Immanence and Incompleteness: Whitehead's Late Metaphysics
نویسنده
چکیده
In Religion in the Making, Whitehead sets the stage for an interesting paradox that runs through his whole philosophical work. On the one hand, he defines metaphysics as clearly and succinctly as possible, namely as “the science which seeks to discover the general ideas which are indispensable to the analysis of everything that happens” (RM 84n1). On the other hand, he warns us to mistrust metaphysics because of the “defect of a[ny] metaphysical system that is the very fact that it is a neat little system of thought, which thereby over-simplifies its expression of the world” (RM 50). It is the explication of this paradox of metaphysics as its very “metaphysical” situation that will be the leading “idea” of my analysis of Whitehead's late thought. I think that his “late” thought can be defined as a series of ways to engage this paradox, which thereby remains a paradox that Whitehead not only never solves but that appears to be the sort of problem that cannot be solved, and reveals itself only as a series of deconstructions of metaphysical claims.
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