Whitehead and Jonas
on biological organisms and real individuals
pp. 155-175
in: Stuart Spicker (ed), Organism, medicine, and metaphysics, Berlin, Springer, 1978Abstract
For students of Whitehead's speculative philosophy (esp. [3] Process and Reality), thanks to recurrent critical discussion over the past half century, the fundamental Whiteheadian notion of "actual entity' has become reasonably intelligible.' The notion of actual entity, which refers both to God and to finite, episodic "actual occasions,' is Whitehead's reformation of the traditional notion of substance. Actual entities are the "final, really real things" of Whitehead's cosmos. They are its concrete real individuals, world-experiencing, self-creative, self-functioning, working together in constituting the creative advance which is the evolving cosmos, realizing among themselves that emergent order and those novel, concrete values which are the cosmos' ongoing significance. So much is reasonably clear. But does this doctrine make sense — real, ontological sense? Can there really be real individuals such as conceived by Whitehead? This is a question which demands further critical discussion. It is a question not about the coherence of Whitehead's system, but about its adequacy to our experience, to our good ontological, if not common, sense.
