Michel Weber - Böcker

Opens a dialogue between process philosophy and contemporary consciousness studies.This collection opens a dialogue between process philosophy and contemporary consciousness studies. Approaching consciousness from diverse disciplinary perspectives-philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, neuropathology, psychotherapy, biology, animal ethology, and physics-the contributors offer empirical and philosophical support for a model of consciousness inspired by the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947). Whitehead's model is developed in ways he could not have anticipated to show how it can advance current debates beyond well-known sticking points. This has trenchant consequences for epistemology and suggests fresh and promising new perspectives on such topics as the mind-body problem, the neurobiology of consciousness, animal consciousness, the evolution of consciousness, panpsychism, the unity of consciousness, epiphenomenalism, free will, and causation.

Opens a dialogue between process philosophy and contemporary consciousness studies.This collection opens a dialogue between process philosophy and contemporary consciousness studies. Approaching consciousness from diverse disciplinary perspectives-philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, neuropathology, psychotherapy, biology, animal ethology, and physics-the contributors offer empirical and philosophical support for a model of consciousness inspired by the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947). Whitehead's model is developed in ways he could not have anticipated to show how it can advance current debates beyond well-known sticking points. This has trenchant consequences for epistemology and suggests fresh and promising new perspectives on such topics as the mind-body problem, the neurobiology of consciousness, animal consciousness, the evolution of consciousness, panpsychism, the unity of consciousness, epiphenomenalism, free will, and causation.

The second international Chromatiques whiteheadiennes conference was devoted exclusively to the exegesis and contextualization of Whitehead's Science and the Modern World (1925). In order to elucidate the meaning and significance of this epoch-making work, the Proceedings are designed to form "companion" volume. With one paper devoted to each of its thirteen chapters, the Proceedings aim, on the one hand, to identify the specific contribution of each chapter to Whitehead's own research program - that is to say, to put its categories into perspective by means of an internal analysis- and, on the other hand, to identify its global impact in the history of ideas.

"I do not expect a good reception from professional philosophers" wrote Whitehead in 1929, immediately after the publication of Process and Reality. Indeed, it took nearly thirty years before scholars seriously started to try to decipher the book taken as a whole. And there remains today "professional" Whiteheadians who claim that this work can - or even should - be bracketed by anyone wishing to get a clear picture of Whitehead's true speculative agenda. Creativity and Its Discontents aims to provide evidence of the conditions for this state of affairs by gathering and contextualizing all the major reviews (translated where need be) of Process and Reality: its original 1929 edition, its various translations (some of them still ongoing) and its 1978 corrected edition. It is designed as the ideal tool to accompany the recently published Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought.

The primary goal of this volume is to describe the contemporary state of affairs in Western psychotherapy, and to do so in a Whiteheadian spirit: with genuine openness to the relative ways in which creativity, beauty, truth, and peace manifest themselves in various cultural traditions. This Whiteheadian Dialogue explores afresh an important cross-elucidatory path: what have we, and what can be learned from a dialogue with Eastern worldviews? In order to generate meaningful contrasts between these different systems of thought, all the papers address common core issues. On one hand, how does the given system understand the interaction of the individual, society, and nature (or cosmos)? On the other hand, what is the paradigm of all pathology and what is its typical or curative pattern?

When Reschers Process Metaphysics (1996) was published, it was widely acclaimed as a major step towards the academic recognition of a mode of thought that has otherwise been confined within sharp scholarly boundaries. Of course it is not an easy book: despite its stylistic clarity, it remains the complex outcome of a lifes work in most areas of philosophy. The goal of the present volume is to systematically unfold the vices and virtues of Process Metaphysics, and thereby to specify the contemporary state of affairs in process thought. To do so, the editor has gathered one focused contribution per chapter, each paper addressing specifically and explicitly its assigned chapter and seeking to promote a dialogue with Rescher. In addition, the volume features Reschers replies to the papers.

This volume gathers prominent international scholars to celebrate the complex legacy of Reiner Wiehl, whose work has been instrumental in bringing together the European tradition of prima philosophia as represented by Plato, Spinoza, Kant and Hegel, with the adventurous speculative renewal of the twentieth century by Alfred North Whitehead. Grouped into four sections (Process and Universals, Nature and Subjectivity, Ethics and Civilization, Psychology and Phenomenology) the fifteen papers collected in this book cover a range of topics which is as wide and as intertwined as Wiehl's own expertise. The common thread running through all contributions is the problematic nature of subjectivity and especially of its process slant, which easily eludes the static and abstract schemes of rationality.

This volume celebrates the life achievements of Jason W. Brown, who, along with Jean Piaget, Heinz Werner, Alexander Luria and the Würzburg school, has significantly contributed to the development of a process-based theory of brain/mind capable of challenging the currently fashionable modularist or cybernetic approaches to understanding human thought and feeling. As a paradigm, Brown's microgenetic theory is thus applicable in both brain science (where Brown was inspired by the pioneering work of Schilder and Pick) and the philosophy of mind (where the influence of Bergson, Whitehead, Cassirer, and Merleau-Ponty can be seen). Essays with a range of focus as wide as Brown's expertise have been collected in such diverse areas as neuropsychology (microstructure of action, symptomatology, neuro-rehabilitation, neurolinguistics, locationism), theoretical psychology (consciousness, hypnosis, morphogenesis, personality development, psychoanalysis, Buddhist psychology, mysticism), and philosophy of mind (evolutionary epistemology, emergence/novelty/creativity, subjectivity, will and action, Whiteheadian process philosophy).

Whitehead's Pancreativism: The Basics has provided tools to understand Whitehead secundum Whitehead. We now seek to bring him in dialogue with James. 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. 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. 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. It is time to rediscover James from the perspective of his radical empiricism.

There is one question that any potential reader who suspects that Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) might be important for past, contemporary, and future philosophy inevitably raises: how should I read Whitehead? How can I make sense of this incredibly dense tissue of imaginative systematizing, spread over decades of work in disciplines so different and specialized as algebra, geometry, logic, relativistic physics and philosophy of science? Accordingly, this monograph has two main complementary objectives. The first one is to propose a set of efficient hermeneutical tools to get the reader started. These straightforward tools provide answers that are highly coherent and probably the most applicable to Whitehead's entire corpus. The second objective is to illustrate how the several parts of Process and Reality are interconnected, something that all commentators have either failed to recognise or only incompletely acknowledged.