Praesens de futuris

Whitehead on how to be going to move forward into the future

Gottfried Heinemann

pp. 17-32

in: Axiomathes 29 (1), 2019.

Abstract

Whitehead's metaphysics involves an event ontology. Fundamental—that is, in Whitehead's language: "actual"—entities are events, described as acts of experience. It also involves presentism since past events have perished and future events do not yet exist according to Whitehead. Hence the question alluded to in the title of the present paper: "How are you going to move forward into the future?… If you conceive it under the guise of a temporal transition into the non-existent, you can't get going." (See T2 below) I will argue that, to a large extent, Whitehead's metaphysics is designed to answer that question.

Cited authors

Whitehead Alfred North