No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2022
The article by Mr. David L. Miller, called ‘Purpose, Design and Physical Relativity', in the July 1936 issue of Philosophy of Science, consists mainly of a commentary on the development of Whitehead's thought from the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge to Process and Reality. Now most criticisms of Whitehead so far published have been from realists of the anti-metaphysical Cambridge school, complaining that his later works retract the teaching of his earlier works on the philosophy of natural science; and this complaint is raised quite unjustly, because a careful reading of the earlier works will show that there is nothing in them that precludes the logical possibility of a metaphysics of nature such as Whitehead expounded later. We should be grateful for any comment on Whitehead which does not repeat this hoary error. But unfortunately two opposed misinterpretations do not together make a correct interpretation. The opposite distortion of Whitehead is effected by those readers who, having found that the earlier books showed genius but were, alas, too much under the influence of ill-advised realist dogma, proceed to construe the succession of later books as the gradual self-correction of the great man towards a mature judgment which is in full accord with the reader's own. Of this distortion, I am afraid, Mr. Miller has given us an example.
1 Following Mr. Miller's example, I shall use the first words of their titles as abbreviations for Whitehead's Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge, Concept of Nature, Principle of Relativity, Science and the Modern World, and Process and Reality.
2 A phrase from the Preface to Enquiry.
3 Enquiry, Preface.
4 Concept, p. 4.
5 Concept, p. 5.
6 Miller, p. 268.
7 Concept, p. 48.
8 Trans. Royal Society, 1906, (Series A).
9 Miller, p. 273.
10 Miller, p. 272.
11 To avoid misleading readers of Mr. Moore's article, I add the observation that his position shows more of compatibility than of incompatibility with Whitehead's. This is because both are realists, in the sense in which Mr. Moore speaks of realism. And the only teleology which Mr. Moore discusses is an ‘extranatural’ teleology, arbitrarily and externally operating on the system of nature. Any notion of that type would of course be rejected by Whitehead as well; in fact, such notions are hardly worth discussing. The important, Whiteheadian arguments for teleology are thus not touched by Mr. Moore.
12 Miller, p. 273.
13 Miller, p. 272.
14 See Chap. I of Process, Part I.
15 See Part IV of Process.
16 Science, p. 185.
17 Miller, p. 272.
18 Miller, p. 268.
19 See Enquiry, Preface. On p. 3 of this Discussion I have tried to explain what ‘our perplexities’ were.
20 See Concept, pp. 28, 32.
21 Miller, p. 284.
22 Science, p. 101.
23 See the paper on ‘Time', read before the Sixth International Congress of Philosophy, Harvard, 1926.