Alfred North Whitehead Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Lewis S. Ford

Critical Essay by Lewis S. Ford

SOURCE: “The Ramifications of Whitehead's Theory of Experience,” in The Monist, Vol. 68, No. 4, October, 1985, pp. 439-50.

In the following essay, Ford studies Whitehead's concept of experience “as a unification of many past actualities.”

Whitehead's philosophy is thought by many to be a modern-day rationalism, yet the rationalistic criteria of logical consistency and coherence are balanced by the empirical criteria of applicability and adequacy. He understands metaphysics to be “the endeavour to frame a … necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted. … Here ‘applicable’ means that some items of experience are thus interpretable, and ‘adequate’ means that there are no items incapable of such interpretation” (PR 4).¹ Experience is fundamental. Without the appeal to experience we could not determine whether our metaphysical proposals pertained to the actual world or merely to its possible alternatives.²

Although there is...
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