Adventures in Unfashionable Philosophy

2. Invitation to a Philosophic Revolution (1971)

t w o Invitation to a Philosophic Revolution (1971) This essay appeared in the New scholasticism and was written in the flush of early enthusiasm for Whitehead’s “process philosophy.” The essay in fact influenced several other more traditional philosophers to take a harder look at Whitehead’s philosophy. I believe now, however, that whatever its merits, the essay is simplistic in its criticism of traditional thinking, especially that of St. Thomas Aquinas . It is, I think, too much influenced by Charles Hartshorne ’s remarkable book, the Divine Relativity: a social Conception of God.1 But whatever the flaws of that book, or still more of this essay, Hartshorne’s powerful challenge to traditional scholastic thinking had to be taken seriously, with a consequent enriching of Thomistic thought itself. In the essay I invite fellow philosophers to attempt in their own way to meld what seem to be the better aspects of the thought of both Aquinas and Whitehead and thus to form a new and more contemporary metaphysical view. Though it was later always on my mind, I myself only began trying to respond to that implausible challenge in the year 2000 with 4 Originally published as “Invitation to a Philosophic Revolution,” The New Scholasticism 45, no. 1 (1971): 87–109. Reprinted with permission. Invitation to a Philosophic Revolution 5 essay 15 in this volume and with two books, Coming to Be: toward a thomistic-Whiteheadian metaphysics of Becoming (2001) and aims: a Brief metaphysics for today (2007). I would today not write this essay, since I am now sensible of its faults. Yet for all its simplemindedness and exaggeration it does point to problems to be solved, so that the basic invitation still stands. The essay assumes some familiarity with scholastic philosophy and is only mildly technical. —The progress of philosophy does not primarily involve reactions of agreement or dissent. It essentially consists in the enlargement of thought, whereby contradictions and agreements are transformed into partial aspects of wider points of view. —Alfred North Whitehead2 Just two small clouds, lord Kelvin noted, marred the skies of Newtonian physics in 1900: the resistance of “black-body” radiation to analysis, and the unexpected negative result of the michelson-morley ether detection experiments.3 these clouds, the first portents of quantum and relativity physics, were to grow into a storm that would overwhelm classical physics and effect the greatest scientific revolution since Galileo and Newton. It can hardly be doubted that this conceptual revolution constituted scientific progress. Yet it proves surprisingly difficult to specify exactly wherein scientific progress consists. Perhaps it is even harder to define progress in philosophy. But since, as I believe, progress in science is analogous to that in philosophy, let us initially examine the notion of progress in science. afterwards we can draw a parallel for philosophy, then assess in that light some aspects of the current philosophic situation. What I shall propose is that in philosophy we are at present in a revolutionary situation. 6 Adventures in Unfashionable Philosophy 1. sCIeNtIFIC RevOlUtIONs If we accept the quantum and relativistic revolutions as an advance, we must recognize that progress in physics consists not so much in the solution of ordinary problems within the currently accepted conceptual framework as in the transformation to a new framework better capable of interpreting scientific experience. transition to this new framework —this new “paradigm,” to use Kuhn’s terminology4—is an advance because, let us tentatively say, it somehow makes sense out of more scientific experience than did the old. such a shift of scientific paradigms takes place in much the same way as a political revolution (Kuhn, chap. 9). It begins with increasing dissatisfaction over crucial problems arising within the system and with the growing realization that within that system these problems are not only intolerable but also unsolvable. the old political system is then replaced by a different one thought to be capable of coping with these problems. similarly, some scientific problems, instead of yielding to the conventional methods of solution, gradually take the shape of genuine anomalies incapable of solution by the hitherto successful paradigm. the paradigm will not, however, be abandoned until the appearance of an alternative conceptual scheme equally capable of solving the old conventional problems and of resolving the new anomalies. Within a single political or scientific structure there is “progress,” it is true, insofar as an increasing number of problems are solved within...