David Breeden is speaking all week about Process Theology and Process Philosophy.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, and this is Coffee and Wisdom.This week we’ve been looking at Process Philosophy and Process Theology and what all of that means now. And this is all based on one book, Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality, which was published in 1929. It was based on a series of lectures he gave in the late 1920s at Harvard. He was British but came to Harvard and then one of his grad students was Charles Hartshorne. We’ve also looked at in terms of what he did with going into something called Process Theology. Whitehead himself was a deist, probably. He was very vague about as theism if he had it one. But Charles Hartshorne was very much involved in the idea of finding a God in the process. Now, Hartshorne did not pretend to be Christian. He was a theologian and he was a theist and did go to Unitarian Universalist congregations. So what we need to look at today, first off, is the idea of process for philosophy itself. Yeah, there’s a lot of words here. This is from a Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy, one of the real central online things that you can look up and pretty well get just about anything in terms of philosophy.I’ll show you another source of the best process philosophies. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is based on the premise that being is dynamic and I’ve mentioned that before, being is becoming being as dynamic and that the dynamic nature of being should be the primary focus of any comprehensive philosophical account of reality and our place within it, even though we experience our world and ourselves, is continuously changing. Western metaphysics has long been obsessed with describing reality as an assembly of static individuals whose dynamic features are either taken to be mere appearances or ontologically secondary and derivative. We’re going to run into that term ontological several times today. That is the study of being itself. That’s a Greek term, ontose for being. But you get the idea. Here is what we’re looking at is a way to talk about a new way of talking about objects in the world. Are they solid objects? And should we deal with them as solid objects or should we deal with them as processes? And that’s a scientific explanation. And if it works, so let’s see what they say.For process philosophers, the adventure of philosophy begins with a set of problems that traditional metaphysics marginalizes or even sidesteps altogether what is dynamic or becoming. If it is the way we experience reality, how should we interpret this metaphysically?Now, I would quickly mention that in terms of of serious philosophy, the term metaphysics means that which does not change. It’s not about supernaturalism or anything of that, but which we kind of in popular use of the term we kind of used. But in serious philosophy, metaphysics simply means that which does not change. So what is DII and dynamicists? You’re going to see very weird uses of words in Process Philosophy because they’re trying to express something that has not been expressed before. Now, given its current role as a rival to the dominant substance geared paradigm of Western metaphysics Process Philosophy has the overarching task of establishing the following three claims. So if we’re going to talk about it seriously, these things must be established. Number one, the basic assumption of the substance paradigm, i.e. metaphysics based on static entities such as substance’s objects, states of affairs or instantaneous stages are dispensable theoretical presuppositions rather than laws of thought. Now, if you know some philosophy,