Current Status

Not Enrolled

Price

You Decide

Get Started

Take this Course

Course Summary

In this six-week course Jay McDaniel will guide students through important passages in Process and Reality, and, along with way, give everyone a basic understanding of sixteen key ideas. Each week he will invite participants to turn to particular passages and offer his understanding of their meaning, followed by open discussion.

Course Description

The process movement is a worldwide phenomenon, consisting of people from many walks of life: teachers, parents, artists, farmers, accountants, and poets. You may be among them. We are all interested in not only comprehending concepts but practicing process thought by living with respect and care for the community of life. We all want to think globally and act locally for the common good of the world and our local communities. We all seek wholeness, strength of beauty and richness of experience, in our relationships with other people, the natural world, the heavens above, and ourselves. We all seek what the Cobb Institute calls spiritual integration.

The process movement is partly, but not exclusively, inspired by the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and a rich but dense book of his called Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Its difficulty is well-known, and the purpose of this six-week course is to work through important passages in the text, and, along with way, give everyone a basic understanding of sixteen key ideas: process, creativity, concrescence, subjective immediacy, transition, the principle of relativity, the ontological principle, the reformed subjectivist principle, objective immortality, actual occasions, eternal objects, prehension, subjective form, nexus, eternal objects, contrasts, and God.

“If we want a society in which the sense of belonging is strong, people are concerned for one another, and there is strong commitment to the common good, we need a metaphysics that shows that we are in fact part of larger societies and have no existence apart from our relations to others.”
-John Cobb

We will move slowly, as if we were taking a relaxed walk in a neighborhood, proceeding passage by passage, for six weeks. At the end of the walk participants will have a sense of the overall gestalt (organized whole) of Whitehead’s cosmology, and they will be comfortable with some of the technical vocabulary. They will have confidence in their own understanding of this key text.

In the spirit of Whitehead, lessons will be given week by week, relative to where we are in the walk at the end of any given session. The future is open, of course, and the next step depends on where we are in the walk. Each week the facilitator – Dr. Jay McDaniel – will invite participants to turn to particular pages and he will offer his understanding of the meaning of the passage, followed by open discussion. At the end he will give the readings for the next week. There are no lessons for the first session, but bring your book!

Course Materials

The primary text for the course will be Process and Reality (purchase here). Thus, as we enjoy the walk, it is important that everyone have a copy of the book at their side online, so that together we can turn to texts.

Supplementary Resources