Process and Reality

of experience, which appears in his Essays on Truth and Reality. His insistence on "feeling" is very consistent with my own conclusions. This entire metaphysical position is an unspoken rejection of the doctrine of "vacuous actuality" vacuous actuality: the idea that material things exist without any internal experience or "feeling." Whitehead argues that everything has some form of internal experience.

The fifth part of this book is concerned with the final interpretation of the ultimate way the problem of the universe—the cosmological problem—should be understood. It answers the question: what does it all come to? In this part, the closeness to Bradley's ideas is evident. Indeed, if this cosmology is considered successful, it is natural at this point to ask whether the type of thought involved is actually a transformation of the main doctrines of Absolute Idealism Absolute Idealism: a school of philosophy, including thinkers like Bradley, which holds that ultimate reality is an all-encompassing mental or spiritual whole onto a realistic foundation.

These lectures will be best understood by noting the following list of common habits of thought, which are rejected, specifically regarding their influence on philosophy:

(i) The distrust of speculative philosophy speculative philosophy: the effort to create a logical, necessary system of general ideas that explains every element of our experience.
(ii) The trust in language as a perfectly adequate way to express philosophical statements.
(iii) The style of philosophical thought that involves "faculty-psychology" faculty-psychology: an older theory that the mind is divided into separate, independent powers like "will," "reason," and "memory".
(iv) The reliance on the "subject-predicate" form of expression subject-predicate: a linguistic structure (e.g., "the leaf is green") that Whitehead believes leads us to mistakenly think of the world as made of isolated objects with independent qualities.
(v) The sensationalist doctrine of perception sensationalist doctrine: the belief that all knowledge comes only from raw, isolated sensory data like "red" or "loud".
(vi) The doctrine of vacuous actuality.
(vii) The Kantian doctrine of the objective world as a theoretical construct built from purely subjective experience.
(viii) Arbitrary deductions used in "arguments from absurdity" original: ex absurdo; a method of proving a point by showing that the opposite leads to a ridiculous or impossible conclusion.
(ix) The belief that logical inconsistencies can indicate anything other than some prior errors in thinking.

Because it so readily accepts some, or all, of these nine myths and flawed procedures, much of nineteenth-century philosophy makes itself irrelevant to the stubborn, ordinary facts of daily life.

The positive teaching of these lectures is concerned with the becoming, the being, and the relatedness of "actual entities." An "actual entity" is a "real thing" original: res vera in the...