By Schubert Ogden
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-- "Every effect is in some degree, however slight, an 'emergent whole.' Emergence is no special case, but the general principle of process, although it may have privileged instances in which the extent of novelty (not determined by the conditions) is unusually pronounced."
6 \ -\- "Let us imagine \ [_sic_\!\] the universe as a vast system of experiencing individuals on innumerable levels," "\[e\]ach such individual \ [being\] in some measure free," since "experiencing is a partly free act." \ -\- I have no difficulty _imagining_ this; my problem is with _conceiving_ it\! Wiki Markup
7 -- Hartshorne speaks of "the many being the previous acts of freedom." But, of course, "the many" include objects that were never "acts of freedom," such as, e.g., the abstract structure of creativity, or of concrescence, itself (cf. 14). Similarly, his answer to the question, "What, then, are the objects which are there to be experienced?" -- "Simply, previous cases of experience." -- collapses the distinction between "entity" and "actual entity, or "concrete entity."
unmigrated-wiki- markup\-\- "\[I\]n this philosophy, there is nothing in the world but creative experience." \ -\- But, then, Hartshorne's usual apology for psychicalism, according to which _not_ "everything is psychical," is undercut. What he means, obviously, is that "there is nothing _concrete (and singular)_ in the world but creative experience."
26 -- "At least one thing is true of any entity whatever, that it can be thought, experienced, and valued." -- This, clearly, is Hartshorne's way of taking account of what Scotus means by "covertible properties."
33 \ -\- "\[T\]he pure concept of experience" / "a clear concept of experience as such." Wiki Markup
34 \ -\- "\[T\]he very definition of contingency," i.e., of being contingent, is "cuts off extra-linguistic possibilities."unmigrated Wiki Markup
-wiki- markup\-\- "\[O\]ne mark of a metaphysical statement \ [is\] that its denial is verbal only, signifying nothing beyond language." \ -\- By "verbal only" I understand "purely linguistic, not an objective possibility at all." \ -\- Another such "mark of a metaphysical statement," presumably, is that "\[i\]ts meanings must be so general that we are in effect using them even when we think we are not" (23).
46 -- There is a distinction to be made between "things or events which become and are relative" and "becoming and relativity as such."
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233 – Hartshorne invariably begs the question in favor of his ontological idealism or psychicalism. "Total independence entails ignorance," he says. I should say, instead, "Total independence entails total lack of internal relatedness (more exactly, specific or determinate, as distinct from generic or indeterminate, internal relatedness). Thus his statement here is a parallel to many others, such as "To be relative is to take other things into account, to allow them to make a difference to oneself, in some sense to care about them" (55).
240 \ -\- Note the explicit reference here to "\[God's\] own consciousness." Cf. 94 f., where Hartshorne speaks of "God's super-linguistic consciousness" and of "the fully conscious divine sanity," as distinct from "the merely pragmatic or emotional sanity of the other animals" (or "the sanity inherent in life as such") and the "linguistic" form of sanity that a good, or balanced, metaphysics formulates. Wiki Markup
249 f. \ -\- A contingently existing God is "the most irrational case" of such existence that can be conceived. "\[God\] is, \ [God\] might not have been, nothing explains or has in any way influenced or helped to bring about \ [God's\] existence. And if \ [God\] fails to exist, nothing explains or has caused that. Thus an uncaused yet contingent entity is an exception to any usual rule of intelligibility. (By such a rule \ [is not meant\] determinism. All events or contingent things are influenced, conditioned by causes, whether or not they are fully determined by them.) Opponents of Anselm keep accusing him of rule breaking. But what about the rule that the contingent must have causal conditions?" Wiki Markup