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The Archetypal Process
Self and Divine and Whitehead, Jung, and Hillman
David Ray Griffin
Northwestern University Press, 1989
Archetypal Process is a pioneering study linking the ideas of process philosophy, as developed by Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, with the archetypal psychology of C. G. Jung and James Hillman. This is the first work to examine the interconnections of these two modes of thought.

Archetypal Process examines the importance of cosmological thinking and the need to ground archetypal psychology in a metaphysical, philosophical framework. It treats the necessity for symbol and myth, the nature of the spirit, and language as a metaphorical vehicle of thought, and finally, it adds a much-needed feminist perspective to the debate.
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Billy Durant
Creator of General Motors
Lawrence R. Gustin
University of Michigan Press, 2012

Praise for the first edition:

"A fascinating book [and] a sympathetic look at the man who glued General Motors together and in the process made Flint one of the great industrial centers of America."
---Detroit Free Press

"It is refreshing to report that Billy Durant is one of the best researched books dealing with an automotive giant."
---Antique Automobile

"Billy Durant fills in a masterly way the only important void remaining concerning the work of the motorcar pioneers."
---Richard Crabb, author of Birth of a Giant: The Men and Incidents That Gave America the Motorcar

What explains Billy Durant's powerful influence on the auto industry during its early days? And why, given Durant's impact, has he been nearly forgotten for decades?

In search of answers to these questions, Lawrence Gustin interviewed Durant's widow, who provided a wealth of previously unpublished autobiographical notes, letters, and personal papers. Gustin also interviewed two of Durant's personal secretaries and others who had known and worked with the man who created General Motors. The result is the amazing account of the mastermind behind what would become, as the twentieth century progressed, the world's largest company.

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Dewey, Russell, Whitehead
Philosophers as Educators
Brian Patrick Hendley
Southern Illinois University Press, 1986

In Philosophers as Educators Brian Patrick Hendley argues that philosophers of edu­cation should reject their preoccupation with defining terms and analyzing concepts and embrace the philosophical task of con­structing general theories of education.  Hendley discusses in detail the educational philosophies of John Dewey, Bertrand Rus­sell, and Alfred North Whitehead. He sees in these men excellent role models that contem­porary philosophers might well follow. Hendley believes that, like these men­tors, philosophers should take a more ac­tive, practical role in education. Dewey and Russell ran their own schools, and Whitehead served as a university admin­istrator and as a member of many com­mittees created to study education.

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Feed-Forward
On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media
Mark B. N. Hansen
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Even as media in myriad forms increasingly saturate our lives, we nonetheless tend to describe our relationship to it in terms from the twentieth century: we are consumers of media, choosing to engage with it. In Feed-Forward, Mark B. N. Hansen shows just how outmoded that way of thinking is: media is no longer separate from us but has become an inescapable part of our very experience of the world.

Drawing on the speculative empiricism of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, Hansen reveals how new media call into play elements of sensibility that greatly affect human selfhood without in any way belonging to the human. From social media to data-mining to new sensor technologies, media in the twenty-first century work largely outside the realm of perceptual consciousness, yet at the same time inflect our every sensation. Understanding that paradox, Hansen shows, offers us a chance to put forward a radically new vision of human becoming, one that enables us to reground the human in a non-anthropocentric view of the world and our experience in it.
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God's Empire
William Bell Riley and Midwestern Fundamentalism
William V., Jr. Trollinger
University of Wisconsin Press, 1991

More than any other individual, William Bell Riley, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Minneapolis, inspired the resurgence of Protestant fundamentalism in 1930s America.  Trollinger explores the development of Riley’s theology and social thought, examining in detail the rise of the Northwestern Bible and Missionary Training School and other similar institutions.  He sheds light upon the nature, successes, and failures of fundamentalist crusades and makes it clear that, to understand fundamentalist religion in America, one must focus upon its regional and local roots.

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Heidegger and Whitehead
A Phenomenological Examination into the Intelligibility of Experience
Ron L. Cooper
Ohio University Press, 1993

Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time can be broadly termed a transcendental inquiry into the structures that make human experience possible. Such an inquiry reveals the conditions that render human experience intelligible. Using Being and Time as a model, I attempt to show that Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality not only aligns with Being and Time in opposing many elements of traditional Western philosophy but also exhibits a similar transcendental inquiry.

With this reading, Process and Reality contains concepts much like Being-in-the-world, ecstatic temporality, and others found in Being and Time. More important, this interpretation considers Whitehead’s treatment of human experience paradigmatic for understanding his cosmological scheme in general. Finally, the results of this study are employed to sketch a phenomenology of holy experience.

— Prefatory Note to Heidegger and Whitehead

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Intensity
An Essay in Whiteheadian Ontology
Judith A. Jones
Vanderbilt University Press, 1998
A challenging, iconoclastic study that makes clear the underlying unity of Whitehead's vision of the world.

This important and provocative book on the work of Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) explores how his avowed atomism is consistent with his equally essential commitment to a view of reality as a thoroughly interconnected sphere of relations. Judith Jones challenges Whitehead's readers to reconsider certain prevailing interpretations of his organic philosophy. To Jones, a rereading of Whitehead's overall philosophic project is essential to evaluating his contributions to metaphysics and ontology. SinceWhitehead's basic worldview is holistic, a return to viewing Whitehead's work as a whole helps clarify his ontological intentions and contributions to metaphysics.

For this purpose, the concept of "intensity," which Jones defines as the quality and form of feeling involved in subjective experience, is basic to Whitehead's thinking about process at all naturalistic levels and is therefore particularly useful as a lens through which to view his entire system. "Intensity" is at once Whitehead's most basic metaphysical idea and a notion useful in deciphering the overall unity of purpose in his writings. A central aim of this book is to develop an aesthetically sensitive sense of being that demonstrates the profound and original contributions of process philosophy to realism.

Jones shows that a thorough understanding of the concept of intensity yields modes of thought that help overcome knotty problems in conceiving Whitehead's distinction between the private experience of individuals and the public relations those individuals experience in relationship to other entities. Drawing frequently on poetic allusions to aid her interpretations, she focuses specifically on the status of intensity in intellectual and moral experience and develops an ethics of "attention" as an elaboration of Whitehead's aesthetic metaphysics.

The result is a book that should be enthusiastically greeted and debated by scholars of Whitehead and by all who are interested in the field of process thought, including students of theology, literature, and feminist studies. Jones's unorthodox conclusions, backed up with scrupulous attention to both the Whitehead canon and related secondary literature, present challenges to accepted interpretations that cannot be ignored.

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A Key to Whitehead's Process and Reality
Donald W. Sherburne
University of Chicago Press, 1981
Whitehead's magnum opus is as important as it is difficult. It is the only work in which his metaphysical ideas are stated systematically and completely, and his metaphysics are the heart of his philosophical system as a whole. Sherburne has rearranged the text in a way designed to lead the student logically and coherently through the intricacies of the system without losing the vigor of Whitehead's often brilliant prose.

"The Key renders Process and Reality pedagogically accessible for the first time."—Journal of Religion
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Making Sense in Common
A Reading of Whitehead in Times of Collapse
Isabelle Stengers
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

A leading philosopher seeks to recover “common sense” as a meeting place to reconcile science and philosophy

With her previous books on Alfred North Whitehead, Isabelle Stengers not only secured a reputation as one of the premier philosophers of our times but also inspired a rethinking of critical theory, political thought, and radical philosophy across a range of disciplines. Here, Stengers unveils what might well be seen as her definitive reading of Whitehead.

Making Sense in Common will be greeted eagerly by the growing group of scholars who use Stengers’s work on Whitehead as a model for how to think with conceptual precision through diverse domains of inquiry: environmentalism and ecology, animal studies, media and technology studies, the history and philosophy of science, feminism, and capitalism. On the other hand, the significance of this new book extends beyond Whitehead. Instead, it lies in Stengers’s recovery of the idea of “common sense” as a meeting place—a commons—where opposed ideas of science and humanistic inquiry can engage one another and help to move society forward. Her reconciliation of science and philosophy is especially urgent today—when climate disaster looms all around us, when the values of what we thought of as civilization and modernity are discredited, and when expertise of any kind is under attack.

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Nature as Event
The Lure of the Possible
Didier Debaise
Duke University Press, 2017
We have entered a new era of nature. What remains of the frontiers of modern thought that divided the living from the inert, subjectivity from objectivity, the apparent from the real, value from fact, and the human from the nonhuman? Can the great oppositions that presided over the modern invention of nature still claim any cogency? In Nature as Event, Didier Debaise shows how new narratives and cosmologies are necessary to rearticulate that which until now had been separated. Following William James and Alfred North Whitehead, Debaise presents a pluralistic approach to nature. What would happen if we attributed subjectivity and potential to all beings, human and nonhuman? Why should we not consider aesthetics and affect as the fabric that binds all existence? And what if the senses of importance and value were no longer understood to be exclusively limited to the human?
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The Universe of Things
On Speculative Realism
Steven Shaviro
University of Minnesota Press, 2014

From the rediscovery of Alfred North Whitehead’s work to the rise of new materialist thought, including object-oriented ontology, there has been a rapid turn toward speculation in philosophy as a way of moving beyond solely human perceptions of nature and existence. Now Steven Shaviro maps this quickly emerging speculative realism, which is already dramatically influencing how we interpret reality and our place in a universe in which humans are not the measure of all things.

The Universe of Things explores the common insistence of speculative realism on a noncorrelationist thought: that things or objects exist apart from how our own human minds relate to and comprehend them. Shaviro focuses on how Whitehead both anticipates and offers challenges to prevailing speculative realist thought, moving between Whitehead’s own panpsychism, Harman’s object-oriented ontology, and the reductionist eliminativism of Quentin Meillassoux and Ray Brassier.

The stakes of this recent speculative realist thought—of the effort to develop new ways of grasping the world—are enormous as it becomes clear that our inherited assumptions are no longer adequate to describe, much less understand, the reality we experience around us. As Shaviro acknowledges, speculative realist thought has its dangers, but it also, like the best speculative fiction, holds the potential to liberate us from confining views of what is outside ourselves and, he believes, to reclaim aesthetics and beauty as a principle of life itself.

Bringing together a wide array of contemporary thought, and evenhandedly assessing its current debates, The Universe of Things is an invaluable guide to the evolution of speculative realism and the provocation of Alfred North Whitehead’s pathbreaking work.

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