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Whitehead's Philosophy: The Higher Phases of Experience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Extract

In my last article I described fully the important type of entity in Whitehead's philosophy called “propositions,” and explained the part they played in conscious experience. We learnt that “consciousness” was a certain kind of emergent quality associated with the late phase of concrescence of some high-grade actual entities. It was pointed out that whenever consciousness was present in experience, this proved to be the subjective form of an integral synthetic feeling composed of (1) a physical feeling and (2) a pro-positional feeling. This integral feeling was said to be a feeling of contrast between “actuality” and “ideality,” between a fact and a possibility. That is to say consciousness is the subjective form of the feeling of a contrast between what actuality is, and might not be, or what actuality is not, and yet might be. We can now proceed to deal with a number of higher phases of experience such as “belief,” “conscious perception,” “judgment,” together with experiences termed by Whitehead “physical purposes.”

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1946

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References

page 57 note 1 Process and Reality, pp. 377, et seq. (This is a complicated section of Whitehead's philosophy, and the writer has been able to do little more than give a résumé.)

page 58 note 1 P. & R., p. 377.

page 59 note 1 P. & R., p. 77Google Scholar.

page 59 note 2 Ibid., p. 378.

page 59 note 3 Ibid., p. 379.

page 60 note 1 P. & R., p. 379Google Scholar.

page 60 note 2 Ibid., p. 380.

page 61 note 1 P. & R., p. 380Google Scholar.

page 61 note 2 Ibid., p. 380.

page 62 note 1 P. & R., p. 381Google Scholar.

page 62 note 2 Ibid., p. 382.

page 62 note 3 Ibid., pp. 260–94.

page 62 note 4 Ibid., p. 269.

page 63 note 1 P. & R., p. 270Google Scholar.

page 63 note 2 Ibid., p. 270.

page 63 note 4 Ibid., pp. 270.

page 63 note 5 Ibid., pp. 270–71.

page 63 note 6 Ibid., pp. 271.

page 64 note 1 P & R., p. 272Google Scholar.

page 64 note 2 Ibid., p. 272.

page 64 note 3 Ibid., p. 272.

page 64 note 4 Ibid., p. 273.

page 64 note 5 In explaining the difference between a proposition and a judgment, Whitehead says (ibid., p. 279), “a proposition is an example of what Locke calls an “idea determined to particular existences.” It is the potentiality of such an idea; the realized idea, admitted to decision in a given subject, is the judgment, which may be a true or false idea about the particular tilings.”

page 67 note 1 P & R., p. 386Google Scholar.

page 67 note 2 Ibid., p. 387.

page 67 note 3 Ibid., p. 387.

page 67 note 4 Ibid., p. 388.

page 68 note 1 P. & R., p. 388Google Scholar.

page 68 note 2 Ibid., p. 391.

page 68 note 3 Ibid., p. 391.

page 69 note 1 P. & R., p. 385Google Scholar.

page 69 note 2 Ibid., p. 386.

page 72 note 1 P. & R., p. 393.

page 72 note 2 According to this category: “There is secondary origination of conceptual feelings with data which are partially identical with, and partially diverse from, the eternal objects forming the data in the first phase of the mental pole. The diversity is a relevant diversity determined by the subjective aim.”

page 73 note 1 P. & R., p. 394Google Scholar.

page 73 note 2 Ibid., p. 395.

page 74 note 1 P. & R., p. 396Google Scholar.

page 74 note 2 Ibid., p. 396.

page 74 note 3 Ibid., p. 396.

page 75 note 1 P. & R., p. 397.