Did Jaki - or will you - consider whether A.N. Whiiehead undercuts Premise A? As the author of Process and Reality, subtitled "A Philosophy of Organism" and co-author with Russel of Principia Mathematica I'm guessing he might take issue.
Thank you, Richard. Great question. I'm not familiar with this book from Whitehead, but I'll try to address the issue.
Jaki says in his intellectual autobiography (A Mind's Matter) that he knows Whitehead is "a professed pantheist," but Jaki also seems to appreciate much of Whitehead's insights. In fact, he ends Relevance of Physics with a quote from Whitehead: "Physics has meaning, the depth of which was never so strikingly indicated as in Whitehead's remark that only the babe born in the manger created a stir greater than the one caused by the emergence of physical science in the seventeenth century." Then he writes of universality and how physics is just one aspect of the whole. The very last line of this book says, "Undoubtedly this universality is also the only key to one culture, because culture is harmony, or the coordination of parts in an all-pervading unity."
So, I think he would have disagreed with Whitehead's view of the universe as an organism, seeing it as misguided, but he also seems to appreciate Whitehead's scholarship overall.
I'm not so sure that Whitehead thought of the universe as an organism so much as the arrangement* of "actual entities" (his term of art) from the simplest to the most complex is according to the same principles of organization. A whale is an organism, and so is a molecule. Not a stretch, I suppose, to see the universe as an organism as well, but what I was thinking had a different emphasis. You (Jaki actually) identify the source of Aristotle's failure of physics as lying in the effort to use biological processes to describe all processes in the universe. Whitehead uses uniform metaphysical processes - analogized at least linguistically in biological or anthropomorphic terms - to account for the organization of molecules, whales, and solar systems. And of course this cosmology is meant to account for the revolutions in thought of early 20th century physics.
*I used this word "arrangement" so that the sentence would make sense in ordinary English. The word Whitehead coined is "concrescence" the fundamental metaphysical process by which things come to be, by "growing together".
I hope this makes sense. Your earlier posts FWIW have pointed me to a different flaw in Whitehead's approach. His rather offhand dismissal of the Aristotelian concept of "substance" was probably based in part on relying on Enlightenment disparagement of the school men. He could have benefited from closer sympathetic reading of Thomas. He was not able, I know, to attend any of your seminars, but it would have done him some good. ;}
Having 12 years of parochial ( 8 of which were of Jesuit discipline ) schooling I recall a 3d grade 8mm movie that we kiddos were shown. It was explained that what we were about to see was 'very very special - and it was. I can't remember how long or what the beginning sequence of it was, but in the
end the animated picture of our earth and moon and stars panned out to a macro view of the universe that turned into a picture of God. I never forgot it. Being a numerologist and using the Pythagorian method to decipher letters into mathmatical form and interpretation seems like a way
to come up with the whole. Phythics is built into organisms so it seems Aristotle was onto a Jesuit
tragectory when it came to understanding of first things first.
Did Jaki - or will you - consider whether A.N. Whiiehead undercuts Premise A? As the author of Process and Reality, subtitled "A Philosophy of Organism" and co-author with Russel of Principia Mathematica I'm guessing he might take issue.
Thank you, Richard. Great question. I'm not familiar with this book from Whitehead, but I'll try to address the issue.
Jaki says in his intellectual autobiography (A Mind's Matter) that he knows Whitehead is "a professed pantheist," but Jaki also seems to appreciate much of Whitehead's insights. In fact, he ends Relevance of Physics with a quote from Whitehead: "Physics has meaning, the depth of which was never so strikingly indicated as in Whitehead's remark that only the babe born in the manger created a stir greater than the one caused by the emergence of physical science in the seventeenth century." Then he writes of universality and how physics is just one aspect of the whole. The very last line of this book says, "Undoubtedly this universality is also the only key to one culture, because culture is harmony, or the coordination of parts in an all-pervading unity."
So, I think he would have disagreed with Whitehead's view of the universe as an organism, seeing it as misguided, but he also seems to appreciate Whitehead's scholarship overall.
I'm not so sure that Whitehead thought of the universe as an organism so much as the arrangement* of "actual entities" (his term of art) from the simplest to the most complex is according to the same principles of organization. A whale is an organism, and so is a molecule. Not a stretch, I suppose, to see the universe as an organism as well, but what I was thinking had a different emphasis. You (Jaki actually) identify the source of Aristotle's failure of physics as lying in the effort to use biological processes to describe all processes in the universe. Whitehead uses uniform metaphysical processes - analogized at least linguistically in biological or anthropomorphic terms - to account for the organization of molecules, whales, and solar systems. And of course this cosmology is meant to account for the revolutions in thought of early 20th century physics.
*I used this word "arrangement" so that the sentence would make sense in ordinary English. The word Whitehead coined is "concrescence" the fundamental metaphysical process by which things come to be, by "growing together".
I hope this makes sense. Your earlier posts FWIW have pointed me to a different flaw in Whitehead's approach. His rather offhand dismissal of the Aristotelian concept of "substance" was probably based in part on relying on Enlightenment disparagement of the school men. He could have benefited from closer sympathetic reading of Thomas. He was not able, I know, to attend any of your seminars, but it would have done him some good. ;}
Having 12 years of parochial ( 8 of which were of Jesuit discipline ) schooling I recall a 3d grade 8mm movie that we kiddos were shown. It was explained that what we were about to see was 'very very special - and it was. I can't remember how long or what the beginning sequence of it was, but in the
end the animated picture of our earth and moon and stars panned out to a macro view of the universe that turned into a picture of God. I never forgot it. Being a numerologist and using the Pythagorian method to decipher letters into mathmatical form and interpretation seems like a way
to come up with the whole. Phythics is built into organisms so it seems Aristotle was onto a Jesuit
tragectory when it came to understanding of first things first.