Whiteheadian Reading of Metaphysics as a Critic of Abstractions: A Case Study of Simple Location's Critic

Articles in Press

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Semnan University

10.22061/orj.2024.2232

Abstract

From Whitehead's point of view, each human discipline, whether scientific, religious, moral, artistic, or philosophical, abstracts part of integrated reality and then sometimes erroneously equates it with the whole reality. This abstraction being taken for concrete reality is what Whitehead calls a Fallacy of misplaced concreteness. A fallacy which philosophy and new science suffered from it. Now, what is the function of philosophy? And what alternative does he introduce? This article, in view of these two questions, first analyzes the components of Whitehead's definition of metaphysics, such as experience as point of departure coherence, internal consistency, being necessary, attention to all experience, and so on. And then it was pointed to the Whitehead metaphysical method, which has similarities to the science method. Second addresses the main function of philosophy in Whitehead's view, which is "abstract criticism" or a critical examination of the boundary of the abstract from the integral. A prominent example of this criticism is about the fallacy of "simple location", which made the scientific materialism become the cosmological paradigm governing the minds of scientists of the new age. In the end, Whitehead's organismic attitude is introduced as an alternative to scientific materialism; and it is explained that instead of the scientific materialistic understanding of the world as if it is composed of independent material particles, Whitehead refers to the process based on the organism.  The world that consists of interconnected entities which are always experiencing or have been experienced.

Keywords

References

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Journal of Ontological Researches

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Available Online from 17 November 2024

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