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• W4285672638 abstract "Reviewed by: The Event Universe. The Revisionary Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead by Leemon B. McHenry George Lucas McHENRY, Leemon B. The Event Universe. The Revisionary Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015. x+ 169 pp. Cloth, $90.00; paper, $22.00 This brief treatise on process metaphysics has been slow to capture scholarly notice. It was scheduled as the featured topic for the opening session of the March 2020 annual meeting of the Metaphysical Society of America, some five years after its initial release. The postponement of that conference in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic is merely the latest misfortunate to befall this book, which deserves wider public attention and a far better fate. Its author is fluent not only in the challenging metaphysical thought of Alfred North Whitehead but in the philosophy of many important contemporaries and students, from Bertrand Russell to W. V. O. Quine. The latter, toward the end of his life, graciously collaborated with the author on portions of this book, reassessing his own complex relationship with, and influence of, his teacher. McHenry is likewise admirably literate in the important areas of modern science that inform the work of all of these philosophical figures, from the classical electrodynamic field theory of James Clerk Maxwell to post-Copenhagen quantum mechanics and general relativity theory, for which both Whitehead and Russell attempted to develop a grounding conceptual framework. Despite its subtitle, McHenry's essay should not be classified as simply another exposition of Whitehead's thought exclusively, just as it is far from constituting merely a contribution to what is customarily understood as process metaphysics. Instead, the author proposes to make an original and constructive contribution (deeply indebted, to be sure, to Whitehead, Russell, and Quine) to what philosophers and physicists today refer to as grand unified theory, or sometimes, with wry immodesty, the Theory of Everything. The descriptor of this as revisionary harks back to the distinction of P. F. Strawson, for whom revisionary metaphysics denotes an attempt to challenge or overthrow customary commonsense modes of thought, while a descriptive metaphysics (for example, the work of Strawson himself or of the late Donald Davidson) seeks to describe and interpret the ordinary concepts by which we normally think about the world. Importantly, McHenry also emphasizes that his own approach is, in addition, both naturalistic and realistic: that is, grounded in the natural sciences from which metaphysical principles are derived and committed to the underlying notion of a mind-independent reality that is the focus of scientific inquiry. Thus, the metaphysical explanations and interpretations offered must be understood (as Whitehead originally cautioned) only as partial, provisional, and subject to ongoing revision in light of new scientific discoveries. Accordingly, any pretense to foundational certainty (as in mainstream logical positivism) is an illusion. The longstanding preference for a metaphysics based upon substance, from Aristotle, through Descartes and Locke, to contemporaries like Davidson, Susan Haack, and John Heil, is that substance is simple (that is, not composed of other substances) and uniquely able to bear properties [End Page 849] (and so uniquely enabled to constitute the furniture of our universe). Events, by contrast, often appear be composed of other events (and so are inherently compound rather than simple) and cannot (at least as described by Strawson, Quine, and Haack) be the bearers of properties. McHenry, however, challenges the completeness of these substance accounts, demonstrating in a following chapter how these commonsense notions are especially problematic in modern physics, wholly incapable of providing an adequate account of the properties of Maxwell's infinitely extended electromagnetic fields. Likewise, the wave–particle duality and inherent uncertainty of quantum mechanics in the aftermath of Schrödinger and Heisenberg, moreover, are difficult, if not impossible, to represent in terms of simple, property-bearing substances at discrete, well-defined locations. What is required instead is a revisionary theory of events in which discrete volumes of event-sequences are capable of sustaining properties characteristic of finite entities without recourse to any underlying substance. This, McHenry demonstrates, is precisely what Whitehead, Russell, and C. D. Broad were largely successful in describing, each in slightly variant fashion, but all in a manner that provided plausible..." @default.
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• W4285672638 title "The Event Universe. The Revisionary Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead by Leemon B. McHenry" @default.
• W4285672638 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/rvm.2020.0047" @default.
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