Abstract
When I first read Science and the Modern World I had high hopes that Whitehead was going to produce a general theory of organism which might link the physical and the biological sciences. I was excited by his saying that ‘Biology is the study of the larger organisms, whereas physics is the study of the smaller organisms’. That was many years ago; reflecting on his later work I was partly encouraged, but also disappointed. He called this later work The Philosophy of Organism; it was a view of organism in which a kind of psycho-physiology seemed to have taken over the physical sciences.1
In the place of the Aristotelian notion of the procession of forms [the new physics] has substituted the notion of the forms of process.
Whitehead, Modes of Thought
Still glides the stream, and shall not cease to glide; The form remains, the function never dies.
Wordsworth, The River Duddon
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Notes
See B.C. Goodwin, ‘Structuralism in Biology’, in Science Progress, Vol. 74 (1990, pp. 227–44)
and ‘Organisms and Minds as Dynamic Forms’, Leonardo, Vol. 22, No. 1 (1989).
Whitehead called attention to this general principle in Science and the Modern World, (Cambridge, 1926) p. 155.
An excellent account of how such theories produced in effect a revolution in physics is given by P.M. Harman in Energy, Force and Matter: the Conceptual Development of Nineteenth Century Physics (Cambridge, 1982).
This change of view has been documented by Lewis Ford, and he gives a summary of it in his paper “The Concept of ‘Process’: From ‘Transition’ to ‘Concrescence’”, in Whitehead und der Prozessbegriff, eds H. Holz and E. Wolf Gazo. Freiburg: Alber, 1984.
Also V. Lowe ‘Whitehead’s Philosophical Development’, in The Library of Living Philosophers, (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University, 1941), p. 95;
and Whitehead’s paper ‘Time’ in Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Philosophy (Harvard, 1926).
I owe the point that Whitehead’s Subjectivist Principle could be taken as token reflexivity to Richard Rorty’s paper ‘The Subjectivist Principle and the Linguistic Turn’ in Alfred North Whitehead: Essays on his Philosophy, ed. G.L. Kline (Prentice Hall, 1963).
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© 1992 Dorothy Emmet
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Emmet, D. (1992). Organic Processes. In: The Passage of Nature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12644-6_6
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