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Questions:
- If it's true that "no two contemporary occasions are derived from a past wholly in common" (AI: 259 f.), how can it also be true that "human experience is an act of self-origination including the whole [sic!] of nature" (290)?
- That occasions performing some common function in some percipient experience may thereby acquire the unity of a group for that percipient seems clear enough. But, surely, whether or not occasions constitute a nexus is independent of their performing some common function in some percipient experience. If any set of occasions in any way exhibits the basic property of "mutual immanence," it is a group – and, in particular, is the kind of group termed "nexus." And so, too, with other kinds of groups – societies, personally ordered societies and so on. So how can Whitehead say what he says in the opening sentence of Ch. XIII: The Grouping of Occasions?
20 October 2000