers such as Ludwig von Bertalanffy to create a systems-oriented understanding of the God-world relation that serves as a complement to Pope Francis’s reflections on the environmental crisis.

Some Whiteheadians argue that past actual entities only exist and are available for prehension by later actual entities within the divine consequent nature. Others insist that past actual entities are objectively immortal and available for prehension within the extensive continuum. Based on an interpretation of Whiteheadian societies as structured fields of activity for their constituent actual occasions, this article proposes that the world has an objective reality even apart from the existence of God, and that past actual entities arereflected in (...) the current structure of the cosmic process. Yet the world still needs God as its ultimate source of creativity. (shrink)

During the Middle Ages, philosophers and theologians argued over the extramental reality of universal forms or essences. In the early modern period, the relation between subjectivity and objectivity, the individual self and knowledge of the outside world, was a rich subject of debate. Today, there is considerable argument about the relation between spontaneity and determinism within the evolutionary process, whether a principle of spontaneous self-organization as well as natural selection is at work in the aggregation of molecules into cells and (...) the development of primitive forms of life into complex organisms. In _Subjectivity, Objectivity and Intersubjectivity_, Joseph A. Bracken proposes that what is ultimately at stake here is the age-old problem of the relationship between the One and the Many, universality and particularity on different levels of existence and activity within nature. Bracken rejects traditional models of this relationship, wherein either the One or the Many is presupposed to have priority over the other. He instead suggests that a new social ontology—one that is grounded in a theory of universal intersubjectivity—protects both the concrete particularity of individual entities in their specific relations to one another and their enduring corporate reality as a stable community or environment within Nature. What emerges is a bold reimagining of the sometimes strained relationship between religion and science. Bracken's clear writing, sophisticated philosophical analysis, and exemplary scholarship will lend this new work an enthusiastic appreciation by readers with deep interests in philosophy and philosophical theology. (shrink)

Alfred North Whitehead's master work, Process and Reality, is intended to extend the cosmological vision of Whitehead in a new direction. By interpreting societies within Whitehead's scheme as structured fields of activity, the author projects a universe of hierarchically ordered fields of activity, up to and including the all-compassing field of activity constituted by the Christian Trinity.

Bracken synthesizes Polanyi’s notion of morphogentic field and Whitehead’s notion of societies of actual occasions. These comments emphasize the implications of the metaphors involved in these notions. The rnetaphor of plants growing in afield lies beyond the concept of a morphogenetic field, and the metaphor of a society of interacting persons lies behind the concept of a society of actual occasions. I suggest that one of the implications of this metaphor is that there is not, as Bracken argues, (...) a problem of continuity in Whitehead’s metaphysics of events. (shrink)

In God, Chance and Purpose, David Bartholomew uses probability theory to show how Divine Providence can be active in a world governed by chance and necessity. At the micro-level of Nature God uses a statistical formula to control the outcome of seemingly random events; at the macro-level God influences but does not control the outcome of events. From a Whiteheadian perspective “the common element of form” of a society could be seen as the equivalent of Bartholomew’s statistical formula but generated (...) in each case from the bottom-up rather than imposed from the top-down. Yet Bartholomew’s insistence that statistical formulas only work with large groups of entities suggests that more attention should be given by Whiteheadians to the workings of Divine Providence on societies as opposed to individual actual entities. (shrink)

Abstract.Russell Stannard distinguishes between objective time as measured in theoretical physics and subjective time, or time as experienced by human beings in normal consciousness. Because objective time, or four‐dimensional space‐time for the physicist, does not change but exists all at once, Stannard argues that this is presumably how God views time from eternity which is beyond time. We human beings are limited to experiencing the moments of time successively and thus cannot know the future as already existing in the same (...) way that God does. I argue that Stannard is basically correct in his theological assumptions about God's understanding of time but that his explanation would be more persuasive within the context of a neo‐Whiteheadian metaphysics. The key points in that metaphysics are (1) that creation is contained within the structured field of activity proper to the three divine persons of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity and (2) that the spontaneous decisions of creatures are continually ordered and reordered into an ever‐expanding totality already known in its fullness by the divine persons. (shrink)

The author argues that, while logical rigor requires Whiteheadians to emphasize the ontological priority of the notion of actual entity as a self-constituting subject of experience for the proper understanding of physical reality. Whitehead's understanding of the key category of society in his metaphysics, especially the way that societies and their constituent actual entities reciprocally "constrain " one another's existence and activity and the way that societies are hierarchically ordered to one another within the evolutionary process will presumably have more (...) empirical resonance with natural scientists in their own efforts to understand the emergence of life from non-life, the progressive growth of self-awareness among higher-order animal species, etc. So, in dialogue with natural scientists, why not start with what is psychologically more interesting to the listener? (shrink)

In Religion in an Age of Science, Ian Barbour concludes that the contemporary evolutionary worldview with its emphasis on the interplay of law and chance, relationality and autonomy, can be properly accounted for only by something like the process‐relational metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead. At the same time, he expresses serious reservations about certain features of Whitehead's scheme, notably, his perceived inability to account for the ongoing identity of the human self and for the fact of multilevel organization within organisms (...) and in the world of inanimate compounds. In this article, I suggest that both of these difficulties can be resolved if one adopts a revisionist understanding of the Whiteheadian category of society according to which democratically organized societies possess an ontological unity and exercise a corporate agency proper to their own level of existence and activity. Furthermore, if one applies this revisionist understanding of societies to the Whiteheadian doctrine of God, a Trinitarian understanding of God becomes possible within the overall parameters of process‐relational metaphysics. In this way, traditional belief in the doctrine of the Trinity can be reconciled with a scientifically credible worldview. (shrink)

Polanyi’s vision of the cosmic process as undergirded by a logic of emergence common to both the mental life of human beings and the processes of non-human nature can be vindicated if one is prepared to make certain adjustments in the notion of morphogenetic fields with an active center or organizing principle. Given the author’s field-oriented interpretation of Whiteheadian societies, it should be possible to think of entelechies or final causes in developmental rather than strictly Aristotelian terms. That is, the (...) “common element of form” or organizing principle of a Whiteheadian society depends for its own existence on the spontaneous activity of previous sets of actual occasions and yet serves as the ongoing principle of formal and final causality for the present set of actual occasions and still others to follow it. In Aristotelian language, matter and form thus dialectically condition one another and neither is ontologically superior to the other. (shrink)

Following a brief examination of some remarks by Paul Ricoeur on the notion of testimony. I provide the outline or an analysis of revelation based upon certain key concepts of process philosophy. This is followed by a more specific interpretation within the context of Whitehead’s philosophy of process.

String theory is often depicted as the best chance for natural science to find a Theory of Everything. Whiteheadians may object that only a philosophical cosmology such as Whitehead presents in PR can “frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted” (PR 3). But then they have to show that Whitehead’s scheme and string theory fit together nicely, with each helping to resolve residual problem areas in the (...) other. The present article conjectures that the tiny vibrating strings postulated by string theory and the superjects of individual actual entities might correspond to the “final, real things of which the world is made up” (PR 18). Likewise, the extra spatial dimensions required by the mathematics of string theory might be more intelligible in terms of the interaction of different levels of subsocieties within a Whiteheadian structured society. (shrink)

A field‐oriented interpretation of Whiteheadian societies of actual occasions, when used to explain the notion of “strong supervenience” as applied to the mind‐brain problem, allows one to claim that not only higher‐level properties such as consciousness but even higher‐level entities such as the mind or soul are emergent from lower‐level systems of neuronal interaction. Moreover, it also explains the preexistence of God to the world and Christian belief in eternal life with the triune God in a way that is impossible (...) within the limits of a theory of strong supervenience. (shrink)

Members of the Clinical Ethics Consultation Affairs Standing Committee of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities present a collection of insights and recommendations developed from their collective experience, intended for those engaged in the work of healthcare ethics consultation.

The ‘death’ of German Idealism has been decried innumerable times since its revolutionary inception, whether it be by the 19th-century critique of Western metaphysics, phenomenology, contemporary French philosophy, or analytic philosophy. Yet in the face of two hundred years of sustained, extremely rigorous attempts to leave behind its legacy, German Idealism has resisted its philosophical death sentence. For this exact reason it is timely ask: What remains of German Idealism? In what ways does its fundamental concepts and texts still speak (...) to us? Drawing together new and established voices from scholars in Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling, this volume offers a fresh look on this time-honoured tradition. It uses myriad of recently developed conceptual tools to present new and challenging theories of its now canonical figures. (shrink)

Therapists and their patients must deal with the negative sequelae of short term mating strategies. Implications for therapy of Gangestad & Simpson's strategic pluralism theory are compared with those of Buss's sexual strategies theory and Eagly's social role theory. Naive theories held by therapists and patients, as well as prevailing societal views, are posited as influential in determining the course and outcome of therapy.

Antonio Gramsci is one of the major social and political theorists of the 20th century whose work has had an enormous influence on several fields, including educational theory and practice. Gramsci and Education demonstrates the relevance of Antonio Gramsci's thought for contemporary educational debates. The essays are written by scholars located in different parts of the world, a number of whom are well known internationally for their contributions to Gramscian scholarship and/or educational research. The collection deals with a broad range (...) of topics, including schooling, adult education in general, popular education, workers' education, cultural studies, critical pedagogy, multicultural education, and the role of intellectuals in contemporary society. (shrink)

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is (...) substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obviousa priorigrounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions ofhumannature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges. (shrink)

In this essay, we suggest practical ways to shift the framing of crisis standards of care toward disability justice. We elaborate on the vision statement provided in the 2010 Institute of Medicine (National Academy of Medicine) “Summary of Guidance for Establishing Crisis Standards of Care for Use in Disaster Situations,” which emphasizes fairness; equitable processes; community and provider engagement, education, and communication; and the rule of law. We argue that interpreting these elements through disability justice entails a commitment to both (...) distributive and recognitive justice. The disability rights movement's demand “Nothing about us, without us” requires substantive inclusion of disabled people in decision‐making related to their interests, including in crisis planning before, during, and after a pandemic like Covid‐19. (shrink)

While rooted in careful study of Mead’s original writings and transcribed lectures and the historical context in which that work was carried out, the papers in this volume have brought Mead’s work to bear on contemporary issues in metaphysics, epistemology, cognitive science, and social and political philosophy.

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is (...) substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obviousa priorigrounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions ofhumannature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges. (shrink)

This volume is a comprehensive study of the basic questions of philosophy of religion. What is distinctive about its approach is the author’s encyclopedic command of the actual practices of the eleven major world religions now extant.

Having declared that metaphysics had come to its demise in the technologized sciences, Heidegger tried a new way to reopen the question of being. For Blanchette, that Heidegger never got beyond the analysis of Dasein to such an ambitious project is not merely the result of the distractions of other career requirements at the university or of other entanglements along his life’s path. The problem was that the road he took was a road to nowhere, metaphysically speaking.

Parallel to the perennial questions about the adequacy of any human language when used of God are questions about the proper interpretation of any divine self-disclosure in revelation. By the theoretical exploration of the latter in this book, Jorge Gracia also sheds a certain light on the former.

When the COVID-19 surge hit New York City hospitals, the Division of Medical Ethics at Weill Cornell Medical College, and our affiliated ethics consultation services, faced waves of ethical issues sweeping forward with intensity and urgency. In this article, we describe our experience over an eight-week period (16 March through 10 May 2020), and describe three types of services: clinical ethics consultation (CEC); service practice communications/interventions (SPCI); and organizational ethics advisement (OEA). We tell this narrative through the prism of time, (...) describing the evolution of ethical issues and trends as the pandemic unfolded. We delineate three phases: anticipation and preparation, crisis management, and reflection and adjustment. The first phase focused predominantly on ways to address impending resource shortages and to plan for remote ethics consultation, and CECs focused on code status discussions with surrogates. The second phase was characterized by the dramatic convergence of a rapid increase in the number of critically ill patients, a growing scarcity of resources, and the reassignment/ redeployment of staff outside their specialty areas. The third phase was characterized by the recognition that while the worst of the crisis was waning, its medium- and long-term consequences continued to pose immense challenges. We note that there were times during the crisis that serving in the role of clinical ethics consultant created a sense of dis-ease as novel as the coronavirus itself. In retrospect we learned that our activities far exceeded the familiar terrain of clinical ethics consultation and extended into other spheres of organizational life in novel ways that were unanticipated before this pandemic. To that end, we defined and categorized a middle level of ethics consultation, which we have termed service practice communication intervention (SPCI). This is an underappreciated dimension of the work that ethics consult services are capable of in times of crisis. We believe that the pandemic has revealed the many enduring ways that ethics consultation services can more robustly contribute to the ethical life of their institutions moving forward. (shrink)

As several commentators and researchers have noted since late spring 2020, COVID-19 has laid bare the connections between entrenched structurally generated inequalities on one hand, and on the other hand relatively high degrees of susceptibility to contracting COVID-19 on the part of economically marginalized population segments. Far from running along the tracks of race neutrality, studies have demonstrated that the pandemic is affecting Black people more than Whites in the U.S.A. and U.K., where reliable racially-disaggregated data are available. While the (...) situation in Canada seems to follow the same pattern, race-specific data on COVID-19 are hard to come by. At present, there is no federal mandate to collect race-based data on COVID-19, though, in Ontario, at the municipal level, the City of Toronto has been releasing such data. This paper examines the entanglements of race, immigration status and the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada with particular emphasis on Black immigrants and non-immigrants in Toronto, using multiple forms of data pertaining to income, housing, immigration, employment and COVID-19 infections and deaths. Our findings show that the pandemic has had a disproportionate negative impact on Black people and other racialized people in Toronto and, indeed, Canada. (shrink)

Objective Although patients exercise greater autonomy than in the past, and shared decision making is promoted as the preferred model for doctor-patient engagement, tensions still exist in clinical practice about the primary locus of decision-making authority for complex, scarce, and resource-intensive medical therapies: patients and their surrogates, or physicians. We assessed physicians’ attitudes toward decisional authority for adult venoarterial extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (VA-ECMO), hypothesizing they would favor a medical locus. Design, Setting, Participants A survey of resident/fellow physicians and internal medicine (...) attendings at an academic medical center, May to August 2013. Measurements We used a 24-item, internet-based survey assessing physician-respondents’ demographic characteristics, knowledge, and attitudes regarding decisional authority for adult VA-ECMO. Qualitative narratives were also collected. Main Results A total of 179 physicians completed the survey (15 percent response rate); 48 percent attendings and 52 percent residents/ fellows. Only 32 percent of the respondents indicated that a surrogate’s consent should be required to discontinue VA-ECMO; 56 percent felt that physicians should have the right to discontinue VA-ECMO over a surrogate’s objection. Those who self-reported as “knowledgeable” about VA-ECMO, compared to those who did not, more frequently replied that there should not be presumed consent for VA-ECMO (47.6 percent versus 33.3 percent, p = 0.007), that physicians should have the right to discontinue VAECMO over a surrogate’s objection (76.2 percent versus 50 percent, p = 0.02) and that, given its cost, the use of VA-ECMO should be restricted (81.0 percent versus 54.4 percent, p = 0.005). Conclusions Surveyed physicians, especially those who self-reported as knowledgeable about VA-ECMO and/or were specialists in pulmonary/ critical care, favored a medical locus of decisional authority for VA-ECMO. VA-ECMO is complex, and the data may (1) reflect physicians’ hesitance to cede authority to presumably less knowledgeable patients and surrogates, (2) stem from a stewardship of resources perspective, and/or (3) point to practical efforts to avoid futility and utility disputes. Whether these results indicate a more widespread reversion to paternalism or a more circumscribed usurping of decisional authority occasioned by VA-ECMO necessitates further study. (shrink)

Localised configurations of the free electromagnetic field are constructed, possessing properties of massive, spinning, relativistic particles. In an inertial frame, each configuration travels in a straight line at constant speed, less than the speed of lightc, while slowly spreading. It eventually decays into pulses of radiation travelling at speedc. Each configuration has a definite rest mass and internal angular momentum, or spin. Each can be of “electric” or “magnetic” type, according as the radial component of the magnetic or electric field (...) vanishes in the rest frame, and each has an “antiparticle.” Any such configuration, of electric or magnetic type, is characterized in part by a set of labels (κ, ω0, σ,l, m), where ω0 is the mean of the angular frequencies of the plane waves making up the configuration, σ is the variance of those frequencies, κ is a positive constant with dimensions of action, andl, m are angular momentum “quantum numbers” withl a positive integer andm an integer such that ‖m‖≤l. The rest energy of the “particle” is κω0, its spin is κ ‖m‖, and its lifetime is of the order of 1/σ. Its antiparticle has ω0 replaced by −ω0. (shrink)