Page History

SCANNED PDF

Wiki MarkupSome of Whitehead's statements on philosophical method are confusing, if not confused. Thus he says, for example, "The main method of philosophy in dealing with its evidence is that of descriptive generalization. . . . Philosophic generalization seizes on those characters \ [_sc_. of fact\] of abiding importance, dismissing the trivial and the evanescent. There is an ascent from a particular fact, or from a species, to the genus exemplified.... Philosophy is the ascent to the generalities with the view of understanding their possibilities of combination" (_AI_: 301 f.).

Surely, the procedure Whitehead speaks of here as "generalization" would be more appropriately described as "analysis"--even as his metaphor of "ascent" seems rather less apt than the metaphor of descent, or of "digging," as Maurice might well have put it. It's one thing to generalize from a particular fact; it's something else again to analyze a particular concept, and, in that way, to analyze meaning, and so also to analyze the necessary conditions of the possibility, or the presuppositions, of meaning. 

...