Nature in Process: Organic Proposals in Philosophy, Society, and Religion

The new physics, beginning in the early twentieth century, caused a rupture in the longstanding mechanistic paradigm of Descartes and Newton, opening up novel paths of discovery and new possibilities for deeper, organic ways of knowing and living. The emergence of Alfred North Whitehead’s “philosophy of organism” was contemporary to the new physics and responded with a truly organic vision of nature through rigorous philosophical scrutiny, scientific critique and imagination generalization.

Whitehead effectively saw that addressing the mechanistic rupture required an innovative, organic departure. His critique of abstractions, his refusal to bifurcate nature, and his famous formulation of the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” unveiled the inadequacies of mechanistic thought and the interdisciplinary value of a new organic paradigm.

Written by scholars around the world, the proposals that comprise this volume follow in Whitehead’s footsteps in calling for an organic reconception of our philosophical, societal, and religious disciplines. Far from ousting creativity, experience, mind, feeling, and value, the organic shift represented in these chapters reintegrates what was lost in the mechanistic paradigm.