Causation In Whitehead

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Author: Peter SimonsPeter Simons
Affiliation: University of Leeds
Source: Causation 1500-2000, 2008
Keywords: causation, Whitehead  [edit]

@inbook{simons2008c,
    author = "Simons, Peter",
    title = {Causation In Whitehead},
    booktitle = "Causation 1500-2000",
    year = "2008"}

Synopsis

For a cosmologist and philosopher of nature, Whitehead is surprisingly reticent about the notion of causation. Despite being based on the idea of a spread and succession of events, his writings on the philosophy of nature even explicitly disown or avoid the concept: in The Concept of NatureThe Concept of Nature (1920) he writes, “causation raises the memory of discussions based upon theories of nature which are alien to my own”; and causation does not figure among “the ultimate physical concepts”. By the time Whitehead came in the mid- to late twenties to formulate the philosophy of organism, most fully in Process and RealityProcess and Reality (1929), causation begins to play a role in his metaphysics, especially through the doctrine of prehensions and the rejection of any self-sufficiency of actual occasions. It is in the nature of all actual occasions to be determined in part by others: both the eternal objects which confer on them their general nature, and the pre-existing actual occasions which they directly or indirectly prehend. Whitehead also leaves room for a final or teleological concept of causation in his idea that actual occasions are partly self-determining according to their “subjective aim”. Yet even though causation is now accommodated, it is neither metaphysically basic nor terminologically prominent, but seems to emerge as a subordinate pattern within the overall mosaic of events. The paper will draw on Whitehead’s mature philosophy and the discussion of commentators from Emmet to Lowe in assessing the place of causation in Whitehead’s metaphysics; it will attempt to explicate his conception in more standard and tractable terminology; and it will appraise the adequacy or otherwise of his conception.