The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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I can say every bit as truly and insistently as Whitehead that "all final individual actualities have the metaphysical character of occasions of experience" (AI: 284), or that "the whole universe consists of elements disclosed in the analysis of the experiences of subjects" (PRc: 166 [252]). 

This I can do because, in my view, as in Whitehead's, all final individual actualities do have "the metaphysical character of occasions of experience." Where we differ is only in what we take their "metaphysical character" to include: Whitehead holding, presumably, that it includes "experience" in some sense of the word, while I make no such claim. "The metaphysical character" of occasions of experience, I maintain, is not their experience, but their concreteness, and thus their being instances of the same process of concrescence of which all concretes, and so "all final individual actualities," are also instances. But, so far as I can see, there is no valid inference from the fact that all occasions of experience are concretes to the conclusion that all concretes are occasions of experience. 

And so, too with the other claim: "the whole universe" does consist of "elements disclosed in the analysis of the experiences of subjects." But what, exactly, are these "elements"? Do they include "experience" in some sense or other? Or is what is "elemental," or "elementary," in the experiences of subjects simply their concreteness, their being instances of concrescence, and so on?

21 October 2000

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