Process Studies

This article examines the thought of the nineteenth-century French thinker Jules Lequyery who influenced Charles Renouvier, William James, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Charles HartshornCy who never ceased to promote Lequyer s importance, refers to the Frenchman in all but five of his twenty-one books. Lequyer is especially noteworthy because of his philosophical defense of human freedom against any sort of determinism

Alfred North Whiteheadfamously compares the philosophical method of knowledge acquisition with the process of flying an airplane. Likewise, "shamanic flight" marks stages of cognitive processing in navigation through perceptible and imperceptible worlds. This article focuses on the cosmovision of the Amazon people Huni Kuin, the Whiteheadian method of imaginative rationalization, and the concept of Amerindian perspectivism. This study also investigates shamanism as an experience of knowledge generation. Furthermore, "shamanic flight, "as an ecstatic technique experienced in many diverse Amerindian rituals, will be explored as a method in the discovery and organization ofnonhuman alterities. Finally, Amazonian-based shamanic epistemology will be discussed within a "multinaturalist" ontology.

This article explores the relationship between three elements—personality character, and script—to interpret the idea of someone's identity, A common way to deal with this relationship is in terms of a duality, but a tripartite analysis works better. The article relies heavily on the thought of Charles Hartshorne, with the aid of Simone Weil and Charles Sanders Peirce

This article takes up the processual account of drive and its derivations in relation to desire and emotion with an aim to explore the continuity of feeling from internal drive to value in the world. A mental state or act of cognition begins with an impulse and the category of instinctual drive. Drive partitions to desire, which is shaped by value. The combined concept/feeling can remain internal as emotion or distribute into action in vocalization or display. The transition in the mental state from drive (need) through desire (want) is constrained by intrinsic value, which accompanies the object outward as extrinsic value (worth). The partly intrapersonal nature of action prevents feeling from externalizing. Feeling drives concepts to completion. Concepts propelled by feeling undergo specification to images and/or objects. The feeling in the action gives intensity to emotion; the concept in the perception gives the quality of emotion. Feeling empowers concepts to finality, as emotions, ideas, or act/objects. In the animal mind, feeling empowers drive categories. In the human mind, feeling distributes as emotion into a diversity of ideas. Feeling unfelt in lower organisms is felt in a human mind according to the degree of individuation.

What is the relation of an earlier being to a later such that given the earlier there is or will be a later? I call this the question of material continuation. To answer, I offer a review of several philosophers thoughts, including those ofZeno, Aristotle, Descartes, Bertrand Russell, Henri Bergson, and Alfred North Whitehead. While there is considerable variety among the ontological views of these philosophers, and indeed some direct opposition of both method and assertion, my review suggests that material continuation may be explained by reference to a principle of continual creation. This principle is reflected in Aristotles unmoved mover, in Descartess account of God's activity in persistence, in Bergsons concept of la duree, and in Whitehead's principle of creativity. It disappears from view in objective methodologies first emerging in pre-Socratic thought, made rigorous by the development of science by the modern philosophers such as Descartes, and realized in the scientist philosophy of Russell. I include some consideration of whether the creative principle might be ideal or divine.

This short article was originally delivered as a lecture in China. The article responds to the question asked in the title with a tentative and qualified optimism based on the thought of Alfred North Whitehead.