![]() ![]() Victor Lowe's Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and His Work, Volume II: 1910-1947, Ch. Leemon McHenry, "Pan-Physics: Whitehead's Philosophy of Natural Science," of Leemon McHenry, Whitehead and Bradley, Ch. Timothy Sprigge, "The Distinctiveness of American Philosophy" William James, “The Stream of Thought” and “The Perception of Time,” in The Leemon McHenry, "Alfred North Whitehead," British Philosophers, 1800-2000 The Problem of Time and the Specious Present.Week 8: Metaphysics of Process: Extension Week 7: Metaphysics of Process: Eternal Objects Week 6: Metaphysics of Process: Relations Week 5: Metaphysics of Process: Actual Occasions Week 1: Overview of Whitehead’s Philosophy Whitehead’s event theory will also be compared with that of Bertrand Russell, W. This theory will be critically evaluated from the point of view of traditional substance theorists such as Aristotle and Peter Strawson. This course examines the emergence of Whitehead’s event ontology from his early concerns with Einstein’s theory of relativity to the comprehensive system of Process and Reality. The mature expression of this theory was delivered as the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 1928 and published as Process and Reality. This is one such book.Alfred North Whitehead’s metaphysics is the most advanced and sophisticated version of process philosophy, an ontology that takes events rather than enduring substances as the basic units of reality. There is also a lengthy accumulation of endnotes (255–98) that more than reward the effort needed to check and read them as one moves through the chapters.Īny book that helps to bridge the often unnecessarily deep divide between formalism and functionalism is well worth the read. Appendix 2 (251–53) uses Whiteheadian principles to schematically represent the production of the utterance ‘I wouldn’t have thought it was possible’. Finally, F admonishes the linguist that langue and parole-or pattern and process-though real, separable aspects of language often warranting their own approaches, can never be studied entirely apart from one another.Īppendix 1 (245–50) briefly assesses White-head’s legacy within modern philosophy. He further suggests (256) that full human language could well have developed as a postevolutionary consequence of social transmission rather than strictly in tandem with biological changes. F argues that language must be conceived of as a ‘complex external object’ rather than an ‘organism’. There are also discussions of mental language processing, the comprehension of written texts, and the role of the individual language user in the historical transmission of language. Individual chapters explore language as a unified system of signs but also separately from a form-oriented and a content-oriented perspective. Whitehead’s philosophy provides one key to this new holism. F’s core argument throughout is that form and function-though distinct in the Saussurean sense-are far more interdependent in reality than many linguists have been wont to treat them. Although this is the first thorough-going attempt to connect Whitehead’s ‘philosophy of organism’ with modern linguistics, its outlines were already adumbrated in F’s earlier monograph, A discourse production model for twenty questions (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1980). especially Alfred North Whitehead, Symbolism, its meaning and effect, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928). After answering the anticipated question ‘Why White-head?’ (1–23), F proceeds to apply Whitehead’s writings on symbolism to language behavior (cf. There are nine chapters and two appendices. The result is a thought-provoking journey into philosophical and sometimes metaphysical realms that proves to be of unexpected relevance to the possible future trajectories of many trends dominant in linguistics today, from optimality theory to emergent grammar. By revealing the linguistics in Whitehead’s ‘philosophy of organism’, F is able to reassess the positions of both generativists and functionalists from a refreshingly neutral vantage, though F himself ‘confesses’ (3) to being more in sympathy with the functionalists. ![]() More importantly, he reassesses the contemporary orientational division between formalists and functionalists from a temporally detached perspective. In this thoughtful essay, published as part of a recently inaugurated series on human cognition and language (the first volume, Ning Yu’s The contemporary theory of metaphor: A perspective from Chinese, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, appeared in 1998), Fortescue revisits the perennial dichotomy between linguistic form and function. Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) is remembered largely for his writings on mathematics and philosophy, and it may come as a surprise to see a book devoted to linguistic metatheory written in the context of his world of ideas.
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