Sorry, my links were N.G. Try these:
D. Irvine, “Whitehead’s Philosophical Influence”
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/whitehead/#WPI
Richard Lubbock, “Alfred North Whitehead for the Muddleheaded”
http://www3.sympatico.ca/rlubbock/ANW.html
Robert A. Herrmann, “The Wondrous Design and Non-random Character of ‘Chance’ Events”
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/physics/9903038
Thank you oh so very much for your excellent post and reference information and links! I have some comments, but the time has gotten away from me tonight and I'll be gone until later tomorrow. So they'll have to wait. Sigh...
For Lurkers: Whitehead was raised on the Experts won’t back Dover thread in trying to negotiate the difference between “scientific materialism” and “methodological naturalism”. Since Whitehead coined the term “scientific materialism”, he is the one I turned to for a definition. betty boop investigated his thinking more thoroughly and posted the results here.
Whitehead's philosophy seems to view the physical realm (at least) as an organism – where the material things within it are not the point, but rather the processes or events.
His complaints about “scientific materialism” remind me of the physician who was all astir over another physician who had prescribed over 20 medications to my mother – one treating a symptom caused by another – all the while completely ignoring, not even asking, what the underlying disease was. To that extent, I certainly agree with him. But I am a bit "off" with his philosophy (as I understand it).
However, he’s not that far afield of the quantum world. Most of us probably think of particles as “real” or “substantive” when of a truth, the surest statements we can make are concerning the fields themselves – and that illusive “carrier” mechanism remains yet undetected – the Higgs boson/field which would account for ordinary matter. The smallest portion of matter in the universe is “ordinary” – the largest, dark energy, is even more illusive – as is dark matter.
IOW, Whitehead would be underscoring the importance of the fields over the particles. But this is where we start parting company, because Whitehead puts the burden on the process itself whereas I put the burden on the geometry. It's as if he would rather subordinate the geometry (space/time) to the process.
Whitehead’s “prehensions” and “actual occasions” are part of his construing “reality” as a exercise of free-will (on steroids in my view). It has been suggested on prior threads that man is a “co-creator” – but Whitehead seems to take this further, as if God could not exist without man’s free will. On that point I sharply disagree.
Whitehead may indeed be a “dualist” – and I would love to see you do a comparison between him and Pannenburg.
The trend I am gathering from various sources is that some will entertain the concept of a whole willfulness which is greater than the sum of the wills of its parts. In that view, the will, mind, consciousness, autonomy, object or form of the man actually exists as a "thing" although it transcends to all of the component wills of his body. Thus, there is no Cartesian Split as the whole exists in the parts, and is also greater than the sum.
The interesting point is that when all the parts are taken away from the whole, since the whole is greater, then what remains yet exists. This would be consistent with most Judeo/Christian theologies known to me.