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Reviewed by:
  • Process Approaches to Consciousness in Psychology, Neuroscience, and Philosophy of Mind
  • Nathaniel F. Barrett (bio)
Process Approaches to Consciousness in Psychology, Neuroscience, and Philosophy of Mind. Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes , eds. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2009. 472 pp. $90 cloth.

I imagine that many readers of AJTP will find it hard to get excited about a new collection of essays about consciousness from the process perspective, no matter how good it is purported to be, because they are bored with the so-called "problem of consciousness" and uninterested in playing the role of the choir for what looks like a lot of old-fashioned Whiteheadian preaching. But in fact this book was conceived with the intention to do much more than preach to the choir: it aims to engage a wider audience and to make new contributions to the process perspective. That it succeeds so well in achieving these two aims, often within the same essay, is what makes this book so exceptionally good and deserving of the wide audience it seeks.

I would even go so far as to say that process thought needs a book like this. As the editors point out in their introduction (1-2), process discourse has recently tended to turn in on itself, shying from the sort of interdisciplinary ventures that are arguably essential to the vitality of any speculative tradition. This tendency may be especially hard to resist in the face of recent debates over consciousness, which can seem hopelessly lost from the process perspective. Indeed, the estrangement of process philosophy from the mainstream alliance of analytic philosophy and functionalist cognitive science has reinforced the sense, on both sides, of mutual irrelevance. Still, however misguided the mainstream may be, the burden of proof falls on process philosophers to show how and why the "funded wisdom" of western thought has, in this case, gone astray for so long. The burden is especially great for process approaches to the problem of consciousness, because Whiteheadians must face—in addition to persistent obstacles to integrative and speculative thought—a profound empirical challenge: If they are right about the processual character of experience, why has universal access to this experience not lent greater credibility to their approach? Indeed, why has it been so easy, for the last four hundred years at least, to acquiesce in the approaches of materialism and dualism? David Ray Griffin, a contributor to this volume, has argued convincingly that these approaches violate tenets of "hard-core" common sense (177-83), and yet they retain a firm hold on our imagination.

One of the notable accomplishments of this volume is how its authors manage to bring this state of affairs into much sharper focus, with more detail, and [End Page 197] from a greater range of perspectives, than previous attempts. The authors engage richly with the history of western philosophy, contemporary analytic philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, creating a fine meshwork of connections in which the process approach stands out in vivid contrast with modern alternatives, while at the same time making sense of its perennial minority status.

In particular, the historically oriented chapters do a superb job of clarifying how the problem of consciousness is tied to key developments in western phenomenology, linguistics, metaphysics, and logic, extending to the very roots of western thought. No doubt some readers will already be familiar with these connections, but I doubt they will have found them presented with such rigor. Argumentative rigor is demanded more than ever by the situation in which process philosophy finds itself today—a moribund tradition deeply at odds with contemporary academic culture. From the perspective of process thought, the entire history of western thought can appear as a vast conspiracy to deny the processual character of reality, and this appearance desperately needs a rigorous and compelling explanation or else, as with most conspiracy theories, the rationality of the process view begins to seem suspect. The cumulative weight of these chapters goes a long way toward providing this explanation; the three chapters by Anderson Weekes are especially good and may come to be regarded as milestones in this respect. 1

Moreover, because of the hard work done in this volume, it...

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