The Genesis of Modern Process Thought: a Historical Outline with Bibliography (review)

~36 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY ~4: ~ JANUARY 1986 These volumes, produced so well and inexpensively, should find their way into all major research libraries and into a number of private collections as well. They show Joaquim de Carvalho to h~/vebeen a major and unduly neglected historian of Renaissance and early-modern philosophy. CHARLES B. SCHMITT The Wartmrg Institute George R. Lucas, Jr. The Genesis of Modern Process Thought: a Historical Outline with Bibliography. ATLA Bibliography Series, No. 7. Metuchen, N. J.: The Scarecrow Press, Inc. and the American Theological Library Association, a983. Pp. xi + ~3 x. $~8.5o. Process philosophy can be variously defined. For the purposes of ProcessStudies, we define it narrowly and stipulatively "as applying primarily, though not exclusively, to the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and his intellectual associates, most notably Charles Hartshorne." Lucas, with his descriptive and historical interests, needs a broader definition generalizing three characteristic features of the Whiteheadian approach. For Lucas, process philosophy O) "stresses that events or occasions of experience form the primary ontology"; (~) "employs a modified form of teleological explanation that is both pluralistic and organic"; and (3) "discerns some sort of immanent pattern or principle of organization which is generally exhibited in all processes of change" (~o). In charting affinities based on these characteristics, Lucas proposes Hegel as the first process thinker, though acknowledging him to be at the opposite extreme from Whitehead. With Hegel as its source and Whitehead its focus, process philosophy broadly construed embraces evolutionary cosmology, pragmatism , realism, and personalism. The subtitle correctly indicates the limits of this study; it is an outline history of process philosophy broadly construed with a partially annotated bibliography of some 94~ items. It is not primarily a bibliography of Whitehead and Hartshorne, though some ~7~ items are noted under this heading, while the dosing Bibliography of bibliographical sources indicates where the appropriate bibliographies can be found. Nor is it a bibliography of process theology, tracing out its modes and styles. The study is designed for those who want to see process philosophy against a broader context, who want access to its literature, and some guidance with respect to this literature. Thus the book is organized in terms of 8 bibliographies, one for each school represented, and secondary bibliographies for cross-classifications. There is some duplication, since some items are mentioned under several headings. Some items (books or articles) are annotated, others not. These annotations may be purely descriptive, but they are often evaluative, sometimes provocative. Some can be misleading if thought to apply to the entire work cited, whereas Lucas is interested only in that part most pertinent to the issue at hand. (Thus #39~ discusses only pp. 56-6~ of my book, The Lure of God.) The few pages introducing part IV on Pragmatism and Realism were particularly BOOK REVIEWS 137 stimulating. Lucas shows the affinities between process thinkers and the major pragmatists if we bracket the issue of pragmatic method, which is not particularly a process feature. The career of realism in reaction to idealism is sketched as it moves through critical realism to what A. E. Murphy calls 'objective relativism', which he finds in Whitehead. The varieties of idealism and "English" Hegelianism (i.e., those British and American philosophers strongly influenced by Hegel) are stressed, for it is among the variety that process themes can be found. McTaggart and F. H. Bradley, often taken to define English Hegelianism, were hardly process thinkers. The evolutionary cosmologists (from Lamarck to Alexander, Bergson, Teilhard de Chardin and others) bear in many ways the closest affinities with Whitehead, yet it is a very striking fact that Whitehead had very little to say about evolution, except in the short book, The Function of Reason (1929). I suspect there are two good reasons for this: (l) Whitehead was interested not so much in process as in the metaphysical (and unchanging) principles of process. These principles Could not evolve, because whatever evolves would be of subordinate, contingent importance. (2) His most distinctive characteristics are derived from a metaphysical generalization from experience , known only first-hand in human experience, and not from any induction and extrapolation from the findings of the natural and biological...