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Most management and organization theories focus on the full existence and finitude of things. They deal with fullness and the full happening of things. Both organizing and managing mean fully producing something, doing something, or giving value to something. A good manager should follow what is happening and, even better, make things fully happen. But in everyday life, our managerial capitalism makes the world more and more impatient, problematic and incomplete, full of more and more holes, interruptions and voids that permeate experience. This is true emotionally (as frustration), narratively (as cliffhangers and suspense) and materially (as creative destruction scars our earth). In this essay for ML's 55th anniversary, I argue for a process-oriented perspective on managerial emptiness and incompleteness based on three core interwoven negative processes–representation, narration and materialization. I explain how each of these processes contributes to a nexus of incompleting events at the heart of managerial processes. Paradoxically, I also suggest that different kinds of emptiness and incompleteness might be part of a more resonant experience of the world. Embracing patience, waiting, deep letting go, and the nuanced exploration of non-events within events could foster what Whitehead called a 'culture of possibilities'. This perspective on possibilities – considering what might have been and what might yet be – could lead to a more harmonious relationship with nature. Finally, I encourage business schools and the corporate world to (un)learn nothingness and non-events in the context of the negative ontology discussed here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to outline Dorothy Emmet's (1904–2000) account of perception in The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking (published in 1945). Emmet's account of perception is part of a wider attempt to rehabilitate metaphysics in the face of logical positivism and verificationism (of the kind espoused most famously by A. J. Ayer). It is thus part of an attempt to stem the tide of anti-metaphysical thought that had become widespread in British philosophy by the middle of the twentieth century. Emmet does not fit neatly into the traditional story of twentieth-century British philosophy. She draws on figures like A. N. Whitehead and Henri Bergson much more extensively than figures like Russell or Moore – and thus straddles the so-called 'analytic-continental divide.' My aim in this paper is to put Emmet on the map of twentieth-century British thought by outlining her philosophy of perception, highlighting her proposals for a way forward for metaphysics in a time of crisis, and identifying the ways she preempts movements in contemporary philosophy of perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Molecular structure is one of the dispositional attributes of the molecule and counted as an example of affordances. This attribute has been systematically exploited through the development of theories and practice of organic chemistry. (Ochiai 2023, pp. 141–149) The question to be addressed in this study is whether we can legitimately claim that this type of attribute is real. To answer the question, we first clarify what is worthy of the word 'reality' in scientific arguments. Whitehead claims that a physical substance like electron is a bundle of spatial-temporal experience. (Mesle 2008, p. 36) The contention is that we cognize the causal relationships of the physical world through the experience of events. What we cognize as real is not unchanging matter but various kinds of events we experience. Based on this recognition we examine the nature of affordances. Affordances are the context-relative dispositional attributes of {agent-world} complexes. (Harré 2014, pp. 77–91; Harré and Llored 2018, pp. 167–186) The affordance of a knife becomes actualized through our experience of cutting. In this way affordances are concerned with work or the function of something useful. They are materialized as tools. This suggests that affordances are real, and so is molecular structure. Molecular structure is characterized by a certain function which molecules show in organic synthesis. Other dispositional attributes of molecules that become actualized in the context of organic chemistry are also examined. We refer to the physical significance of wavefunctions as well, which we discussed in the previous study. (Ochiai 2023, pp. 359–367) Creating function, we expand a world we cognize as real. This view of the world we name 'functional realism.' Our conceptual scheme is supported by Quine's holism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the special issue on 'Geographies of Value and Valuation' and has a threefold objective. Apart from introducing the contributions to the special issue, it reviews important modes of thinking with regard to the spatial politics of value and valuation, and identifies some ways forward for geographers' engagement with questions of value, valuation and value experience. It discusses Marxist thought on value primarily by considering recent texts by David Harvey, and reflects on the multiple ways in which value is performed through the philosophies of Brian Massumi and John Dewey, diverse economy scholarship, and the burgeoning research in sociology and science and technology studies on valuation. It also encourages geographers to consider valuation as more than the preserve of humans, to heed value as non-cognitive experience, and to experiment with value, valuation and value experience to affirm, enact and institutionalize more-than-capitalist worlds at a time of poly-crisis. Engaged pluralism and cross-fertilization across theoretical traditions will help geographers in realizing the potential contributions their engagement with value and valuation can make over and above the considerable achievements so far. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The timeless and unchanging nature of God was defended by Dr. Eric Mascall throughout his books. He argued against process theology, and in particular the works of mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who was one of its foremost exponents. In his books, Mascall defended the distinction between our temporal and created nature and God's divine and uncreated nature as found in historic theology. In a manner suited to his learning, he discussed the implications of modern physics for theology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Whitehead's theory of "events", the primary focus is on the critical assessment of abstraction. Modern science's heavy reliance on abstraction has resulted in what Whitehead calls "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness", where the abstract is mistaken for the actual. To address this issue, Whitehead replaces the traditional category of abstraction with eternal objects and defines the abstractive hierarchy. He aims to clarify the metaphysical status of abstraction and concreteness while dissolving their binary opposition. It is important to note that there are two possible approaches for interpreting an abstractive hierarchy. The differences between these approaches stem from the question of whether abstraction and complexity should be considered identical concepts. Based on their respective understandings, the abstractive hierarchy will exhibit different structural features, as well as varying positions for the concepts of abstraction and eternal objects within Whitehead's metaphysical thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The seminar "From Claremont to China: A Case Study of Process Summer Academies in China" organized by the Cobb Institute was held on August 27th, 2024. Speakers presented an overview of the history of the China-US Process Summer Academy, reflected on their past experiences, and demonstrated its broader impacts and future visions. The China-US Process Summer Academy has facilitated the introduction of process philosophy from Claremont to China, established Claremont as a prominent center for process studies, fostered friendship between Chinese and American scholars, and nurtured an organic community centered around process philosophy. The flourishing of process philosophy encourages a re-evaluation of traditional Chinese culture, while promoting the transformation from an industrial civilization to an ecological civilization. As an organic framework, process philosophy provides a theoretical foundation for ecological civilization and offers diverse applications. John Cobb, Jr. expressed his confidence that process thought can facilitate dialogue that is honest, open, authentic, respectful, and realistic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the Buddha's philosophy of becoming in relation to that of Whitehead. It questions how we might begin to understand the spatial production of organization differently if we move beyond Western concepts of space and time. While Whitehead provides a way to comprehend a world in flux, his approach to spatial becoming tends to transform processes (verbs) into entities (nouns) by halting their becoming. In contrast, the Buddha's perspective on becoming is not limited by the noun/verb dichotomy and does not revert to notions of permanence. This paper posits that the Buddha conceptualizes becoming as a continuous stream, while Whitehead portrays it as a series of events. The study concludes that the Buddha's concept of the 'specious present'—a fusion of his doctrines of 'dependent origination' and 'dependently arisen'—provides novel insights into organizational space that can be of value in sharpening the conceptual underpinnings of the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract From the outset of Western philosophy most occidental philosophers held that both existence and knowledge depended on stability - what is genuinely changing does not have a clear essence or identity and is thus not an object for knowledge, nor can it be expressed in language. This is the case even though change touches all areas of life, shaping both the self and world, in subjective experience as well as scientific discoveries. In this contribution I will consider why precisely change is seen as such a vexing problem for knowledge and I will look at what that means for our ability to know a world that is fundamentally characterised by change. In part 1, I discuss how the assumption that change can neither be known nor put into words, led to the development of epistemologies and ontologies that bypass the problem of change by understanding it in terms of its opposite. I will show how this strategy limits our ability to come to terms with concrete reality. In part 2, I point towards possible ways out of this predicament. I will use the Aristotelian tode ti to propose a novel way to encounter change on its own terms.

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This contribution offers a sense of the scope and transdisciplinary relevance of the philosophy of British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead by providing an overview of the three main phases of his career. The contribution goes on to distinguish process thought from the substance thought which dominated modern philosophy, and to outline some of the ways in which Whitehead has influenced thought from across the full spectrum of academic disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to clarify the role of the notion of rhythm in Whitehead's philosophy, considering the mediating character it has between the order of events and that of objects. Deleuze and Harman, when commenting on Whitehead's ontological system, have highlighted the value of events and objects, respectively. Here, we pretend to elucidate the limits of these readings and give relevance to the category between both planes, which is rhythm. This concepts evolve from a naturalistic view to a more metaphysical conception in Whitehead's later work, and its applications go from science to education and aesthetics. Thus, rhythm can be understood as a complex that has an eventual face and an objectual face, internally defining itself as a system of contrasts that mobilizes creation and intensity through time. This rhythmic process of creation leads us to think a poetics of experience, considering its aesthetic and compositional nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The topic of critical thinking has engaged philosophers, psychologists and educators for well over one hundred years. Amid polarized political attacks on the teaching of controversial issues, however, education in critical thinking appears to be nearing a new low, not only in the United States, but also in other countries being torn by partisan politics. This article reviews the ebb and flow of critical thinking efforts, suggests explanations for their discouraging results, and proposes a way forward that treats critical thinking as an integrative process advanced by Mary Parker Follet, and more recently espoused by Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway. In the exploratory spirit of John Dewey and Alfred North Whitehead, I am introducing this essay, not with analysis or theory, but with a narrative of educational events in all their richness of context. These events describe how middle school students addressed the question of whether wolves should be removed from the endangered species list in the Northern Rocky Mountains of the United States. In the course of this discussion, I wish to demonstrate that thinking critically requires moving beyond winning, losing, or compromising to resolution of conflict, and furthermore, understanding that even stable resolutions must be revisited as events change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is devoted to the analysis of two seminal definitions of points within the region-based framework: one by Whitehead (1929) and the other by Grzegorczyk (Synthese, 12(2-3), 228-235 1960). Relying on the work of Biacino & Gerla (Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, 37(3), 431-439 1996), we improve their results, solve some open problems concerning the mutual relationship between Whitehead and Grzegorczyk points, and put forward open problems for future investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regions-based theories of space aim—among others—to define points in a geometrically appealing way. The most famous definition of this kind is probably due to Whitehead. However, to conclude that the objects defined are points indeed, one should show that they are points of a geometrical or a topological space constructed in a specific way. This paper intends to show how the development of mathematical tools allows showing that Whitehead’s method of extensive abstraction provides a construction of objects that are fundamental building blocks of specific topological spaces.

One way of characterizing the ontological turn in anthropology is the effort to transform philosophical anthropology into anthropological philosophy—or anthropology into philosophy. This effort proceeds upon the premise that to critique philosophical representationalism is to critique the entire rationalist enterprise. It is as a result of this coupling that some OTers suggest that a permanently decolonized philosophy becomes indistinguishable from post-representationalist anthropology. Curiously, it is by thinking with Gilles Deleuze that they conclude, on the one hand, that to decolonize anthropology is to de-representationalize it, and, on the other, that to decolonize philosophy is therefore to anthropologize it (since, on their logic, de-representationalizing means de-philosophizing). To turn to ontology means "thinking immanence" not, pace Deleuze, as philosophy, but beyond philosophy. This article argues that the supersessionist claim is incoherent precisely insofar as this coupling is unwarranted. To provide a counterinstance, the article suggests how thinking with Alfred North Whitehead decouples the critique of representationalism from the critique of rationalism. One implication of this work is to model a speculative philosophy that can be responsive to postcolonial concerns about representationalism without thereby becoming functionally indistinct from anthropological method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regions-based theories of space aim--among others--to define points in a geometrically appealing way. The most famous definition of this kind is probably due to Whitehead. However, to conclude that the objects defined are points indeed, one should show that they are points of a geometrical or a topological space constructed in a specific way. This paper intends to show how the development of mathematical tools allows showing that Whitehead's method of extensive abstraction provides a construction of objects that are fundamental building blocks of specific topological spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I engage with the arguments of Andrew Davis's book Metaphysics of Exo-Life, which is a commentary on my previous work on cosmotheology. I applaud Davis's critique and deepening of my work in the context of Whitehead's process theology. I largely agree with his metaphysical deepening of the first three principles of my cosmotheology, dealing with the non-centrality of humanity in the universe and its metaphysical re-centering. But I diverge on his view of the last three principles dealing with the metaphysical necessity of God, the source of value in the universe, and the nature of human destiny. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For Adorno, the only possibility for understanding history is to relate it to the natural through his idea of natural-history. Agreeing with Whitehead, for Adorno the natural lacks temporal existence and can only be accessed through a temporally affective sense - which can be illuminated through Charles Hartshorne's distinction between existence and actuality - in Adorno's 1932 article Idea of Natural History. Adorno's conception is related to the historical by demonstrating how standard interpretations of history, which can be cast within three broad approaches, are not historical since they fail to acknowledge the significance of 'second nature'. Given that demonstration, it can then be shown how 'all history is natural' by employing Walter Benjamin's notion of a constellation. A return can then be made to Hartshorne's distinction to show how a past event's existence can be related to Benjamin's claims by means of his 'dialectics at a standstill' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The work is concerned with Whitehead's dipolar theism, which, among other things, makes a case for real relations and contingency in God. It undertakes this task using the methodological tools of analysis and hermeneutics. Alfred North Whitehead, in his works, especially Process and Reality, makes some strong statements that underscore and reiterate the creative nature and freedom of actual entities. For him, this is simply a given, a fact of experience. This affirmation of the self-creative nature of all levels of actualities permeates and influences his process philosophic system. He moves, therefore, to posit a dipolar theism, which he feels does justice to the reality of self-determination of actual occasions, a movement that favors the affirmation of the real relationship between God and the world from both perspectives of the world and God. Maintaining this dipolarity in God, he establishes that God whose nature is both primordial and consequential-superject and the world are, in some sense, infinite and in another finite. God, in this scheme, would, in some sense, be characterized by contingency. This position evidently counters Thomistic--classical theodicy which denies any real relation between God and creatures from the standpoint of God. He writes about a dipolar God and creativity that is the ultimate for which God and actual entities are its creatures. In doing this, there appears to be a direct contrast between what God within the classical system can accomplish and what God within the process system cannot do, and in this case, an undermining, at least in the context of classical philosophy, of the classical notion of God. Conversely, there is also the disparity between what the process actual occasion can achieve and what the classical creatures cannot do. With this, an undermining of the process of actual entities. Thus, in classical philosophy, there is an asymmetry in the divinecosmic connection, while in Whitehead and process philosophy, the relationship is symmetrical. It is with this God-world relationship that the work is concerned and is poised to evaluate this from the standpoints of Whitehead and classical philosophies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the implications of Whitehead's, Butler's, and Badiou's views for understanding the Christian subject. Since postmodernists' declaration of 'the death of the subject', the traditional view of the subject as a fixed and self-identical substance no longer suffices. These three thinkers present dynamic and original views of the subject. For Whitehead, the subject emerges out of the process of becoming and, by perishing, contributes to future processes of becoming. Butler claims that subjectivity is performative. For Badiou, the subject is the bearer of a fidelity to an event. With those views in mind, this article argues first, that the Christian subject is the bearer of fidelity to a truth-event of God; second, that Christian subjectivity is performative; and third, that a Christian is one who performs death and, by doing so, contributes to, and brings the novelty into, the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the philosophical underpinnings of Nyamnjoh's social theory of incompleteness and conviviality and Whitehead's process ontology in the context of intellectual decoloniality. The theory of incompleteness and convivial scholarship is spearheaded by Francis Nyamnjoh as a strategy for intellectual decoloniality and a substitute for the rigid alternatives prevalent in the decoloniality clamour in Africa. This idea also finds expression in Whitehead's process and relational ontology. Although Whitehead's process ontology has been widely studied, one hardly comes across works studying in detail the profound ontological richness underpinning Nyamnjoh's social theory in conversation with Whitehead. In this essay, I examine the ontological assumptions underlying Nyamnjoh's theory of incompleteness, on the one hand, and the ethical assumptions underpinning his theory of convivial scholarship, on the other. These two analyses combined are expected to shed light on Nyamnjoh's social theory of epistemic decoloniality and help clarify some philosophical conundrums that underpin it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the problem of cessation in Whitehead’s philosophy. By focusing on his Process and Reality, but also on his other works, different temporal, mereological and other aspects of perishing are analyzed, with special attention to the annihilation of subjective directness. The article also focuses on the complementary character of creation and cessation, by taking into consideration the various (subjective, objective, superjective or divine) layers of cessation. By relying upon the critical reception of Whitehead, the article formulates certain dilemmas with regard to the status of ceased events or entities, and also in relation to the general possibility and the discreet character of perishing.

El ensayo argumentativo que se presenta tiene dos fines. Evaluar la suficiencia y compleción de una investigación en administración de operaciones dentro de la epistemología de una escuela de humanismo administrativo, y buscar posibles perspectivas epistemológicas para la investigación en administración. Para esto, revisa las corrientes epistemológicas dominantes de la administración, y las compara con la epistemología de la investigación de operaciones, para concluir que la investigación de operaciones, si es suficiente y se ajusta a la epistemología de la administración humanista. Luego revisa la definición de humanismo y de humanidades para extrapolarlas en la administración, y encontrar así, posibles temas de investigación en administración dentro del pan-experiencialismo y la semiótica.

When trying to give a universal definition to the term “neurophilosophy,” difficulties arise, since each researcher who identifies himself as a member of this field sets his own definition. The common thing for the work of “neurophilosophers” can be described as an interdisciplinary approach, which takes into account the achievements in the field of consciousness research of both philosophical thought and neuroscience. How this approach is implemented and what it represents depends on the particular researcher. This article focuses on Georg Northoff's neurophilosophical approach. For a long time Northoff has been developing a project of neurophilosophy, the distinguishing feature of which is its nonreductive nature: Northoff does not reduce consciousness to the brain but develops a special method that allows philosophy of consciousness and neuroscience to investigate the problems of consciousness and the brain in an integrated way. The article discusses the philosophical foundations of brain research that Nortoff provides, as well as the role of process ontology for the study of consciousness and the brain. In addition, the empirical studies of brain activity with which Northoff illustrates his philosophical claims are presented. The paper also identifies the philosophical significance of the brain-body-environment connection for the emergence of the processual self in Northoff's theory. At the same time, Northoff does not engage in a search for a solution to the consciousness-brain problem and, in particular, the hard problem of consciousness. Instead, he seeks to question and dissolve the problem while questioning its premises. Northoff argues that philosophers of consciousness refer to studies of particular areas and aspects of the brain to construct their theories, whereas to solve the problems of consciousness it is necessary to consider the brain holistically, as represented in neuroscientific research.

Muitos pensam que a capacidade crítica e reflexiva, assim como a postura de acolher a contingência, o outro e o debate, é alguma energia interna e bem intencionada de pessoas com mente aberta, como defendem os liberais, quer de direita, quer de esquerda. O que não percebem é o quanto a capacidade de reflexão e diálogo é um fenômeno externo, presente no próprio mundo, produzido apenas graças a um espaço de resistências, encontros e até frustrações, a exemplo da esfera acadêmica e científica. Ele impede que meu cogito e meus convenientes esquemas epistêmicos saiam do controle, em um delírio transcendentalista perigoso, e se apoderem do mundo e das próprias circunstâncias. O objetivo deste ensaio é justamente compreender essa dimensão estética da ciência, essa característica ontológica que atravessa seus contornos, tomando como ponto de partida os conceitos de “importância”, em Whitehead, e matters of concern, em Bruno Latour.

Book review of Dadejík, O., Kaplický, M., Ševčík, M., and Zuska, V. (2021) Process and Aesthetics: An Outline of Whiteheadian Aesthetics and Beyond. Prague: Karolinum Press. ISBN 978-80-246-4726-5.

Adopting numbering practices is central to 'business-like' public organising. These practices were primarily critiqued for their more-than-technical, normative character. This paper expands the critique of numbers in governance by considering numbers' epistemic consequences in public sector work. Drawing on Whitehead's philosophy of aesthetics and an ethnography of enumeration inside a public agency in England, the paper argues that enumeration techniques, when relying on accounting categories and used within a 'business-like' public sector, end up enacting knowledge objects that are aesthetic in kind. Numbered entities taken as performance evidence (metrics, rankings) end up (a) part of a project of enunciation, (b) opaque for conceptual interrogation, and (c) attuned to through bodily affect. Such characterisation makes two contributions. First, it conceptualises 'aesthetic enumerated entities' as a way of understanding instrumental knowledge in organising. Second, it extends our scope of engaging with the aesthetic by going beyond conceptualisations focused on art or beauty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Isabelle Stengers' cosmopolitical proposal is an influential attempt by a European philosopher to transform the burdensome legacy of Western thought. Reconsidering her comprehensive engagement with the cosmology of the British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, this article reveals two concepts as foundational to Stengers' cosmopolitics: civilization and commerce. While not usually associated with a critical political theory, in her development of what we call a commercial political ontology, Stengers explores the modes of inheriting these ostracized notions. By tracing the genealogy of this political ontology back to Pericles' first explicit defense of persuasion as a requisite for civilization, we argue that Pericles' famous funeral oration provides the structure for Whitehead's cosmology, and, ultimately, Stengers' cosmopolitics. As such, we understand her cosmopolitical proposal as a dress rehearsal of a funeral eulogy for bourgeois society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rice striped stem borer, Chilo suppressalis (Walker, 1863), is considered as a major destructive pest in paddy fields in the most regions of Iran. In this study, the impact of the rice cultivars, Tarom and Shiroudi, and the insecticides, cypermethrin, tebufenozide and the emulsion and granule formulations of diazinon were examined on the damage indices, percentages of dead heart and whitehead. The study was performed as factorial randomized complete block design using artificial infestation in semi-field conditions in Amol County. No significant interaction was found between rice cultivar and insecticide for all indices in both vegetative and reproductive stages (P>0.05). The results of main effects in both phenological stages indicated that the weight of live larvae and damage indices were significantly higher on Tarom than those of Shiroudi (P=0.05), while no significant difference was detected in larval mortality on the cultivars (P>0.05). The main effects of insecticide were significant for all biological and damage indices (P≤0.05). The efficacies of tebufenozide and cypermethrin in terms of larval mortality were 47.57 and 74.90 % at vegetative stage reaching to 79.15 and 92.08% at reproductive stage, respectively. The lowest efficacy in terms of larval mortality (73.33%) was obtained on plants treated by diazinon emulsion. At reproductive, the survived larvae weighed 170.80 mg.seedling-1 and the corrected whitehead index compared to the control reached 50.04% on plants treated by diazinon emulsion. According to the results, tebufenozide, regarding its relatively high efficacy and environmental compatibility, is suggested to be assessed further for integrated C. suppressalis management in the field conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates Alfred North Whitehead and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's attempts to develop a historical, dynamic ontology (a "process ontology", according to the former, and an "ontology of the flesh" for the latter). The claim of the paper is that their originality lies in the methods adopted to reach such ontologies, which show strong similarities. Both authors based their research on nature, conceived of as "the leaf of Being", and on perceptual experience, understood not as a chaos of bare, punctual, sense data, but as the complex, original source of meaning that constitutes the primary field of philosophical investigation—the only source from which one can gain new understanding of both nature and logos (things, happenings, values, subjectivity, laws, etc.). After some introductory remarks on the connections between Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty, the paper is divided into three parts. The first part clarifies why and how, according to the philosophers, ontology should start from a new scrutiny of nature. The second part specifies what this new conception of nature, based on perceptual experience, is. The third part focuses on how their ontologies must be construed as historic, insofar as behaviors, actions, and practices lie at the core of their concept of being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper articulates and explores in some detail the main features of Whitehead's early temporal ontology. By 'early temporal ontology' I refer to the views Whitehead developed during his London years, more specifically in his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919) and the more approachable Concept of Nature (1920). These works are not usually read through a heavily ontological lens. It is often said that Whitehead developed his metaphysics later, when he moved to the United States, in 1924. I believe, however, that these earlier works should not merely be read as works in natural philosophy or merely as stepping stones to his later magnum opus Process and Reality (1929). Although Whitehead's stated goal in these works is not to provide a systematic ontology of time, such an ontology is present and is worth distilling and interpreting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a theoretical, methodological, and empirical case for metaphysics in psychology as a human science. First, the outline of an empirically (experientially) controlled metaphysics is presented that is grounded in the psychology of science of Abraham Maslow, the process philosophy of nature of Alfred North Whitehead, and the phenomenological psychology of Franz Brentano. This is followed by a discussion of how somatic research methods and transpersonal methods of disciplined inquiry offer the opportunity to put the notion of an experientially controlled metaphysics to the test of action and further development. Two Popperian functions of metaphysical hypotheses in science are then examined, objections to the use of metaphysics as a heuristic in research are reviewed, and the ramifications of adopting metaphysical agnosticism as a preferred strategy in research and clinical practice are discussed. Examples of how researchers in the sciences (a) employ metaphysical hypotheses to explain puzzling and challenging patterns of empirical observations and (b) use empirical data to justify metaphysical claims are then presented. The article concludes with a discussion of the consequences of continued dichotomization of psychology and philosophy for the future of psychology. Arguments in favor of metaphysical agnosticism as a preferred strategy in psychology become moot if it can be shown how metaphysics as a heuristic serves the practice and advancement of science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]