Perspective in Whitehead's Metaphysics

By Stephen David Ross

Book Overview

Stephen David Ross presents an extensive, detailed, and critical interpretation of Whitehead's mature thought, emphasizing the fundamental role of perspective in Whitehead's cosmology, and tracing the conflicts and difficulties therein to tensions involving perspective in relation to other central features of Whitehead's thought. Ross isolates four principles as having a fundamental role in whitehead's metaphysics: perspective, cosmology, experience, and mechanical analysis. He argues that many of Whitehead's difficulties can be eliminated by raising the principle of perspective to prominence and by revising the other central features of Whitehead's theory accordingly.

This book addresses key Whiteheadian texts and secondary interpretations of Whitehead. The discussion ranges over most of Whitehead's theory in Process and Reality, and offers a number of significant and, in some cases, novel views on different aspects of Whitehead's theory: perception, prehension, causation, objective immortality, self-causation, the extensive continuum, natural order, possiblity, concreteness, and God. Ross's concluding suggestions for modifying Whitehead's system promise to occasion much debate among process philosophers, theologians, and anyone concerned with Whitehead's thought.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0873956575
• ISBN13: 9780873956574
• Release Date: June 1983
• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Length: 295 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.1"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher