Sentences with phrase «temporal occasions»

Nothing organic can be explained: temporal occasions and sequences can be found, but not adequate causes.

In section 1 above, I have argued that past temporal occasions may also contribute to the formation of the initial aim.

If we adopt the later position, as I believe we should, then we must ask whether in the case of temporal occasions as well the ontological principle allows that their own decisions can be explanatory of conceptual prehensions not derived from physical prehensions.

In temporal occasions the initial aim is always an aim at some intensity of feeling both in the occasion itself and in its relevant future.13... The relations of an individual's own future and those of others introduce tensions that are highly relevant to man's ethical thinking.14 In God, however, there are no such tensions because the ideal strength of beauty for himself and for the world coincide.15 Hence, we may simplify and say that God's aim is at ideal strength of beauty and that this aim is eternally unchanging.

In addition, Whitehead apparently intends to use the term «actual entity» to refer both to temporal occasions and to God (PR 135), and Whitehead says that «actual entities perish» (PR 52).

If we adopt the latter position, as I believe we should, then we must ask whether in the case of temporal occasions as well the ontological principle allows that their own decisions can be explanatory of conceptual prehensions not derived from physical prehensions.

(In section 1 above, I have argued that past temporal occasions may also contribute to the formation of the initial aim.

If now we combine this conclusion of section 1 with the discussion of creation in this section, we may say in summary that God always (and some temporal occasions sometimes) is the reason that each new occasion becomes.

Does this mean that the «living immediacy» of temporal occasions is preserved in the consequent nature of God?

We must either reject this doctrine of the causal efficacy of the consequent nature and also affirm that an entirely static God can have particularity of efficacy for each occasion, or else we must recognize that the phases in the concrescence of God are in important respects more analogous to temporal occasions than to phases in the becoming of a single occasion.

Some ordering of eternal objects is possible also in temporal occasions and in principle may have some effectiveness for future occasions.

Time and history are real for him as well as for temporal occasions.

If the dynamic of the relation between God and man can be understood in this way, it is analogous to the dynamic of the relation between at least some temporal occasions and some occasions in their future.

First, it seems that God renders eternal objects effective for actual occasions in a way radically different from that in which temporal occasions make them effective for each other.

I assume, therefore, that the explanation of the derivation from God of the initial aim and of novelty, need not attribute to God's causal efficacy for temporal occasions a function radically different from that exemplified in the interrelationships of other actual entities.

This consequent nature of God is his receptive activity whereby he experiences the temporal occasions of the world.

The difference, the vast difference, is that God envisages and orders all eternal objects, whereas temporal occasions can order only an infinitesimal selection of eternal objects.

The way in which Whitehead conceives of creativity as related to God is not analogous to the relation of God to temporal occasions.

In temporal occasions the initial aim is always an aim at some intensity of feeling both in the occasion itself and in its relevant future.

While in temporal occasions, succession does mean the fading of the occasion as it becomes a part of the past, he is arguing that the counterpart of the occasion in God has a greater unity of life than it had in the temporal world and that in God»... succession does not mean loss of immediate unison.»

And the many temporal occasions giving fluency to the finite world are completed and gain permanence by their everlasting union in the consequent nature of God.

It could still prehend temporal occasions, but they would be immediately (non-temporally) absorbed into the determinate satisfaction, without benefit of any divine temporal determination.

In this final section I will suggest in a tentative manner how the two remaining roles of God (as ontological ground for eternal objects and as source of subjective aims in temporal occasions) could be rendered superfluous in a naturalistic, neo-Whiteheadian, system.

The thrust of the cumulative argument of Cobb's book is that since Whitehead wrote statements that clearly imply that regional inclusion obtains between molecular and electronic occasions, we ought to be receptive to the suggestion that «soul» occasions include the regions of brain occasions and God includes the regions of all temporal occasions, because there is no principle involved in these latter two instances which has not been acknowledged by Whitehead himself in the case of the relations holding between molecular occasions and electronic occasions.

If so, our endeavor becomes once more interpretive, hopefully illuminating such passages as: «In this way God is completed by the individual, fluent satisfactions of finite fact, and the temporal occasions are completed by their everlasting union with their transformed selves, purged into conformation with the eternal order which is the final absolute «wisdom»» (PR 527; italics added).

In Religion in the Making, temporal occasions and God were identified as both being actual entities sharing a common ontological status.

If he did mean to affirm that in God's consequent nature temporal occasions retain their own subjective immediacy, then considerable speculative development would be required to explain it.

Clearly he retained throughout his life the sense that the ultimate fact is the process itself of which God, the eternal objects, and the temporal occasions are all explanatory.

The more normal assumption would be that just as in temporal experience only that which is past is prehended, so also in God's experience temporal occasions are prehended only as they perish.

This might mean, then, that God also prehends temporal occasions in their contemporaneity, and therefore shares the immediacy of every becoming Occasion.

God's prehension of the temporal occasions objectifies them with a completeness necessarily lacking in such prehensions within the temporal world.

At first he had a simple contrast between the «flux» of temporal occasions and the «permanence» of nontemporality, but then it grew into a double problem requiring a consequent temporal nature for God as its solution.

This aim is given to the occasion to determine its limits by the principle of limitation which transcends every temporal occasion and which Whitehead calls God.

The content of a temporal occasion is its antecedent world synthesized and somewhat transformed by a new mode of feeling; the consequent nature of God consists of the temporal occasions transformed by an inclusive mode of feeling derived from his all - embracing primordial nature, so as to be united in a conscious, infinitely wide harmony of feeling which grows without any fading of its members.

But how this is a problem can be seen only after we first descend to the level of an ordinary temporal occasion, A, and ask how it can prehend a past occasion, X, which is part of A's actual world.

The temporal occasion perishes; its divine counterpart does not.

That means that the temporal occasion shares God's appetition for the realization of that possibility in that occasion.

In the succession from a temporal occasion to the divine occasion, the metaphysical conditions are identical to those in the succession from one divine moment to another.

First, God provides each temporal occasion with the initial aim for its becoming (PR 373f.)

In order to include every temporal occasion as it comes into being, the divine satisfaction must be everlasting.

He focuses on the emergence of novelty as it precedes and is presupposed by all conscious reflection and decision, whereas I am speaking of new possibilities introduced by highly reflective consciousness.53 However, I do not wish to press any claim beyond this: Whitehead should not preclude in principle the possibility that a temporal occasion may have toward some eternal object the kind of relation God has toward all.

Not exact matches

Granted, therefore, that God's infinite conceptual valuation of pure possibility may justly be termed «free» since it is «limited by no actuality which it presupposes (PR 524), yet the temporal integrative activity of his consequent nature, whereby he loves particular occasions of the actual world, may also be called «free,» though in a somewhat different sense.

I myself would further argue that the spatio - temporal continuum is itself divided into a myriad number of regions or subflelds of activity, each of which is governed by laws characteristic of the interrelated activity of its constituent occasions from moment to moment.

Other slower - acting occasions such as those constituting human temporal consciousness will attend only to the larger movements taking place in the electromagnetic field because only these larger movements are truly important for their self - constitution.

Lewis S. Ford has addressed himself directly to the claim for nonphysical (but still temporal) successiveness in the genetic process in his article «On Genetic Successiveness: a Third Alternative» (1: 421 - 25).1 Ford begins by pointing out that the differences between phases in a single occasion can not be mere differences in complexity of integration.

Nobo, to be sure, distinguishes the extensive continuum which in itself is eternal and unchanging, from the spatio - temporal continuum which is the extensive continuum as progressively modified by actual occasions occurring in our cosmic epoch (52f).

All the decisions of the consequent nature flow from the primordial nature, and though the former does not fit the present actual occasions into a ready - made pattern of the temporal past (as Ford carefully points out: IPQ 13:356), yet «the weaving of Cod's physical feelings upon his primordial concepts (PR 524) amounts to the emergence into time, as predicates of God's propositional feelings, of the very valuations of his nontemporal decision.

There is a deep cleavage between those who agree with Whitehead in describing God as a single actual entity, nontemporal in his primordial nature and everlasting in his consequent nature (the «entitative» view), and those who prefer with Charles Hartshorne to regard God as a personally ordered temporal society of successive occasions (the «societal» view).

which is his «particular providence for particular occasions» (PR 532); the» «superjective» nature of God is the character of the pragmatic value of his specific satisfaction qualifying the transcendent creativity in the various temporal instances» (PR 135).

Rather, specifically human existence is, in Whitehead's term, a «personal society,» i.e., a temporal sequence of occasions which share, by virtue of inheritance from the earlier to the later, a defining characteristic that makes the man or woman in question just this individual and not some other.