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Being, Process, And Action In Modern Philosophy And Theology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2009

Extract

One of the most general trends in the modern academic world has been a turning away from the static categories of the past towards new thought-forms that are more dynamic. In philosophy and theology this has involved a revulsion against the category of‘being’ (in spite of such important exceptions as Paul Tillich's emphasis on the nature of God as ‘Being Itself’), and against belief in the sufficiency of the ‘static’ traditional logic which has usually been used in conjunction with it. Thus we find today that (apart from Existentialism, the inadequacies of which I have criticised elsewhere) there are three dynamic alternatives competing for the allegiance of philosophical thinkers in the Western world.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1972

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References

129 1Secular Christianity’ and God Who Acts (Hodder and Stoughton, 1970), chapter 5.

132 1 Personal Knowledge, pp. 15 and 140.

133 1 Process and Reality, Preface, p. vi.

134 1 ibid., p. 228.

134 2 ibid., p. 135.

135 1 ibid., Preface, p. x.

136 1 op. cit., p. 77f.

137 1 Process and Reality, p. 136.

137 2 ibid., p. 233.

138 1 Adventures of Ideas, pp. 245, 247.

138 2 Process and Reality, p. 247, etc.

138 3 Adventures of Ideas, p. 221.

138 4 ibid., p. 219.

138 5 Process and Reality, p. 84.

139 1 Adventures of Ideas, p. 273f, etc.

139 2 ibid., p. 208f, etc.

139 3 ibid., p. 215f.

140 1 ibid., p. 216f.

140 2 Process and Reality, p. 88.

140 3 ibid., p. 376

141 1 Religion and Science: Conflict and Synthesis, p. 407.

142 1 Process and Reality, p. 125.

142 2 ibid., p. 471.

143 1 Adventures of Ideas, p. 318.

144 1 ‘What is Action?’, from the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supt. Vol. 17, 1938.

146 1 The philosophical Idealism which has seen recent revival in Germany in somewhat existentialised forms (as in the work of W. Pannenberg and J. Moltmann, for example) is much more genuinely dynamic, with its dialectical logic, than Whitehead's philosophy with its mathematical logic. It can much more properly claim to be a philosophy of ‘organism’. But its ability to follow the dialectical development of an idea does not make it adequate to deal with real, world-changing action. Having made some passing critical comments on Idealism in ‘Secular Christianity’ and God Who Acts, however, I do not propose to deal further with it here.

146 2 The Self as Agent, p. 75.

147 1 ibid., p. 11.

148 1 ibid., p. 73.

150 1 The word ‘empirical’ must obviously be detached from the technical meaning it has acquired in the Cartesian era, as referring to the ‘sense data’ observed by a thinking subject, so that it can be applied to the deep and ‘vague’ experiences of reality with which we are dealing.

152 1 The Self as Agent, p. 19.

153 1 Process and Reality, p. 10f.

153 2 ibid., p. 135.