ABSTRACT

Alfred North Whitehead is arguably the most prominent advocate of the panpsychism (or panexperientialism) with which Nagel, like most of his colleagues, fails to seriously engage. This chapter offers a wide-ranging presentation of Whitehead’s position, taking David Ray Griffin’s defense of it as its point of departure. While Griffin does a good job showing the relevance and richness of ideas found in Whitehead’s so-called “metaphysical” phase, and in Process and Reality in particular, many of the hard questions remain unsettled and unanswered – e.g., do capacities for experience go all the way down, meaning in the inorganic as well as in the organic? Though Whitehead makes progress over his contemporary colleagues in reversing the long-standing primacy of epistemology (questions about knowledge, as to be had by human subjects) over ontology (questions about what is real, about how different beings – all across the board – persist in their distinct modes of being), his “inner physics” is hard to grasp; for all its boldness, it remains speculative and excessively abstract, despite its stated aim of being down to earth as the philosophy of organism.