Zugl. Diss. Univ. Frankfurt (Main), 2007.

Thesis--Columbia University. / Bibliography: p. [201]-204.

Diss.--Université d'Ottawa, 1994. Titre de soutenance : Les concepts de Dieu dans "Process and Reality" de Alfred North Whitehead. / Bibliogr. p. 275-293.

<p> This is a study of the role that creativity plays in the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead ( 1861-194 7). As the title generally indicates, there are two parts to this project. The first part develops an understanding of Whitehead's metaphysics through the careful analysis of two key texts, namely Religion in the Making (1926), and Process and Reality (1929). The second part examines and carefully analyses the role that creativity plays within this metaphysic. The second part focuses on two questions. The first question considers the ontological status which creativity requires to perform the role which it is given within the metaphysical system. The second question discusses implications of this status for creativity's relationship to God. This second section further discusses the implications of such an understanding of "process theology" for Christian theology in general. Specifically it comments on the various responses of theology to creatio ex nihilo and the problem of evil.</p> <p> This thesis concludes that creativity functions as an ultimate explanatory principle in Whitehead's metaphysics. In this role, creativity is monistic, not in the sense of an ontological monism, but in the sense that it is 'one' rather than 'many'. Creativity cannot be ontologically monistic because it is not actual. However, since it is indeterminate it must be one rather than many. In addition creativity and God must be considered distinct elements in Whitehead's metaphysics. Their roles cannot be collapsed into each other, although it is possible to speak of an intimate association between them. In this sense, creativity is the ground of God and God is necessarily creative. Finally, this thesis demonstrates that there is room for further dialogue between process theology and a more orthodox version of Christian theology especially regarding the questions of the creation of the world and theodicy.</p> / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

Thesis -- Catholic University of America, 1946. / Description based on print version record. Bibliography: p. 167-169.

Thesis--Frankfurt am Main.

<p> Science has exerted a tremendous influence on modern thought. This occurrence has brought with it its share of benefits and problems. Science has offered humankind the growing ability to understand and master nature. This benefit has also brought with it the critical problem of environmental destruction. Within its philosophical roots, science is tied to a cosmology that has alienated humanity from its 'spiritual' experience. This includes aesthetic and theological experience. Two extremes choices are possible: either to reject the scientific cosmology or to reject 'spirituality' as central to the functioning of reality. For those who wish to include the integrity of all human experience in a cosmology, the hope of synthesizing the scientific with the 'spiritual' stands as an ideal.</p> <p> The thought of Alfred North Whitehead is an attempt at such a synthesis of thought. This thesis examines Whitehead's metaphysical synthesis. It begins, in the first and second chapters, with an examination of what Whitehead understands as the problem. The first chapter deals with his description of the mechanist-materialist understanding of nature. The second chapter shows the deep problems which make such an understanding untenable. In the third chapter we explicate Whitehead's attempt at a more plausible metaphysical synthesis. Lastly, we apply Whitehead's thought to questions of ecological ethics. In this chapter we note how reintegrating the idea of a living nature occupied by things with 'inherent value' with a renewed assessment of the importance of human aesthetic and theistic experience, form together a mandate for the ethical treatment of nature.</p> / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

The thesis examines the learning experience of Muay Thai training and competition through an interpretation of Whiteheads’ theory of learning. This examination is undertaken through a reflection on training and competing in Canada and Thailand during the 2009-2011 period. I will offer an analysis of learning Muay Thai through an interpretation of Whiteheads learning theory and educational philosophy. This thesis rejects learning as a product of hoarding information and recommends education must facilitate concrete and abstract experiences of the principles of freedom and discipline to allow for the development of wisdom and courage in learners. This paper argues that expressing oneself through Muay Thai facilitates non-violent dispositions by allowing for ‘rhythmic’ experiences which enable the growth of active wisdom and courage through periodic tests of training and competition. By providing an autoethnographic account of learning Muay Thai and a theoretical discussion on learning the author will provide a subsequent interpretation of Whiteheads’ theories applied to Muay Thai training and competition. This paper will also consider the educational merit of Muay Thai for marginalized identities as a consequence of developing active wisdom and courage.

The post-secular event within which we live is occasioned as the limit of the secular project. The secular project meets its limit in attempting to separate a religious private sphere from a public sphere while at the same time repeating as a demand a religious subjectivation of the public sphere: demanding conformity to a simple subjectivity, producing a world of simple subjects through a theologically determined metaphysics of conversion. In this latter demand secularism enforces a simplicity of its subjects and its world. Yet this simplicity cannot be taken up into or as life. To genuinely live and think the post-secular requires, then, not simply a resistance to the secular but a resistance to simplicity, developing ways of becoming otherwise than simply and of producing a world other than that which conforms to a metaphysics of conversion. This dissertation proposes to meet the requirements of the post-secular event by developing a post-secular political ontology drawn from the work of Judith Butler and Alfred North Whitehead. Read through and out of these two philosophers of becoming is a post-secular political ontology that is embedded within a metaphysics of creativity, a metaphysic that is itself already infected by the political. At the intersection of the work of Butler and Whitehead a metaphysic arises that is a systematic discourse of the political. From this metaphysic a political ontology is developed. This political ontology begins with a suspicion of grammar as a suspicion of a subject-predicate form of thought that grounds ontologies of substance. With this suspicion, being is allowed to unfold as its becoming, particularly as a becoming material, so that actuality is a becoming materiality. This is also a relational becoming of feeling, becoming as a process of intensive feeling that can never be finalized for itself, always suffering its own continual downfall. Finally, but without finality, actuality is a becoming of creativity, opened by a divine violence that ruptures history by the possible, leading to a post-secular political ontology of the future.

Thesis--Lille III. / Bibliography: p. [727]-757.