Beyond Superlatives

Regenerating Whitehead's Philosophy of Experience
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4438-5319-4
Verlag: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Buch, Englisch, 215 Seiten

This collection of essays, drawn from the latest generation of Whitehead scholars, explores how, in the deconstruction of certain concepts, an unceasing invitation of possibility and change is released, both in relation to ongoing philosophical conversations, and as applied to lived experience. The essays make a significant intervention in the field of Whiteheadian scholarship by creating new intersections and paths that extend Whitehead’s thought in novel, and often unexpected, directions.

The philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead proposes a radical reconceptualization of experience – one in which we, and all other things, are composed of mutually implicated series of events in an infinite universe of interaction, generating and regenerating experience. Far from indicating a new superlative of holistic integrity, Whitehead prefers the always incomplete movement of all realities, which is the source of vitality for every new generation.

This volume applies Whitehead’s philosophy to superlatives – those valued concepts that limit and define our categories amid the flux of experience. The first half of this book probes the superlatives that have historically defined philosophical method in the West. These essays trace the adventures of concepts like substance, novelty, system, and truth. Ossified oppositions that define these superlatives are fractured, indicating new directions for growth. The essays in the second half of the book reflect on the influx, fragility, and impossibility of superlatives like care, tragedy, love, and loss in human experience, generating new matters of philosophical discourse.

Superlatives abound. But Whitehead cautions us to attend to their multiplicity. The mutual immanence of events constantly generates new constellations of importance, and so superlatives, because they are contingent upon unstable modes of togetherness, cannot be taken for granted. Any of these concepts may have a particular significance today, but as events coalesce into new constellations, those ideals will continue to take on new meaning.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hustwit, J. R.

Faber, Roland

Phelps, Hollis

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Erkenntnistheorie
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Philosophische Logik, Argumentationstheorie
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Geschichte der Westlichen Philosophie Westliche Philosophie: 20./21. Jahrhundert

Über Autor(innen)

Roland Faber is the Kilsby Family/John B. Cobb, Jr., Professor of Process Studies at Claremont Lincoln University and Claremont School of Theology, Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Claremont Graduate University, Executive Co-Director of the Center for Process Studies, and Executive Director of the Whitehead Research Project. His research and publication interests are process philosophy and process theology; (de)constructive theology; poststructuralism (especially Gilles Deleuze); transreligious discourse (epistemology of religious relativity and unity) and interreligious applications (for example, Christianity, Buddhism, Baha'i); comparative philosophy and mysticism (Meister Eckhart, Nicolas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno); and theopoetics, a third space approach to post-structuralist and process theologies, which addresses the liberating necessity of multiplicity. Faber’s publications include God as Poet of the World (2008), Event and Decision (2010), Beyond Metaphysics? (2010), Secrets of Becoming (2011), Butler on Whitehead (2012) and Theopoetic Folds (2013).

J. R. Hustwit is Assistant Professor and Chair of the Philosophy and Religion Department at Methodist University in Fayetteville, North Carolina. His research interests include comparative theology, imagination, and philosophical hermeneutics. He is the author of Inter-Religious Hermeneutics and the Pursuit of Truth (2014).

Hollis Phelps is Assistant Professor of Religion at Mount Olive College in North Carolina. He is the author of Alain Badiou: Between Theology and Anti-theology (2013).