Process And Dipolar Reality [Hardcover]

Process and Dipolar Reality takes up Whitehead's challenge to philosophy to regain its proper status, namely, an adventure in speculative thought elaborating a categoreal scheme aiming to be the coherent, conceptual framework within which every possible item of experience can be interpreted. Dipolarity, a whole with its parts, is seen as the fundamental principle all categories of the modified Scheme exhibit abstractly, and that every actuality concretely exemplifies from the minimally complex puffs of space to the unsurpassable, cosmically inclusive personal nexus. A whole is a unit of process creating a determination, a settled, unalterable state of affairs that only exists as the privileged part in the immediately successive whole that must also embrace other prior and contiguous neighboring beings. Among aspects of Whitehead's Scheme critically examined are his inability to explain how death of personal series is possible (given his belief that every whole that begins must end successfully), his theory of potentiality as eternal objects, his failure to be consistent applying his theory of change to the members of the greatest conceivable personal society, and his failure to consistently maintain the initial data for an actual entity come with their mutual relationships, making their growing together during concrescence superfluous. This is an admirable piece of work, carefully drawing out conclusions to your assumptions. --Lewis Ford, Founding Editor of Process Studies, Professor Emeritus, Old Dominion University Duane Voskuil was a thesis advisee of Charles Hartshorne at Emory University in the early 60s before teaching and serving as Chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of North Dakota. Now retired, he continues to write articles examining the metaphysics of process philosophy while crafting master-quality violin-family instruments.