Aims: A Brief Metaphysics for Today

Notes

Notes PREFACE 1. Etienne Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience, 248; italics in the original. Here and in all further citations, see the bibliography for complete publication information. 2. James W. Felt, “Invitation to a Philosophic Revolution.” 3. The above views have naturally found expression in my published essays and in my books, Making Sense of Your Freedom (1984; repr. 2005), Coming To Be (2001), and Human Knowing: A Prelude to Metaphysics (2005). 4. George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, 4. Chapter 1 THE BEGINNING 1. The relation between philosophic and scientific understanding constitutes a rich epistemological topic that will be at least touched on later in this essay. 2. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, 124. 3. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, 112. 4. This assumption is obviously in need of further refinement, and I shall undertake that later. For the present I propose it as a tentative though reasonable hypothesis. 127 Felt-17.Notes 7/27/07 2:51 PM Page 127 5. I am not the first to use the phrase “relational realism.” To my knowledge it was first used by W. Norris Clarke, though perhaps in a somewhat different sense, in his essay “Action as the Self-Revelation of Being,” (in Explorations in Metaphysics, 59). In any case, the phrase is exactly apt to express what I mean here. I develop this theory more completely in my essay, “Relational Realism and the Great Deception of Sense,” and more fully still in Human Knowing: A Prelude to Metaphysics . 6. I shall further develop the point about causality in the next chapter. Chapter 2 A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF EXPERIENCING 1. Alfred North Whitehead, who was perhaps the first philosopher explicitly to recognize this aspect of immediate sense experience, called it “perception in the mode of causal efficacy.” See his Process and Reality, part 2, chap. 8, “Symbolic Reference”; also his Symbolism , especially chap. 2. 2. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, book 1, part 4, section 6, 252. 3. Reported by William Ernest Hocking in “Whitehead as I Knew Him,” 8. Chapter 3 INTERLUDE ON METHOD 1. It can even be argued, though I shall not do it here, that human consciousness is also one of these factors, so that human sensation belongs to a different horizon from that of other animals. 2. Etienne Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience, 243. 3. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, xviii. 4. Were this an essay focused on the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, it would be customary to refer to him as “Thomas” inasmuch as “Aquinas” is not a patronymic but rather a place name. But in the present essay it will be clearer to say “Aquinas,” and it may be thought that after more than seven centuries Aquinas has earned the name for himself. 5. W. Norris Clarke, “Analogy and the Meaningfulness of Language about God,” 131. — A I M S 128 Felt-17.Notes 7/27/07 2:51 PM Page 128 6. The notion of “primary being” will be discussed in section 4.4. 7. Here I explicitly reject the independent existence of anything like Plato’s Forms, Whitehead’s eternal objects, or Leibniz’s and David Lewis’s possible worlds. 8. Aristotle says: “It is not absurd that the actualization of one thing should be in another. Teaching is the activity of a person who can teach, yet the operation is performed on some patient—it is not cut adrift from a subject, but is of A on B”; Physics, book 3, chap. 3, 202b5; in The Basic Works of Aristotle, 257. 9. See Whitehead’s Process and Reality, part 2, chap. 8, “Symbolic Reference.” 10. This assumption is shared by both Aquinas and Whitehead, though each in his own way. 11. The notion “primary being” will be elucidated in the following chapter, section 4.4. 12. The reader familiar with Whitehead will recognize that I am here controverting his conception of the genesis of an “actual entity,” in which the feeler of the feelings originating the actual entity is in a technical but strong sense more derivative from the feelings than presupposed by them. Roughly, the feelings are given ontologically prior to the feeler which ultimately arises out of them. But Whitehead adopted this view largely in order to avoid making his ultimate units into “substances,” which he understood in the senses of Descartes, Locke, and Hume, and...