Beyond Metaphysics?
Beyond Metaphysics? Explorations in Alfred North Whitehead's Late ThoughtRoland Faber, Brian G. Henning, Clinton Combs (eds.)
Vol. 1 - Contemporary Whitehead Studies
(Rodopi, 2010)
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Book Description
Alfred North Whitehead’s interpreters usually pay less attention to his later monographs and essays. Process and Reality is taken to be the definitive center of the Whiteheadian universe and the later works, thereby, appear to many only as applications or elaborations of themes already introduced earlier. Yet, is it also possible that the dominance of this perspective has obscured or even distorted further creative developments of Whitehead’s thought? This volume offers a sort of Copernican revolution in Whitehead interpretation, methodologically and conceptually inviting its contributors to observe Whitehead’s work from the perspective of his later works. The aim of this preferencing is meant not to invalidate earlier approaches to Whitehead’s thought nor is the inference that the later works are more authoritative. Yet, just as the first space-based images of our planet forever changed humanity’s understanding of its place in the universe, shifting the alleged center of, or even decentering of the view on, Whitehead’s “philosophy of organism” to the later works, we might discover previously obscured ideas or new vistas of thought relevant not only to our current philosophical landscape, but also to the pressing issues of our fragile and endangered world. This volume invites its contributors and readers to consider whether one thereby also moves beyond metaphysics?
Table of Contents
Introduction:
Roland Faber and Brian G. Henning: Whitehead’s Other Copernican Turn
Part 1 - Complexities of System, Life, and Novelty
Vincent Colapietro: Toward a Metaphysics of Expression
Christoph Kann: Renewing Speculation: The Systematic Aim of Whitehead’s Philosophic Cosmology
Dennis Soelch: Beyond Metaphysics?—A Historiographical Approach to Whitehead’s Speculative Philosophy
Deena Lin: Citing the Paradox: Probing the Systematization of Whitehead as Philosopher Subject
Clinton Combs: Before Metaphysics: Modes of Thought as a Prequel to Whitehead’s “Trilogy”
Roland Faber: Immanence and Incompleteness: Whitehead’s Late Metaphysics
Part 2 - Depths of Nature, Order, and Organicity
Robert J. Valenza: The Organism of Forms in Later Whitehead
Jeremy Dunham: Beyond Dogmatic Finality: Whitehead and the Laws of Nature
Joachim Klose: Alfred North Whitehead’s Receptacle
Helmut Maaßen: Contingency and Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Experience
Regine Kather: The Web of Life and the Constitution of Human Identity: Rethinking Nature as the Main Issue of Whitehead’s Late Metaphysics
Part 3 - Evocations of Value, Beauty, and Concern
Brian G. Henning: Re-Centering Process Thought: Recovering Beauty in A. N. Whitehead’s Late Work
Stascha Rohmer: The Self-Evidence of Civilization
Michael Halewood: Fact, Values, Individuals, and Others: Towards a Metaphysics of Value
Steven Shaviro: Self-enjoyment and Concern: On Whitehead and Levinas
Jude Jones: Provocative Expression: Transitions In and From Metaphysics in Whitehead’s Later Work
Isabella Palin: The Dream of Solomon