Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy

m m Readers of all philosophical persuasions wiU learn much from this book, 7a because of its innovative insights, rigorous thinking, and sound scholarship. . Skeptics and believers will soon realize that they are reading essays with leanings toward secular assumptions in various degrees. Meanwhile, all readers would be better served with another subtitle, since the current one suggests more of an emphasis on experience than actually appears. Because of the greater endorsement of the useful side of religion rather than its truth, the book could be called "finding expedience in The Varieties"This one letter change from "experience" to "expedience" would suit the anthology's emphasis on James's pragmatic justifications of religion. And this anthology is an enterprise in scholarly "R and D" that is well worth careful attention, for all the arguments in James's glories and failures that it records so well. Paul Jerome Croce, Reviewer American Studies Department Stetson University, pcroce@stetson.edu Edited by Janusz A. Polanowski and Donald W. Sherburne Whitehead's Philosophy, Points of Connection Albany: State University Press of New York, 2004. 220 pgs. Whitehead's philosophy has been long appropriated by theologians and phflosophers of religion, but his place in the modern history of philosophy, both American and European, has been less weU noted. The tide began to turn with the pioneering work of George R. Lucas Jr., and with the publication in 2002 of Process and Analysis: Whitehead, Hartshorne, and the Analytic Tradition, edited by George Shields. Now this coUection presents important new "points of connection" between Whitehead and such phflosophers as Descartes, Dewey, Santayana, Rorty, Maclntyre, Merleau-Ponty, and Nietzsche. In addition, Robert Neville contributes a compact and brilliantly lucid chapter on "Whitehead and Pragmatism" that is really an overview of the scholarship linking process philosophy and pragmatism, the unresolved issues between them (chiefly concerning time's flow and continuity), and NeviUe's own hypotheses for resolution. John Cobb contributes a comprehensive essay on "Thinking with Whitehead about Nature" and Frederick Ferres chapter on "Whitehead and Technology" creatively applies aWhiteheadian perspective to such topics as technology's character, the functions of technological intelligence, and the challenges of choosing a wise technological future. Cobb offers his own elegant Whiteheadian responses to the work of environmentalist writers across a spectrum, including Passmore, Regan, Singer, Callicott, Rolston, and Shepard. Ferre builds on Whitehead's insights chiefly in The Function of Reason and Adventures of Ideas to make his own wise assessment of areas in which technology is helping us "to live better (genetic engineering, cloning, aquaculture of Earth's open seas) and those g^j ω 00 that are failing us (e.g. internal combustion engines, "given ugly embodiment in the behemoths rumbling antisocially and antienvironmentally across the asphalt universe..." p. 210). ^ The first formidable obstacle a volume like this must overcome is the ^ unfamiliarity of Whitehead's language and point of departure, which can seem very foreign to uninitiated readers. But how to initiate? Donald Sherburne solves this expertly in the opening chapter by presenting Whitehead's terminology as a "monumental shift of perspective" from the philosophy of Descartes. In twelve compact pages Sherburne covers the highlights of the philosophy of organism in contrast to the Cartesian philosophy of substance , concluding with the topic/term "God" where the contrast is most stark. So helpful is this brief presentation that I plan to use it in class from now on to introduce students to process philosophy. Turning to classical American philosophy, George AUan's comparison of Whitehead and Dewey develops the theme of "religion in the making of education ." Proposing that Dewey and Whitehead work from the same root model— taking actual occasions and experimental inquiries to have the same fundamental shape—Allan finds that "a given material situation, an ideal of it as more satisfactory, a corrective reforming possibility, the effecting of a new situation: this fourfold of conditions, endlessly iterated, constitutes a general model of human action implicate in both Dewey's and Whitehead's root models " (p. 52). If their interpretive frameworks are thus metaphoricaUy linked, Allan argues, their approaches to educational issues should therefore be similar , which he proceeds to demonstrate throughout half a dozen rich and intricate pages...