title: Saski Baskonia

text: In the 2017–18 season, the club advanced to the playoffs for the third consecutive year and put up a major fight against Fenerbahçe before falling in four games. None of that was looking likely when the Basque club suffered a shocking start, losing its first four games to signal the departure from the coaching position of club legend Pablo Prigioni. The man appointed to turn things around was Pedro Martínez, who immediately effected a remarkable revival as Baskonia won four of its next five games to ignite its challenge. A mid-season dip left the side in the bottom half of the standings heading into the final few weeks of the regular season, but then came a dramatic surge in form that yielded six consecutive win, with the consistent excellence of versatile big man Tornike Shengelia earning him the monthly MVP award for March. A top half finish was sealed with a home win over Maccabi Tel Aviv in Round 29, and although disappointment followed against Fenerbahçe, that playoff berth was a just reward for Baskonia's typically spirited recovery from its slow start. The team was also highly competitive on the domestic front, earning a second-place finish in the Spanish League after pushing Real Madrid hard in the finals.


title: Saski Baskonia

text: The 2018–19 season was an important season for the club with the Final Four taking place on its home court. A slow start caused Baskonia to part ways with head coach Pedro Martínez and bring back club legend Velimir Perasović to replace him. Baskonia kept struggling on the road, but won 10 of its last 11 regular season games – including victories against playoff-bound teams CSKA Moscow, Panathinaikos and Real Madrid – to reach the playoffs from sixth place. Baskonia managed to do something no team had done in over a decade – steal home-court advantage in a playoff series against CSKA, but the Russian powerhouse recovered with back-to-back wins at Buesa Arena to qualify for the Final Four and eventually win the title. Vincent Poirier was chosen to the All-EuroLeague Second Team. Baskonia had early exits in its two main domestic competitions; it lost against Joventut in the Copa del Rey quarterfinals and against Zaragoza in the Spanish League quarterfinals.


title: Saski Baskonia

text: On 30 June 2020, ten years after their last title, Baskonia won the 2019–20 ACB season, marked by the COVID-19 pandemic.


title: Saski Baskonia

text: The club was often referred to for years as TAU Cerámica, a Spanish brand name of ceramics manufacturer TAULELL, which name sponsored the club from 1987 to 2009. Originally, TAULELL used another of its brand names, Taugrés, as the name of the team, before changing the name to TAU Cerámica in 1997. TAU, Taugrés and TAU Vitoria were also frequently used to refer to the team. Baskonia, Saski Baskonia, and Saski Baskonia, S.A.D. refer to the name of the actual sports club itself. In 2009, the Spanish credit union Caja Laboral became the new name sponsor of the club and increased the amount of money that the name sponsor contributes to the sports club's budget. In 2016, Laboral Kutxa end its sponsorship naming to Baskonia.


title: Saski Baskonia

text: Since 1991, Baskonia has played its home games at the Fernando Buesa Arena, which has a seating capacity of 15,504 people for basketball games. The arena was originally called the Pabellón Araba, from 1991 to 2000. The arena was extensively renovated and expanded in the year 2012.


title: Saski Baskonia

text: The arena hosted the 1996 FIBA European Cup Final, in which Baskonia won the title and also hosted the 2010 Eurocup Finals, before hosting the EuroLeague Final Four in 2019.


title: Saski Baskonia

text: Despite not having retired any number in its history, three of the club's most notable players have a shirt with the number they wore in their time with the team hung in the Fernando Buesa Arena. These are Pablo Prigioni (#5), whose shirt was put on display in 2017; Igor Rakočević (#8) and Sergi Vidal (#9), who followed suit in 2020.


title: Saski Baskonia

text: Baskonia B is the reserve team of Baskonia. It currently plays in Liga EBA, the fourth tier of Spanish basketball.


title: Tragicomedy

text: Tragicomedy is a literary genre that blends aspects of both tragic and comic forms. Most often seen in dramatic literature, the term can describe either a tragic play which contains enough comic elements to lighten the overall mood or a serious play with a happy ending. Tragicomedy, as its name implies, invokes the intended response of both the tragedy and the comedy in the audience, the former being a genre based on human suffering that invokes an accompanying catharsis and the latter being a genre intended to be humorous or amusing by inducing laughter.


title: Tragicomedy

text: There is no concise formal definition of tragicomedy from the classical age. It appears that the Greek philosopher Aristotle had something like the Renaissance meaning of the term (that is, a serious action with a happy ending) in mind when, in "Poetics", he discusses tragedy with a dual ending. In this respect, a number of Greek and Roman plays, for instance "Alcestis", may be called tragicomedies, though without any definite attributes outside of plot. The word itself originates with the Roman comic playwright Plautus, who coined the term somewhat facetiously in the prologue to his play "Amphitryon". The character Mercury, sensing the indecorum of the inclusion of both kings and gods alongside servants in a comedy, declares that the play had better be a "tragicomoedia":


title: Tragicomedy

text: Two figures helped to elevate tragicomedy to the status of a regular genre, by which is meant one with its own set of rigid rules. First was Giovanni Battista Giraldi Cinthio, a dramatist working in the mid-sixteenth century who developed a treatise on drama modeled on Roman comedies and tragedies as opposed to early Greek-based treatises that became the model for Italian dramatists at the time. He argued for a version of tragicomedy where a tragic story was told with a happy or comic ending ("tragedia a lieto fine)," which he thought were better suited for staged performances as opposed to tragedies with unhappy endings which he thought were better when read. Even more important was Giovanni Battista Guarini. Guarini's "Il Pastor Fido", published in 1590, provoked a fierce critical debate in which Guarini's spirited defense of generic innovation eventually carried the day. Guarini's tragicomedy offered modulated action that never drifted too far either to comedy or tragedy, mannered characters, and a pastoral setting. All three became staples of continental tragicomedy for a century and more.


title: Tragicomedy

text: In England, where practice ran ahead of theory, the situation was quite different. In the sixteenth century, "tragicomedy" meant the native sort of romantic play that violated the unities of time, place, and action, that glibly mixed high- and low-born characters, and that presented fantastic actions. These were the features Philip Sidney deplored in his complaint against the "mungrell Tragy-comedie" of the 1580s, and of which Shakespeare's Polonius offers famous testimony: "The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individuable, or poem unlimited: Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light. For the law of writ and the liberty, these are the only men." Some aspects of this romantic impulse remain even in the work of more sophisticated playwrights: Shakespeare's last plays, which may well be called tragicomedies, have often been called romances.


title: Tragicomedy

text: By the early Stuart period, some English playwrights had absorbed the lessons of the Guarini controversy. John Fletcher's "The Faithful Shepherdess", an adaptation of Guarini's play, was produced in 1608. In the printed edition, Fletcher offered an interesting definition of the term, worth quoting at length: "A tragi-comedie is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some neere it, which is inough to make it no comedie." Fletcher's definition focuses primarily on events: a play's genre is determined by whether or not people die in it, and in a secondary way on how close the action comes to a death. But, as Eugene Waith showed, the tragicomedy Fletcher developed in the next decade also had unifying stylistic features: sudden and unexpected revelations, outré plots, distant locales, and a persistent focus on elaborate, artificial rhetoric.


title: Tragicomedy

text: Some of Fletcher's contemporaries, notably Philip Massinger and James Shirley, wrote popular tragicomedies. Richard Brome also essayed the form, but with less success. And many of their contemporary writers, ranging from John Ford to Lodowick Carlell to Sir Aston Cockayne, made attempts in the genre.


title: Tragicomedy

text: Tragicomedy remained fairly popular up to the closing of the theaters in 1642, and Fletcher's works were popular in the Restoration as well. The old styles were cast aside as tastes changed in the eighteenth century; the "tragedy with a happy ending" eventually developed into melodrama, in which form it still flourishes.


title: Tragicomedy

text: "Landgartha" (1640) by Henry Burnell, the first play by an Irish playwright to be performed in an Irish theatre, was explicitly described by its author as a tragicomedy. Critical reaction to the play was universally hostile, partly it seems because the ending was neither happy nor unhappy. Burnell in his introduction to the printed edition of the play attacked his critics for their ignorance, pointing out that as they should know perfectly well, many plays are neither tragedy nor comedy, but "something between".


title: Tragicomedy

text: Criticism that developed after the Renaissance stressed the thematic and formal aspects of tragicomedy, rather than plot. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing defined it as a mixture of emotions in which "seriousness stimulates laughter, and pain pleasure." Tragicomedy's affinity with satire and "dark" comedy have suggested a tragicomic impulse in modern theatre with Luigi Pirandello who influenced many playwrights including Samuel Beckett and Tom Stoppard. Also it can be seen in absurdist drama. Friedrich Dürrenmatt, the Swiss dramatist, suggested that tragicomedy was the inevitable genre for the twentieth century; he describes his play "The Visit" (1956) as a tragicomedy. Tragicomedy is a common genre in post-World War II British theatre, with authors as varied as Samuel Beckett, Tom Stoppard, John Arden, Alan Ayckbourn and Harold Pinter writing in this genre. Vladimir Nabokov's postmodern 1962 novel "Pale Fire" is a tragicomedy preoccupied with Elizabethan drama.


title: Tragicomedy

text: American writers of the metamodernist and postmodernist movements have made use of tragicomedy and/or gallows humor. A notable example of a metamodernist tragicomedy is David Foster Wallace's 1996 magnum opus, "Infinite Jest". Wallace writes of comedic elements of living in a halfway house (i.e. "some people really do look like rodents"), a place steeped in human tragedy and suffering. Modern television series including "Succession", "Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul," "Fleabag", "I May Destroy You", "BoJack Horseman", "Barry", "Made for Love", and "The White Lotus" have been described as tragicomedies.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Alfred North Whitehead (15 February 1861 – 30 December 1947) was an English mathematician and philosopher. He is best known as the defining figure of the philosophical school known as process philosophy, which today has found application to a wide variety of disciplines, including ecology, theology, education, physics, biology, economics, and psychology, among other areas.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: In his early career Whitehead wrote primarily on mathematics, logic, and physics. His most notable work in these fields is the three-volume "Principia Mathematica" (1910–1913), which he wrote with former student Bertrand Russell. "Principia Mathematica" is considered one of the twentieth century's most important works in mathematical logic, and placed 23rd in a list of the top 100 English-language nonfiction books of the twentieth century by Modern Library.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Beginning in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Whitehead gradually turned his attention from mathematics to philosophy of science, and finally to metaphysics. He developed a comprehensive metaphysical system which radically departed from most of Western philosophy. Whitehead argued that reality consists of processes rather than material objects, and that processes are best defined by their relations with other processes, thus rejecting the theory that reality is fundamentally constructed by bits of matter that exist independently of one another. Today Whitehead's philosophical works – particularly "Process and Reality" – are regarded as the foundational texts of process philosophy.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Whitehead's process philosophy argues that "there is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have consequences for the world around us." For this reason, one of the most promising applications of Whitehead's thought in recent years has been in the area of ecological civilization and environmental ethics pioneered by John B. Cobb.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Alfred North Whitehead was born in Ramsgate, Kent, England, in 1861. His father, Alfred Whitehead, became an Anglican minister after being headmaster of Chatham House Academy, a school for boys previously headed by Alfred's father, Thomas Whitehead. Whitehead himself recalled both of them as being very successful school masters, with his grandfather being the more "remarkable" man.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Whitehead's mother was Maria Sarah Buckmaster. Her maternal great grandmother was Jane North (1776-1847); whose maiden surname was given to Whitehead, and several other members of his family over time. His mother, Maria Buckmaster had eleven siblings. The son of her brother Thomas, Walter Selby Buckmaster, was twice an Olympics silver medal winner for polo (1900, 1908) for Britain, and is said to be "one of the finest polo players England has ever produced" . Whitehead does not appear to have been close to his mother, although he and Evelyn (full name: Evelyn Ada Maud Rice Willoughby Wade), whom he married in 1890, are recorded in the English Census of 1891 as living with Alfred's mother and father. Lowe notes that there appears to have been mutual dislike between Whitehead's wife, Evelyn, and his mother, Maria.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Griffin relates how Bertrand Russell, a colleague and collaborator of Whitehead, was a very close friend of Whitehead and of his wife, Evelyn. Griffin retells Russell's story of how, one evening in 1901, "they found Evelyn Whitehead in the middle of what appeared to be a dangerous and acutely painful angina attack. ... [but] It seems that she suffered from a psychosomatic disorder ... [and] the danger was illusory." Griffin posits that Russell exaggerated the drama of her illness, and that both Evelyn and Russell were habitually given to melodrama. Intensity of emotion was encourgaged by their avant garde associates in the turbulent Bloomsbury Group which "discussed aesthetic and philosophical questions in a spirit of agnosticism and were strongly influenced by G.E. Moore’s "Principia Ethica" (1903) and by A.N. Whitehead’s and Bertrand Russell’s "Principia Mathematica" (1910–13), in the light of which they searched for definitions of the good, the true, and the beautiful "


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Alfred's brother Henry became Bishop of Madras and wrote the closely observed ethnographic account "Village Gods of South-India" (Calcutta: Association Press, 1921).


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Whitehead was educated at Sherborne, a prominent English public school, where he excelled in sports and mathematics and was head prefect of his class.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: In 1880, he began attending Trinity College, Cambridge, and studied mathematics. His academic advisor was Edward Routh. He earned his B.A. from Trinity in 1884, writing his dissertation on James Clerk Maxwell's "A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism", and graduated as fourth wrangler.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Elected a fellow of Trinity in 1884, Whitehead would teach and write on mathematics and physics at the college until 1910, spending the 1890s writing his "Treatise on Universal Algebra" (1898), and the 1900s collaborating with his former pupil, Bertrand Russell, on the first edition of "Principia Mathematica". He was a Cambridge Apostle.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: In 1910, Whitehead resigned his senior lectureship in mathematics at Trinity and moved to London without first obtaining another job. After being unemployed for a year, he accepted a position as lecturer in applied mathematics and mechanics at University College London, but was passed over a year later for the Goldsmid Chair of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics, a position for which he had hoped to be seriously considered.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: In 1914, Whitehead accepted a position as professor of applied mathematics at the newly chartered Imperial College London, where his old friend Andrew Forsyth had recently been appointed chief professor of mathematics.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: In 1918, Whitehead's academic responsibilities began to seriously expand as he accepted a number of high administrative positions within the University of London system, of which Imperial College London was a member at the time. He was elected dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of London in late 1918 (a post he held for four years), a member of the University of London's Senate in 1919, and chairman of the Senate's Academic (leadership) Council in 1920, a post which he held until he departed for America in 1924. Whitehead was able to exert his newfound influence to successfully lobby for a new history of science department, help establish a Bachelor of Science degree (previously only Bachelor of Arts degrees had been offered), and make the school more accessible to less wealthy students.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Toward the end of his time in England, Whitehead turned his attention to philosophy. Though he had no advanced training in philosophy, his philosophical work soon became highly regarded. After publishing "The Concept of Nature" in 1920, he served as president of the Aristotelian Society from 1922 to 1923.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: In 1924, Henry Osborn Taylor invited the 63-year-old Whitehead to join the faculty at Harvard University as a professor of philosophy. The Whiteheads would spend the rest of their lives in the United States.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: During his time at Harvard, Whitehead produced his most important philosophical contributions. In 1925, he wrote "Science and the Modern World", which was immediately hailed as an alternative to the Cartesian dualism then prevalent in popular science. Lectures from 1927 to 1928, were published in 1929 as a book named "Process and Reality", which has been compared to Immanuel Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason".


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: In 1890, Whitehead married Evelyn Wade, an Irishwoman raised in France; they had a daughter, Jessie, and two sons, Thomas and Eric. Thomas followed his father to Harvard in 1931, to teach at the Business School. Eric died in action at the age of 19, while serving in the Royal Flying Corps during World War I.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: From 1910, the Whiteheads had a cottage in the village of Lockeridge, near Marlborough, Wiltshire; from there he completed "Principia Mathematica".


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: The Whiteheads remained in the United States after moving to Harvard in 1924. Alfred retired from Harvard in 1937 and remained in Cambridge, Massachusetts, until his death on 30 December 1947.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: The two-volume biography of Whitehead by Victor Lowe is the most definitive presentation of the life of Whitehead. However, many details of Whitehead's life remain obscure because he left no "Nachlass" (personal archive); his family carried out his instructions that all of his papers be destroyed after his death. Additionally, Whitehead was known for his "almost fanatical belief in the right to privacy," and for writing very few personal letters of the kind that would help to gain insight on his life. Wrote Lowe in his preface, "No professional biographer in his right mind would touch him."


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Led by Executive Editor Brian G. Henning and General Editor George R. Lucas Jr., the Whitehead Research Project of the Center for Process Studies is currently working on a critical edition of Whitehead's published and unpublished works. The first volume of the "Edinburgh Critical Edition of the Complete Works of Alfred North Whitehead" was published in 2017 by Paul A. Bogaard and Jason Bell as "The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead, 1924–1925: The Philosophical Presuppositions of Science".


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: In addition to numerous articles on mathematics, Whitehead wrote three major books on the subject: "A Treatise on Universal Algebra" (1898), "Principia Mathematica" (co-written with Bertrand Russell and published in three volumes between 1910 and 1913), and "An Introduction to Mathematics" (1911). The former two books were aimed exclusively at professional mathematicians, while the latter book was intended for a larger audience, covering the history of mathematics and its philosophical foundations. "Principia Mathematica" in particular is regarded as one of the most important works in mathematical logic of the 20th century.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: In addition to his legacy as a co-writer of "Principia Mathematica", Whitehead's theory of "extensive abstraction" is considered foundational for the branch of ontology and computer science known as "mereotopology," a theory describing spatial relations among wholes, parts, parts of parts, and the boundaries between parts.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: In "A Treatise on Universal Algebra" (1898), the term "universal algebra" had essentially the same meaning that it has today: the study of algebraic structures themselves, rather than examples ("models") of algebraic structures. Whitehead credits William Rowan Hamilton and Augustus De Morgan as originators of the subject matter, and James Joseph Sylvester with coining the term itself.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: At the time, structures such as Lie algebras and hyperbolic quaternions drew attention to the need to expand algebraic structures beyond the associatively multiplicative class. In a review Alexander Macfarlane wrote: "The main idea of the work is not unification of the several methods, nor generalization of ordinary algebra so as to include them, but rather the comparative study of their several structures." In a separate review, G. B. Mathews wrote, "It possesses a unity of design which is really remarkable, considering the variety of its themes."


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: "A Treatise on Universal Algebra" sought to examine Hermann Grassmann's theory of extension ("Ausdehnungslehre"), Boole's algebra of logic, and Hamilton's quaternions (this last number system was to be taken up in Volume II, which was never finished due to Whitehead's work on "Principia Mathematica"). Whitehead wrote in the preface:


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Such algebras have an intrinsic value for separate detailed study; also they are worthy of comparative study, for the sake of the light thereby thrown on the general theory of symbolic reasoning, and on algebraic symbolism in particular... The idea of a generalized conception of space has been made prominent, in the belief that the properties and operations involved in it can be made to form a uniform method of interpretation of the various algebras.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Whitehead, however, had no results of a general nature. His hope of "form[ing] a uniform method of interpretation of the various algebras" presumably would have been developed in Volume II, had Whitehead completed it. Further work on the subject was minimal until the early 1930s, when Garrett Birkhoff and Øystein Ore began publishing on universal algebras.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: "Principia Mathematica" (1910–1913) is Whitehead's most famous mathematical work. Written with former student Bertrand Russell, "Principia Mathematica" is considered one of the twentieth century's most important works in mathematics, and placed 23rd in a list of the top 100 English-language nonfiction books of the twentieth century by Modern Library.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: "Principia Mathematica"s purpose was to describe a set of axioms and inference rules in symbolic logic from which all mathematical truths could in principle be proven. Whitehead and Russell were working on such a foundational level of mathematics and logic that it took them until page 86 of Volume II to prove that 1+1=2, a proof humorously accompanied by the comment, "The above proposition is occasionally useful."


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Whitehead and Russell had thought originally that "Principia Mathematica" would take a year to complete; it ended up taking them ten years. When it came time for publication, the three-volume work was so long (more than 2,000 pages) and its audience so narrow (professional mathematicians) that it was initially published at a loss of 600 pounds, 300 of which was paid by Cambridge University Press, 200 by the Royal Society of London, and 50 apiece by Whitehead and Russell themselves. Despite the initial loss, today there is likely no major academic library in the world which does not hold a copy of "Principia Mathematica".


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: The ultimate substantive legacy of "Principia Mathematica" is mixed. It is generally accepted that Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorem of 1931 definitively demonstrated that for any set of axioms and inference rules proposed to encapsulate mathematics, there would in fact be some truths of mathematics which could not be deduced from them, and hence that "Principia Mathematica" could never achieve its aims. However, Gödel could not have come to this conclusion without Whitehead and Russell's book. In this way, "Principia Mathematica"'s legacy might be described as its key role in disproving the possibility of achieving its own stated goals. But beyond this somewhat ironic legacy, the book popularized modern mathematical logic and drew important connections between logic, epistemology, and metaphysics.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Unlike Whitehead's previous two books on mathematics, "An Introduction to Mathematics" (1911) was not aimed exclusively at professional mathematicians but was intended for a larger audience. The book covered the nature of mathematics, its unity and internal structure, and its applicability to nature. Whitehead wrote in the opening chapter:


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: The object of the following Chapters is not to teach mathematics, but to enable students from the very beginning of their course to know what the science is about, and why it is necessarily the foundation of exact thought as applied to natural phenomena.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: The book can be seen as an attempt to understand the growth in unity and interconnection of mathematics as a whole, as well as an examination of the mutual influence of mathematics and philosophy, language, and physics. Although the book is little-read, in some ways it prefigures certain points of Whitehead's later work in philosophy and metaphysics.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Whitehead showed a deep concern for educational reform at all levels. In addition to his numerous individually written works on the subject, Whitehead was appointed by Britain's Prime Minister David Lloyd George as part of a 20-person committee to investigate the educational systems and practices of the UK in 1921 and recommend reform.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Whitehead's most complete work on education is the 1929 book "The Aims of Education and Other Essays", which collected numerous essays and addresses by Whitehead on the subject published between 1912 and 1927. The essay from which "Aims of Education" derived its name was delivered as an address in 1916 when Whitehead was president of the London Branch of the Mathematical Association. In it, he cautioned against the teaching of what he called "inert ideas" – ideas that are disconnected scraps of information, with no application to real life or culture. He opined that "education with inert ideas is not only useless: it is, above all things, harmful."


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Rather than teach small parts of a large number of subjects, Whitehead advocated teaching a relatively few important concepts that the student could organically link to many different areas of knowledge, discovering their application in actual life. For Whitehead, education should be the exact opposite of the multidisciplinary, value-free school model – it should be "trans"disciplinary, and laden with values and general principles that provide students with a bedrock of wisdom and help them to make connections between areas of knowledge that are usually regarded as separate.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: In order to make this sort of teaching a reality, however, Whitehead pointed to the need to minimize the importance of (or radically alter) standard examinations for school entrance. Whitehead writes:


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Every school is bound on pain of extinction to train its boys for a small set of definite examinations. No headmaster has a free hand to develop his general education or his specialist studies in accordance with the opportunities of his school, which are created by its staff, its environment, its class of boys, and its endowments. I suggest that no system of external tests which aims primarily at examining individual scholars can result in anything but educational waste.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Whitehead argued that curriculum should be developed specifically for its own students by its own staff, or else risk total stagnation, interrupted only by occasional movements from one group of inert ideas to another.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Above all else in his educational writings, Whitehead emphasized the importance of imagination and the free play of ideas. In his essay "Universities and Their Function", Whitehead writes provocatively on imagination:


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Imagination is not to be divorced from the facts: it is a way of illuminating the facts. It works by eliciting the general principles which apply to the facts, as they exist, and then by an intellectual survey of alternative possibilities which are consistent with those principles. It enables men to construct an intellectual vision of a new world.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Whitehead's philosophy of education might adequately be summarized in his statement that "knowledge does not keep any better than fish." In other words, bits of disconnected knowledge are meaningless; all knowledge must find some imaginative application to the students' own lives, or else it becomes so much useless trivia, and the students themselves become good at parroting facts but not thinking for themselves.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Whitehead did not begin his career as a philosopher. In fact, he never had any formal training in philosophy beyond his undergraduate education. Early in his life, he showed great interest in and respect for philosophy and metaphysics, but it is evident that he considered himself a rank amateur. In one letter to his friend and former student Bertrand Russell, after discussing whether science aimed to be explanatory or merely descriptive, he wrote: "This further question lands us in the ocean of metaphysic, onto which my profound ignorance of that science forbids me to enter." Ironically, in later life, Whitehead would become one of the 20th century's foremost metaphysicians.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: However, interest in metaphysics – the philosophical investigation of the nature of the universe and existence – had become unfashionable by the time Whitehead began writing in earnest about it in the 1920s. The ever-more impressive accomplishments of empirical science had led to a general consensus in academia that the development of comprehensive metaphysical systems was a waste of time because they were not subject to empirical testing.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Whitehead was unimpressed by this objection. In the notes of one of his students for a 1927 class, Whitehead was quoted as saying: "Every scientific man in order to preserve his reputation has to say he dislikes metaphysics. What he means is he dislikes having his metaphysics criticized." In Whitehead's view, scientists and philosophers make metaphysical assumptions about how the universe works all the time, but such assumptions are not easily seen precisely because they remain unexamined and unquestioned. While Whitehead acknowledged that "philosophers can never hope finally to formulate these metaphysical first principles," he argued that people need to continually reimagine their basic assumptions about how the universe works if philosophy and science are to make any real progress, even if that progress remains permanently asymptotic. For this reason, Whitehead regarded metaphysical investigations as essential to both good science and good philosophy.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Perhaps foremost among what Whitehead considered faulty metaphysical assumptions was the Cartesian idea that reality is fundamentally constructed of bits of matter that exist totally independently of one another, which he rejected in favour of an event-based or "process" ontology in which events are primary and are fundamentally interrelated and dependent on one another. He also argued that the most basic elements of reality can all be regarded as experiential, indeed that everything is constituted by its experience. He used the term "experience" very broadly so that even inanimate processes such as electron collisions are said to manifest some degree of experience. In this, he went against Descartes' separation of two different kinds of real existence, either exclusively material or else exclusively mental. Whitehead referred to his metaphysical system as "philosophy of organism," but it would become known more widely as "process philosophy."


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Whitehead's philosophy was highly original, and soon garnered interest in philosophical circles. After publishing "The Concept of Nature" in 1920, he served as president of the Aristotelian Society from 1922 to 1923, and Henri Bergson was quoted as saying that Whitehead was "the best philosopher writing in English." So impressive and different was Whitehead's philosophy that in 1924 he was invited to join the faculty at Harvard University as a professor of philosophy at 63 years of age.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: This is not to say that Whitehead's thought was widely accepted or even well understood. His philosophical work is generally considered to be among the most difficult to understand in all of the Western canon. Even professional philosophers struggled to follow Whitehead's writings. One famous story illustrating the level of difficulty of Whitehead's philosophy centres around the delivery of Whitehead's Gifford lectures in 1927–28 – following Arthur Eddington's lectures of the year previous – which Whitehead would later publish as "Process and Reality":


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Eddington was a marvellous popular lecturer who had enthralled an audience of 600 for his entire course. The same audience turned up to Whitehead's first lecture but it was completely unintelligible, not merely to the world at large but to the elect. My father remarked to me afterwards that if he had not known Whitehead well he would have suspected that it was an imposter making it up as he went along... The audience at subsequent lectures was only about half a dozen in all.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: It may not be inappropriate to speculate that some fair portion of the respect generally shown to Whitehead by his philosophical peers at the time arose from their sheer bafflement. The Chicago theologian Shailer Mathews once remarked of Whitehead's 1926 book "Religion in the Making": "It is infuriating, and I must say embarrassing as well, to read page after page of relatively familiar words without understanding a single sentence."


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: However, Mathews' frustration with Whitehead's books did not negatively affect his interest. In fact, there were numerous philosophers and theologians at Chicago's Divinity School that perceived the importance of what Whitehead was doing without fully grasping all of the details and implications. In 1927, they invited one of America's only Whitehead experts, Henry Nelson Wieman, to Chicago to give a lecture explaining Whitehead's thoughts. Wieman's lecture was so brilliant that he was promptly hired to the faculty and taught there for twenty years, and for at least thirty years afterwards Chicago's Divinity School was closely associated with Whitehead's thought.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Shortly after Whitehead's book "Process and Reality" appeared in 1929, Wieman famously wrote in his 1930 review:


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Not many people will read Whitehead's recent book in this generation; not many will read it in any generation. But its influence will radiate through concentric circles of popularization until the common man will think and work in the light of it, not knowing whence the light came. After a few decades of discussion and analysis, one will be able to understand it more readily than can now be done.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Wieman's words proved prophetic. Though "Process and Reality" has been called "arguably the most impressive single metaphysical text of the twentieth century," it has been little-read and little-understood, partly because it demands – as Isabelle Stengers puts it – "that its readers accept the adventure of the questions that will separate them from every consensus." Whitehead questioned Western philosophy's most dearly held assumptions about how the universe works — but in doing so, he managed to anticipate a number of 21st century scientific and philosophical problems and provide novel solutions.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Whitehead was convinced that the scientific notion of matter was misleading as a way of describing the ultimate nature of things. In his 1925 book "Science and the Modern World", he wrote that:


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: There persists ... [a] fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter, or material, spread through space in a flux of configurations. In itself, such a material is senseless, valueless, purposeless. It just does what it does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of its being. It is this assumption that I call "scientific materialism." Also, it is an assumption which I shall challenge as being entirely unsuited to the scientific situation at which we have now arrived.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: In Whitehead's view, there are a number of problems with this notion of "irreducible brute matter." First, it obscures and minimizes the importance of change. By thinking of any material thing (like a rock, or a person) as being fundamentally the "same" thing throughout time, with any changes to it being secondary to its "nature," scientific materialism hides the fact that nothing ever stays the same. For Whitehead, change is fundamental and inescapable; he emphasizes that "all things flow."


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: In Whitehead's view, then, concepts such as "quality," "matter," and "form" are problematic. These "classical" concepts fail to adequately account for change, and overlook the active and experiential nature of the most basic elements of the world. They are useful abstractions but are not the world's basic building blocks. What is ordinarily conceived of as a single person, for instance, is philosophically described as a continuum of overlapping events. After all, people change all the time, if only because they have aged by another second and had some further experience. These occasions of experience are logically distinct but are progressively connected in what Whitehead calls a "society" of events. By assuming that enduring objects are the most real and fundamental things in the universe, materialists have mistaken the abstract for the concrete (what Whitehead calls the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness").


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: To put it another way, a thing or person is often seen as having a "defining essence" or a "core identity" that is unchanging, and describes what the thing or person "really is". In this way of thinking, things and people are seen as fundamentally the same through time, with any changes being qualitative and secondary to their core identity (e.g., "Mark's hair has turned grey as he has gotten older, but he is still the same person"). But in Whitehead's cosmology, the only fundamentally existent things are discrete "occasions of experience" that overlap one another in time and space, and jointly make up the enduring person or thing. On the other hand, what ordinary thinking often regards as "the essence of a thing" or "the identity/core of a person" is an abstract generalization of what is regarded as that person or thing's most important or salient features across time. Identities do not define people; people define identities. Everything changes from moment to moment and to think of anything as having an "enduring essence" misses the fact that "all things flow," though it is often a useful way of speaking.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Whitehead pointed to the limitations of language as one of the main culprits in maintaining a materialistic way of thinking and acknowledged that it may be difficult to ever wholly move past such ideas in everyday speech. After all, every moment of each person's life can hardly be given a different proper name, and it is easy and convenient to think of people and objects as remaining fundamentally the same things, rather than constantly keeping in mind that each thing is a different thing from what it was a moment ago. Yet the limitations of everyday living and everyday speech should not prevent people from realizing that "material substances" or "essences" are a convenient generalized description of a continuum of particular, concrete processes. No one questions that a ten-year-old person is quite different by the time he or she turns thirty years old, and in many ways is not the same person at all; Whitehead points out that it is not philosophically or ontologically sound to think that a person is the same from one second to the next.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: A second problem with materialism is that it obscures the importance of "relations". It sees every object as distinct and discrete from all other objects. Each object is simply an inert clump of matter that is only "externally" related to other things. The idea of matter as primary makes people think of objects as being fundamentally separate in time and space, and not necessarily related to anything. But in Whitehead's view, relations take a primary role, perhaps even more important than the relata themselves. A student taking notes in one of Whitehead's fall 1924 classes wrote that, "Reality applies to "connections", and only relatively to the things connected. (A) is real for (B), and (B) is real for (A), but [they are] not absolutely real independent of each other." In fact, Whitehead describes any entity as in some sense nothing more and nothing less than the sum of its relations to other entities – its "synthesis of" and "reaction to" the world around it. A real thing is just that which forces the rest of the universe to in some way conform to it; that is to say, if theoretically, a thing made strictly no difference to any other entity (i.e., it was not "related" to any other entity), it could not be said to really exist. Relations are not secondary to what a thing is; they "are" what the thing is.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: It must be emphasized, however, that an entity is not "merely" a sum of its relations, but also a valuation of them and reaction to them. For Whitehead, creativity is the absolute principle of existence, and every entity (whether it is a human being, a tree, or an electron) has some degree of novelty in how it responds to other entities and is not fully determined by causal or mechanistic laws. Most entities do not have consciousness. As a human being's actions cannot always be predicted, the same can be said of where a tree's roots will grow, or how an electron will move, or whether it will rain tomorrow. Moreover, the inability to predict an electron's movement (for instance) is not due to faulty understanding or inadequate technology; rather, the fundamental creativity/freedom of all entities means that there will always remain phenomena that are unpredictable.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: The other side of creativity/freedom as the absolute principle is that every entity is constrained by the social structure of existence (i.e., its relations); each actual entity must conform to the settled conditions of the world around it. Freedom always exists within limits. But an entity's uniqueness and individuality arise from its own self-determination as to just how it will take account of the world within the limits that have been set for it.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: In summary, Whitehead rejects the idea of separate and unchanging bits of matter as the most basic building blocks of reality, in favour of the idea of reality as interrelated events in the process. He conceives of reality as composed of processes of dynamic "becoming" rather than static "being," emphasizing that all physical things change and evolve and that changeless "essences" such as matter are mere abstractions from the interrelated events that are the final real things that make up the world.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Since Whitehead's metaphysics described a universe in which all entities experience, he needed a new way of describing perception that was not limited to living, self-conscious beings. The term he coined was "prehension," which comes from the Latin "prehensio", meaning "to seize". The term is meant to indicate a kind of perception that can be conscious or unconscious, applying to people as well as electrons. It is also intended to make clear Whitehead's rejection of the theory of "representative" perception, in which the mind only has private ideas about other entities. For Whitehead, the term "prehension" indicates that the perceiver actually incorporates aspects of the perceived thing into itself. In this way, entities are constituted by their perceptions and relations, rather than being independent of them. Further, Whitehead regards perception as occurring in two modes, "causal efficacy" (or "physical prehension") and "presentational immediacy" (or "conceptual prehension").


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Whitehead describes causal efficacy as "the experience dominating the primitive living organisms, which have a sense for the fate from which they have emerged, and the fate towards which they go." It is, in other words, the sense of causal relations between entities, a feeling of being influenced and affected by the surrounding environment, unmediated by the senses. Presentational immediacy, on the other hand, is what is usually referred to as "pure sense perception," unmediated by any causal or symbolic interpretation, even unconscious interpretation. In other words, it is pure appearance, which may or may not be delusive (e.g., mistaking an image in a mirror for "the real thing").


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: In higher organisms (like people), these two modes of perception combine into what Whitehead terms "symbolic reference," which links appearance with causation in a process that is so automatic that both people and animals have difficulty refraining from it. By way of illustration, Whitehead uses the example of a person's encounter with a chair. An ordinary person looks up, sees a coloured shape, and immediately infers that it is a chair. However, an artist, Whitehead supposes, "might not have jumped to the notion of a chair," but instead "might have stopped at the mere contemplation of a beautiful colour and a beautiful shape." This is not the normal human reaction; most people place objects in categories by habit and instinct, without even thinking about it. Moreover, animals do the same thing. Using the same example, Whitehead points out that a dog "would have acted immediately on the hypothesis of a chair and would have jumped onto it by way of using it as such." In this way, symbolic reference is a fusion of pure sense perceptions on the one hand and causal relations on the other, and that it is in fact the causal relationships that dominate the more basic mentality (as the dog illustrates), while it is the sense perceptions which indicate a higher grade mentality (as the artist illustrates).


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Whitehead believed that when asking questions about the basic facts of existence, questions about value and purpose can never be fully escaped. This is borne out in his thoughts on abiogenesis, or the hypothetical natural process by which life arises from simple organic compounds.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Whitehead makes the startling observation that "life is comparatively deficient in survival value." If humans can only exist for about a hundred years, and rocks for eight hundred million, then one is forced to ask why complex organisms ever evolved in the first place; as Whitehead humorously notes, "they certainly did not appear because they were better at that game than the rocks around them." He then observes that the mark of higher forms of life is that they are actively engaged in modifying their environment, an activity which he theorizes is directed toward the three-fold goal of living, living well, and living better. In other words, Whitehead sees life as directed toward the purpose of increasing its own satisfaction. Without such a goal, he sees the rise of life as totally unintelligible.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: For Whitehead, there is no such thing as wholly inert matter. Instead, all things have some measure of freedom or creativity, however small, which allows them to be at least partly self-directed. The process philosopher David Ray Griffin coined the term "panexperientialism" (the idea that all entities experience) to describe Whitehead's view, and to distinguish it from panpsychism (the idea that all matter has consciousness).


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Whitehead's idea of God differs from traditional monotheistic notions. Perhaps his most famous and pointed criticism of the Christian conception of God is that "the Church gave unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar." Here, Whitehead is criticizing Christianity for defining God as primarily a divine king who imposes his will on the world, and whose most important attribute is power. As opposed to the most widely accepted forms of Christianity, Whitehead emphasized an idea of God that he called "the brief Galilean vision of humility":


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: It does not emphasize the ruling Caesar, or the ruthless moralist, or the unmoved mover. It dwells upon the tender elements in the world, which slowly and in quietness operates by love; and it finds purpose in the present immediacy of a kingdom not of this world. Love neither rules, nor is it unmoved; also it is a little oblivious as to morals. It does not look to the future; for it finds its own reward in the immediate present.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: For Whitehead, God is not necessarily tied to religion. Rather than springing primarily from religious faith, Whitehead saw God as necessary for his metaphysical system. His system required that an order exist among possibilities, an order that allowed for novelty in the world and provided an aim to all entities. Whitehead posited that these ordered potentials exist in what he called the "primordial nature" of God. However, Whitehead was also interested in religious experience. This led him to reflect more intensively on what he saw as the second nature of God, the "consequent nature". Whitehead's conception of God as a "dipolar" entity has called for fresh theological thinking.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: The primordial nature he described as "the unlimited conceptual realization of the absolute wealth of potentiality" — i.e., the unlimited possibility of the universe. This primordial nature is eternal and unchanging, providing entities in the universe with possibilities for realization. Whitehead also calls this primordial aspect "the lure for feeling, the eternal urge of desire," pulling the entities in the universe toward as-yet unrealized possibilities.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: God's consequent nature, on the other hand, is anything but unchanging; it is God's reception of the world's activity. As Whitehead puts it, "[God] saves the world as it passes into the immediacy of his own life. It is the judgment of a tenderness which loses nothing that can be saved." In other words, God saves and cherishes all experiences forever, and those experiences go on to change the way God interacts with the world. In this way, God is really changed by what happens in the world and the wider universe, lending the actions of finite creatures an eternal significance.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Whitehead thus sees God and the world as fulfilling one another. He sees entities in the world as fluent and changing things that yearn for a permanence which only God can provide by taking them into God's self, thereafter changing God and affecting the rest of the universe throughout time. On the other hand, he sees God as permanent but as deficient in actuality and change: alone, God is merely eternally unrealized possibilities and requires the world to actualize them. God gives creatures permanence, while the creatures give God actuality and change. Here it is worthwhile to quote Whitehead at length:


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: "In this way God is completed by the individual, fluent satisfactions of finite fact, and the temporal occasions are completed by their everlasting union with their transformed selves, purged into conformation with the eternal order which is the final absolute 'wisdom.' The final summary can only be expressed in terms of a group of antitheses, whose apparent self-contradictions depend on neglect of the diverse categories of existence. In each antithesis there is a shift of meaning which converts the opposition into a contrast.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: "It is as true to say that God is permanent and the World fluent, as that the World is permanent and God is fluent.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: "It is as true to say that, in comparison with the World, God is actual eminently, as that, in comparison with God, the World is actual eminently.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: "What is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven, and the reality in heaven passes back into the world... In this sense, God is the great companion – the fellow-sufferer who understands."


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: The above is some of Whitehead's most evocative writing about God, and was powerful enough to inspire the movement known as process theology, a vibrant theological school of thought that continues to thrive today.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: For Whitehead, the core of religion was individual. While he acknowledged that individuals cannot ever be fully separated from their society, he argued that life is an internal fact for its own sake before it is an external fact relating to others. His most famous remark on religion is that "religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness ... and if you are never solitary, you are never religious." Whitehead saw religion as a system of general truths that transformed a person's character. He took special care to note that while religion is often a good influence, it is not "necessarily" good – an idea which he called a "dangerous delusion" (e.g., a religion might encourage the violent extermination of a rival religion's adherents).


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: However, while Whitehead saw religion as "beginning" in solitariness, he also saw religion as necessarily expanding beyond the individual. In keeping with his process metaphysics in which relations are primary, he wrote that religion necessitates the realization of "the value of the objective world which is a community derivative from the interrelations of its component individuals." In other words, the universe is a community which makes itself whole through the relatedness of each individual entity to all the others; meaning and value do not exist for the individual alone, but only in the context of the universal community. Whitehead writes further that each entity "can find no such value till it has merged its individual claim with that of the objective universe. Religion is world loyalty. The spirit at once surrenders itself to this universal claim and appropriates it for itself." In this way, the individual and universal/social aspects of religion are mutually dependent.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: A connection between the works of William DeWitt Hyde and Whitehead further elucidates this necessary duality of social and individual roles in religious experience.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Whitehead also described religion more technically as "an ultimate craving to infuse into the insistent particularity of emotion that non-temporal generality which primarily belongs to conceptual thought alone." In other words, religion takes deeply felt emotions and contextualizes them within a system of general truths about the world, helping people to identify their wider meaning and significance. For Whitehead, religion served as a kind of bridge between philosophy and the emotions and purposes of a particular society. It is the task of religion to make philosophy applicable to the everyday lives of ordinary people.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Isabelle Stengers wrote that "Whiteheadians are recruited among both philosophers and theologians, and the palette has been enriched by practitioners from the most diverse horizons, from ecology to feminism, practices that unite political struggle and spirituality with the sciences of education." In recent decades, attention to Whitehead's work has become more widespread, with interest extending to intellectuals in Europe and China, and coming from such diverse fields as ecology, physics, biology, education, economics, and psychology. One of the first theologians to attempt to interact with Whitehead's thought was the future Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple. In Temple's Gifford Lectures of 1932-1934 (subsequently published as "Nature, Man and God"), Whitehead is one of a number of philosophers of the emergent evolution approach with which Temple interacts. However, it was not until the 1970s and 1980s that Whitehead's thought drew much attention outside of a small group of philosophers and theologians, primarily Americans, and even today he is not considered especially influential outside of relatively specialized circles.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Early followers of Whitehead were found primarily at the University of Chicago Divinity School, where Henry Nelson Wieman initiated an interest in Whitehead's work that would last for about thirty years. Professors such as Wieman, Charles Hartshorne, Bernard Loomer, Bernard Meland, and Daniel Day Williams made Whitehead's philosophy arguably the most important intellectual thread running through the divinity school. They taught generations of Whitehead scholars, the most notable of whom is John B. Cobb.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Although interest in Whitehead has since faded at Chicago's divinity school, Cobb effectively grabbed the torch and planted it firmly in Claremont, California, where he began teaching at Claremont School of Theology in 1958 and founded the Center for Process Studies with David Ray Griffin in 1973. Largely due to Cobb's influence, today Claremont remains strongly identified with Whitehead's process thought.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: But while Claremont remains the most concentrated hub of Whiteheadian activity, the place where Whitehead's thought currently seems to be growing the most quickly is in China. In order to address the challenges of modernization and industrialization, China has begun to blend traditions of Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism with Whitehead's "constructive post-modern" philosophy in order to create an "ecological civilization". To date, the Chinese government has encouraged the building of twenty-three university-based centres for the study of Whitehead's philosophy, and books by process philosophers John Cobb and David Ray Griffin are becoming required reading for Chinese graduate students. Cobb has attributed China's interest in process philosophy partly to Whitehead's stress on the mutual interdependence of humanity and nature, as well as his emphasis on an educational system that includes the teaching of values rather than simply bare facts.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Overall, however, Whitehead's influence is very difficult to characterize. In English-speaking countries, his primary works are little-studied outside of Claremont and a select number of liberal graduate-level theology and philosophy programs. Outside of these circles, his influence is relatively small and diffuse and has tended to come chiefly through the work of his students and admirers rather than Whitehead himself. For instance, Whitehead was a teacher and long-time friend and collaborator of Bertrand Russell, and he also taught and supervised the dissertation of Willard Van Orman Quine, both of whom are important figures in analytic philosophy – the dominant strain of philosophy in English-speaking countries in the 20th century. Whitehead has also had high-profile admirers in the continental tradition, such as French post-structuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who once dryly remarked of Whitehead that "he stands provisionally as the last great Anglo-American philosopher before Wittgenstein's disciples spread their misty confusion, sufficiency, and terror." French sociologist and anthropologist Bruno Latour even went so far as to call Whitehead "the greatest philosopher of the 20th century."


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Deleuze's and Latour's opinions, however, are minority ones, as Whitehead has not been recognized as particularly influential within the most dominant philosophical schools. It is impossible to say exactly why Whitehead's influence has not been more widespread, but it may be partly due to his metaphysical ideas seeming somewhat counterintuitive (such as his assertion that matter is an abstraction), or his inclusion of theistic elements in his philosophy, or the perception of metaphysics itself as passé, or simply the sheer difficulty and density of his prose.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Historically, Whitehead's work has been most influential in the field of American progressive theology. The most important early proponent of Whitehead's thought in a theological context was Charles Hartshorne, who spent a semester at Harvard as Whitehead's teaching assistant in 1925, and is widely credited with developing Whitehead's process philosophy into a full-blown process theology. Other notable process theologians include John B. Cobb, David Ray Griffin, Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki, C. Robert Mesle, Roland Faber, and Catherine Keller.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Process theology typically stresses God's relational nature. Rather than seeing God as impassive or emotionless, process theologians view God as "the fellow sufferer who understands," and as the being who is supremely affected by temporal events. Hartshorne points out that people would not praise a human ruler who was unaffected by either the joys or sorrows of his followers – so why would this be a praiseworthy quality in God? Instead, as the being who is most affected by the world, God is the being who can most appropriately respond to the world. However, process theology has been formulated in a wide variety of ways. C. Robert Mesle, for instance, advocates a "process naturalism" — i.e., a process theology without God.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: In fact, process theology is difficult to define because process theologians are so diverse and transdisciplinary in their views and interests. John B. Cobb is a process theologian who has also written books on biology and economics. Roland Faber and Catherine Keller integrate Whitehead with poststructuralist, postcolonialist, and feminist theory. Charles Birch was both a theologian and a geneticist. Franklin I. Gamwell writes on theology and political theory. In "Syntheism - Creating God in The Internet Age", futurologists Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist repeatedly credit Whitehead for the process theology they see rising out of the participatory culture expected to dominate the digital era.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Process philosophy is even more difficult to pin down than process theology. In practice, the two fields cannot be neatly separated. The 32-volume State University of New York series in constructive postmodern thought edited by process philosopher and theologian David Ray Griffin displays the range of areas in which different process philosophers work, including physics, ecology, medicine, public policy, nonviolence, politics, and psychology.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: One philosophical school which has historically had a close relationship with process philosophy is American pragmatism. Whitehead himself thought highly of William James and John Dewey, and acknowledged his indebtedness to them in the preface to "Process and Reality". Charles Hartshorne (along with Paul Weiss) edited the collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, one of the founders of pragmatism. Noted neopragmatist Richard Rorty was in turn a student of Hartshorne. Today, Nicholas Rescher is one example of a philosopher who advocates both process philosophy and pragmatism.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: In addition, while they might not properly be called process philosophers, Whitehead has been influential in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Milič Čapek, Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour, Susanne Langer, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Scientists of the early 20th century for whom Whitehead's work has been influential include physical chemist Ilya Prigogine, biologist Conrad Hal Waddington, and geneticists Charles Birch and Sewall Wright.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: In physics, Whitehead's theory of gravitation articulated a view that might perhaps be regarded as dual to Albert Einstein's general relativity. It has been severely criticized. Yutaka Tanaka suggested that the gravitational constant disagrees with experimental findings, and proposed that Einstein's work does not actually refute Whitehead's formulation. Whitehead's view has now been rendered obsolete, with the discovery of gravitational waves, phenomena observed locally that largely violate the kind of local flatness of space that Whitehead assumes. Consequently, Whitehead's cosmology must be regarded as a local approximation, and his assumption of a uniform spatio-temporal geometry, Minkowskian in particular, as an often-locally-adequate approximation. An exact replacement of Whitehead's cosmology would need to admit a Riemannian geometry. Also, although Whitehead himself gave only secondary consideration to quantum theory, his metaphysics of processes has proved attractive to some physicists in that field. Henry Stapp and David Bohm are among those whose work has been influenced by Whitehead.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: In the 21st century, Whiteheadian thought is still a stimulating influence: Timothy E. Eastman and Hank Keeton's "Physics and Whitehead" (2004) and Michael Epperson's "Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead" (2004) and "Foundations of Relational Realism: A Topological Approach to Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Nature" (2013), aim to offer Whiteheadian approaches to physics. Brian G. Henning, Adam Scarfe, and Dorion Sagan's "Beyond Mechanism" (2013) and Rupert Sheldrake's "Science Set Free" (2012) are examples of Whiteheadian approaches to biology.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: One of the most promising applications of Whitehead's thought in recent years has been in the area of ecological civilization, sustainability, and environmental ethics.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: "Because Whitehead's holistic metaphysics of value lends itself so readily to an ecological point of view, many see his work as a promising alternative to the traditional mechanistic worldview, providing a detailed metaphysical picture of a world constituted by a web of interdependent relations."


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: This work has been pioneered by John B. Cobb, whose book "Is It Too Late? A Theology of Ecology" (1971) was the first single-authored book in environmental ethics. Cobb also co-authored a book with leading ecological economist and steady-state theorist Herman Daly entitled "For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future" (1989), which applied Whitehead's thought to economics, and received the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. Cobb followed this with a second book, "Sustaining the Common Good: A Christian Perspective on the Global Economy" (1994), which aimed to challenge "economists' zealous faith in the great god of growth."


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Whitehead is widely known for his influence in education theory. His philosophy inspired the formation of the Association for Process Philosophy of Education (APPE), which published eleven volumes of a journal titled "Process Papers" on process philosophy and education from 1996 to 2008. Whitehead's theories on education also led to the formation of new modes of learning and new models of teaching.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: One such model is the ANISA model developed by Daniel C. Jordan, which sought to address a lack of understanding of the nature of people in current education systems. As Jordan and Raymond P. Shepard put it: "Because it has not defined the nature of man, education is in the untenable position of having to devote its energies to the development of curricula without any coherent ideas about the nature of the creature for whom they are intended."


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Another model is the FEELS model developed by Xie Bangxiu and deployed successfully in China. "FEELS" stands for five things in curriculum and education: Flexible-goals, Engaged-learner, Embodied-knowledge, Learning-through-interactions, and Supportive-teacher. It is used for understanding and evaluating educational curriculum under the assumption that the purpose of education is to "help a person become whole." This work is in part the product of cooperation between Chinese government organizations and the Institute for the Postmodern Development of China.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Whitehead's philosophy of education has also found institutional support in Canada, where the University of Saskatchewan created a Process Philosophy Research Unit and sponsored several conferences on process philosophy and education. Howard Woodhouse at the University of Saskatchewan remains a strong proponent of Whiteheadian education.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Three recent books which further develop Whitehead's philosophy of education include: "Modes of Learning: Whitehead's Metaphysics and the Stages of Education" (2012) by George Allan; "The Adventure of Education: Process Philosophers on Learning, Teaching, and Research" (2009) by Adam Scarfe; and "Educating for an Ecological Civilization: Interdisciplinary, Experiential, and Relational Learning" (2017) edited by Marcus Ford and Stephen Rowe. "Beyond the Modern University: Toward a Constructive Postmodern University," (2002) is another text that explores the importance of Whitehead's metaphysics for thinking about higher education.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Whitehead has had some influence on philosophy of business administration and organizational theory. This has led in part to a focus on identifying and investigating the effect of temporal events (as opposed to static things) within organizations through an "organization studies" discourse that accommodates a variety of 'weak' and 'strong' process perspectives from a number of philosophers. One of the leading figures having an explicitly Whiteheadian and panexperientialist stance towards management is Mark Dibben, who works in what he calls "applied process thought" to articulate a philosophy of management and business administration as part of a wider examination of the social sciences through the lens of process metaphysics. For Dibben, this allows "a comprehensive exploration of life as perpetually active experiencing, as opposed to occasional – and thoroughly passive – happening." Dibben has published two books on applied process thought, "Applied Process Thought I: Initial Explorations in Theory and Research" (2008), and "Applied Process Thought II: Following a Trail Ablaze" (2009), as well as other papers in this vein in the fields of philosophy of management and business ethics.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: Margaret Stout and Carrie M. Staton have also written recently on the mutual influence of Whitehead and Mary Parker Follett, a pioneer in the fields of organizational theory and organizational behavior. Stout and Staton see both Whitehead and Follett as sharing an ontology that "understands becoming as a relational process; difference as being related, yet unique; and the purpose of becoming as harmonizing difference." This connection is further analyzed by Stout and Jeannine M. Love in "Integrative Process: Follettian Thinking from Ontology to Administration"


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: On the other hand, many Whitehead scholars read his work as providing a philosophical foundation for the social liberalism of the New Liberal movement that was prominent throughout Whitehead's adult life. Morris wrote that "... there is good reason for claiming that Whitehead shared the social and political ideals of the new liberals."


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: In addition, the Whitehead Research Project of the Center for Process Studies is currently working on a critical edition of Whitehead's writings, which is set to include notes taken by Whitehead's students during his Harvard classes, correspondence, and corrected editions of his books.


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: "For the most comprehensive list of resources related to Whitehead, see the thematic bibliography of the Center for Process Studies."


title: Alfred North Whitehead

text: – Contains a section called "Alfred North Whitehead: Toward a More Fundamental Ontology" that is an overview of Whitehead's metaphysics.


title: Centre Party (Germany)

text: The Centre Party (), officially the German Centre Party () and also known in English as the Catholic Centre Party, is a Catholic political party in Germany, influential in the German Empire and Weimar Republic. It is the oldest German political party to be still in existence since its founding date. Formed in 1870, it successfully battled the "Kulturkampf" waged by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck against the Catholic Church. It soon won a quarter of the seats in the Reichstag (Imperial Parliament), and its middle position on most issues allowed it to play a decisive role in the formation of majorities. The party name "Zentrum" (Centre) originally came from the fact Catholic representatives would take up the middle section of seats in parliament between social democrats and conservatives.


title: Centre Party (Germany)

text: For most of the Weimar Republic, the Centre Party was the third-largest party in the Reichstag and a bulwark of the Republic, participating in all governments until 1932. Following Adolf Hitler's rise to power in early 1933, the Centre Party was among the parties who voted for the Enabling Act, which granted legislative powers to Hitler's government. Nevertheless, the party was pressured into dissolving itself on 5 July, as the Nazi Party became the only legally permitted party in the country shortly thereafter.


title: Centre Party (Germany)

text: After World War II, the party was reconstituted, but could not rise again to its former importance, as most of its members joined the new Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and, in Bavaria, the Christian Social Union (CSU). The Centre Party continued on as a marginal party and concentrated its efforts on regional politics, mainly based in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The party was unrepresented on the German federal level from 1957 to 2022, when Federal representative Uwe Witt and European representative Jörg Meuthen defected from the AfD and joined the Centre Party.


title: Centre Party (Germany)

text: The Centre Party belongs to the political spectrum of "Political Catholicism" that, emerging in the early 19th century after the turmoil of the Napoleonic wars, had changed the political face of Germany. Many Catholics found themselves in Protestant dominated states.


title: Centre Party (Germany)

text: The first major conflict between the Catholic Church and a Protestant state was the "Colonian Church conflict", when the Prussian government interfered in the question of mixed marriages and the religious affiliation of children resulting from these. This led to serious aggressions against the Catholic population of the Rhineland and Westphalia and culminated in the arrest of the Archbishop of Cologne. At that time, one of the founding fathers of Political Catholicism was journalist Joseph Görres, who called upon Catholics to "stand united" for their common goals, "religious liberty and political and civil equality of the denominations". The conflict relaxed after 1840, with Frederick William IV's accession to the throne.


title: Centre Party (Germany)

text: The German revolutions of 1848–1849 brought new opportunities for German Catholics. In October, the bishops had their first meeting in 40 years in Würzburg and the local "Catholic Federations" assembled in Mainz to found the "Catholic Federation of Germany". In the National Assembly, which was convened to draw up a German constitution, a "Catholic club" was formed. This was not yet a comprehensive party, but a loose union aimed at protecting the Church's liberties in a future Germany, supported by many petitions from the "[Pope] Pius federations for religious liberty". The later demise of the National Assembly proved to be a major setback for Political Catholicism.


title: Centre Party (Germany)

text: In the Kingdom of Prussia, the revised constitution of 1850 granted liberties, which in parts even exceeded those of the Frankfurt draft constitution, yet two years later the minister for culture, von Raumer, issued decrees directed mainly against the Jesuits. In reaction this led to a doubling of Catholic representatives in the subsequent elections and the formation of a Catholic club in the Landtag of Prussia. In 1858, when the "New Era" governments of Wilhelm I adopted more lenient policies, the club renamed itself "Fraction of the Centre" in order to open itself up to include non-Catholics. This name stemmed from the fact that in the Landtag the Catholic representatives were seated in the centre, between the Conservatives on the right and the Liberals on the left. Faced with military and constitutional issues, where there was no definite Church position, the group soon disintegrated and disappeared from parliament after 1867.


title: Centre Party (Germany)

text: Growing anti-Catholic sentiment and policies, including plans for dissolving all monasteries in Prussia, made it clear that a reorganisation of the group was urgently needed in order to protect Catholic minority rights, enshrined in the 1850 constitution, and to bring them over to the emerging nation state.


title: Centre Party (Germany)

text: In June 1870 Peter Reichensperger called on Catholics to unite and, in October, priests, representatives of Catholic federations and the Catholic gentry met at Soest and drew up an election programme. The main points were:


title: Centre Party (Germany)

text: There were also more general demands such as for a more federal, decentralised state, a limitation of state expenditure, a just distribution of taxes, the financial strengthening of the middle classes and the legal "removal of such evil states, that threaten the worker with moral or bodily ruin". With such a manifesto, the number of Catholic representatives in the Prussian Diet rose considerably. In December 1870, they formed a new "Centre" faction, also called the "Constitution Party" to emphasise its adherence to constitutional liberties.


title: Centre Party (Germany)

text: Three months later, early in 1871, the Catholic representatives to the new national parliament, the Reichstag, also formed a "Centre" "faction". The party not only defended the Church's liberties, but also supported representative government and minority rights in general, in particular those of German Poles, Alsatians, and Hannoverians. The Centre's main leader was the Hannoverian advocate Ludwig Windthorst and other major figures included Karl Friedrich von Savigny, Hermann von Mallinckrodt, Burghard Freiherr von Schorlemer-Alst, the brothers August Reichensperger and Peter Reichensperger, and Georg Count Hertling. The party was named the Centre Party due to the fact that in Parliament the Catholics sat between the Liberals on the left and the Conservatives on the right as opposed to the party adhering to centrism in the modern context.


title: Centre Party (Germany)

text: Also in other German states Catholic parties were formed, cooperating with the Prussian Centre Party in the Reichstag:


title: Centre Party (Germany)

text: In the age of nationalism, Protestant Germans, whether Conservative (like Otto von Bismarck) or Liberal, accused the Centre of Ultramontanism or having a greater loyalty towards the Pope than to the German nation. After the First Vatican Council, Bismarck launched the "Kulturkampf" ("cultural struggle") against the Catholic Church. Catholics fought back vigorously and with near-unanimity. The Centre party gained greater support from the Catholic population. Following Bismarck's 1879 turn from free trade to protectionism and from the National Liberal party to the Conservative parties, he also abandoned the unsuccessful "Kulturkampf". The Centre party remained a party of opposition to Bismarck, but after his resignation in 1890, it frequently supported the following administrations' policies in the Reichstag, particularly in the field of social security.


title: Centre Party (Germany)

text: The Kulturkampf had reinforced the Catholic character of the Centre Party, but even during it Ludwig Windthorst had defended the party against Bismarck's accusation of being a "denominational party" in describing the Centre as "a political party with a comprehensive political programme and open to anyone, who accepts it". However, few Protestants took up this offer and the Centre remained, by the composition of its members, politicians and voters, an essentially Catholic party.


title: Centre Party (Germany)

text: Loyal to the Pope in church matters, the Centre party steered a course independent of the Holy See on secular matters. This became apparent in the "septennat dispute" of 1886. Since the Centre Party rejected Bismarck's military budget, the Chancellor negotiated with the Holy See and promised to abolish some Kulturkampf-related laws and to support the Pope in the Roman question, if the Vatican persuaded the Centre Party to accept his bill. Despite this agreement, the Centre Party rejected the budget and Bismarck called new elections. He also published the letters with the Vatican, intending to drive a wedge between Catholic voters loyal to the Pope and the Centre Party with the slogan: "The Pope against the Centre!" Windhorst managed to avert this by reaffirming the Party's autonomy, which the Pope had accepted, and by interpreting the published letters as expressions of papal confidence in the party.


title: Centre Party (Germany)

text: As the Kulturkampf declined, debates about the character of the party emerged culminating in the Centre dispute, in 1906, after Julius Bachem had published the article "We must get out of the tower!" He called upon Catholic politicians to fulfill Windthorst's word and get out of their perpetual minority position by an effort to increase Protestant numbers among their representatives in parliament. His proposal was met with passionate opposition by the greater part of Catholic public, especially since it also included the Christian trade unions and other Catholic organisations. No side could win the upper hand, when the outbreak of World War I ended the dispute.


title: Centre Party (Germany)

text: After the war, there were many proposals on how the reform the party. Heinrich Brauns published the Cologne Program (Kölner Programm), which proposed the re-formation of the Zentrum under a new name (Christliche Volkspartei, CVP). This proposal was rejected, with only a few regions adopting it for the 1919 election; the party instead adopted the Berlin Guidelines (Berliner Leitsätze), which were more moderate but failed at making the Zentrum attractive for Protestant voters too. Adam Stegerwald, leader of the Christian trade unions, made another attempt at transcending the party's exclusively Catholic character and uniting Germany's fragmented party spectrum. In 1920 he advocated the formation of a broad Christian middle-party, that would transcend denominations and social classes and which could push back the Social Democrats' influence.


title: Centre Party (Germany)

text: The Polish minority in the German Empire formed one of the largest Catholic groups, but the Centre Party pursued an anti-Polish course causing enmity between it and Polish minority.


title: Centre Party (Germany)

text: With the German entry into World War I, the party also used the debates about war bonds to push for a repeal of the last remnants of anti-Jesuit laws. In 1916, the Reichstag adopted a resolution introduced by the Centre Party, calling on the government to follow the "Oberste Heeresleitung (OHL)"'s recommendation on the use of submarines. The OHL's policy of resuming unrestricted submarine warfare was supposed to break the deadlock of the war but instead led to the United States entry into the war. As the war continued, many of the leaders of the Centre's left wing, particularly Matthias Erzberger, came to support a negotiated settlement, and Erzberger was key in the passage of the Reichstag Peace Resolution of 1917.


title: Centre Party (Germany)

text: The same year, the Centre's Georg von Hertling, formerly Minister-President of Bavaria, was appointed Chancellor, but he could not overcome the dominance of the military leadership of Hindenburg and Ludendorff. When a parliamentary system of government was introduced in October 1918, the new chancellor Max von Baden appointed representatives from the Centre party, the Social Democrats and the left-liberals as ministers.


title: Centre Party (Germany)

text: After the fall of the monarchy in the German Revolution of 1918–1919, conflict arose between the party and the new Social Democratic government. Adolf Hofmann, the Free State of Prussia minister for culture, attempted to decree a total separation of church and state, forcing religion out of schools. This stirred up a wave of protest among the Catholic population, and bishops, Catholic organisations and the Centre Party itself united to combat the "red danger". This conflict bridged internal tensions within the party and secured its continual existence despite the turmoil of the revolution. The party however was weakened by its Bavarian wing splitting off and forming the Bavarian People's Party (BVP), which emphasised autonomy of the states and also took a more conservative course.


title: Centre Party (Germany)

text: In the 1919 elections for the Weimar National Assembly the Centre Party gained 91 representatives, being the second largest party after the Social Democratic Party (SPD). The Centre's Konstantin Fehrenbach was elected president of the National Assembly. The party actively cooperated with Social Democrats and left-liberal German Democratic Party (DDP) in drawing up the Weimar Constitution, which guaranteed what the Centre had been fighting for since its founding: equality for Catholics and autonomy for Catholic Church throughout Germany. The party was less successful in the school question. Although religious education remained an ordinary subject in most schools, the comprehensive, inter-denominational schools became default.


title: Centre Party (Germany)

text: The Centre Party, whose pragmatic principles generally left it open to supporting either a monarchical or republican form of government, proved one of the mainstays of the Weimar Republic, continuing the cooperation with SPD and DDP in the Weimar Coalition. This combination, however, lost its majority in the 1920 elections.


title: Centre Party (Germany)

text: The party was an ideologically diverse coalition of Catholic politicians, comprising republicans like Matthias Erzberger and Joseph Wirth as well as right-wingers like Franz von Papen. As a result of the party's flexibility, it participated in every government between 1919 and 1932, both with parties to their left and to their right. The Centre mainly provided the ministers for finance and labour and, on four occasions, the Chancellor. However, this also damaged the party's prospects because it was increasingly associated with all of the conflicts, problems, and failures of the Republic. The Centre had a share of the odium attached to the so-called "Weimar Establishment" which was blamed, especially on the right, for the German defeat in World War I in the Stab-in-the-back myth, as well as for the humiliations of the Versailles Treaty and reparations. Erzberger himself, who had signed the armistice, was assassinated by right-wing extremists in 1921.


title: Centre Party (Germany)

text: The parties of the Weimar Coalition (Social Democrats, Centre and the left-liberal German Democratic Party (DDP) were the base of the Weimar Republic but lost their majority in the 1920 elections. After this, majority governments were rare as they required the support of the Weimar Coalition and the national liberal German People's Party (DVP). Social Democrats and DVP found it hard to agree on economic policy while Social Democrats disagreed with the Centre Party on issues like religious schools or a nationwide Concordat with the Holy See.


title: Centre Party (Germany)

text: Following the 1920 elections, the Centre's Konstantin Fehrenbach formed a minority government in a coalition with the DDP and the DVP. In May 1921 the Weimar Coalition once again joined forces with the Centre's Joseph Wirth as Chancellor, but this minority government collapsed again in November 1922. After this, the Centre participated in the non-affiliated Wilhelm Cuno's "government of the economy", together with both liberal parties and the Bavarian People's Party (BVP).


title: Centre Party (Germany)

text: In August 1923 the DVP's Gustav Stresemann formed a Grand Coalition administration, comprising the Centre, both Liberal parties and the Social Democrats, which lasted until November, when the Social Democrats left the coalition and the Centre's Wilhelm Marx became chancellor of a cabinet of the remaining parties. In January 1925 the non-affiliated Hans Luther was appointed chancellor and formed a coalition between the Centre, both Liberal parties, the BVP and, for the first time, the right-wing German National People's Party (DNVP). The Centre, the BVP and the DNVP jointly supported legislation to expand religious schools.


title: Centre Party (Germany)

text: In the same year Wilhelm Marx was the Centre's candidate in the presidential elections. In the second round, combining the support of the Weimar coalition parties, he gained 45.3% of the vote and finished a close second to the victorious right-wing candidate Paul von Hindenburg with 48.3%. In May 1926 Chancellor Luther resigned and Marx again assumed the chancellorship. In June 1928, the general elections resulted in losses for the government parties and in gains for the Social Democrats and the Communists. The Grand Coalition of 1923 was revived, this time including the BVP and the Social Democrat Hermann Müller became chancellor.


title: Centre Party (Germany)

text: During the years of the Weimar Republic debates about the Catholic character of the party, as described above, persisted. The left-wing of the party, led by Erzberger and Wirth, had close ties to the Catholic workers' associations led by Joseph Joos. Some politicians on the right wing of the party, including Heinrich Brauns and Franz von Papen, advocated a move towards the right and a closer cooperation with the national movements. The middle-ground emphasised their loyalty to the Church and rejected both extremes. To mediate the tension between the wings and to strengthen their ties with the Bishops, the party in September 1928 did not elect the two favourites Joseph Joos and Adam Stegerwald, but rather the cleric Ludwig Kaas as chairman.


title: Centre Party (Germany)

text: In 1930 the "Grand Coalition" fell apart. Heinrich Brüning, from the moderate-conservative wing of the party, was appointed as Chancellor with a cabinet that, apart from the missing Social Democrats, was virtually unchanged. Brüning was confronted with economic crises exacerbated by the Great Depression and had to tackle the difficult tasks of consolidating both budget and currency when faced with rising unemployment, and of also negotiating changes to the war reparations payments. His course of strict budget discipline, with severe cuts in public expenditure, and tax increases made him extremely unpopular among the lower and middle classes as well as among the Prussian Junkers.


title: Centre Party (Germany)

text: In 1930, Brüning's failure to gain a majority for his policies in parliament prompted him to call early elections, in which the four parties of the former Grand coalition lost their majority. After this, Brüning based his administration entirely on the support of the presidential decrees ("Notverordnung") through article 48 of the Constitution. This allowed him to circumvent parliament, as long as the Social Democrats - who feared another election - tolerated this practice. For this way of government based on both the President and cooperation of parliament, Brüning coined the term "authoritarian democracy".


title: Centre Party (Germany)

text: By this time, the party had become increasingly ambivalent toward democracy. Many elements of the party, including Kaas, had come to believe that only an authoritarian regime could protect the position of the Church.


title: Centre Party (Germany)

text: The Centre consistently supported Brüning's government and in 1932 vigorously campaigned for the re-election of Paul von Hindenburg, calling him a "venerate historical personality" and "the keeper of the constitution". Hindenburg was re-elected against Adolf Hitler, but shortly afterwards dismissed Brüning on 30 May 1932.


title: Centre Party (Germany)

text: President Hindenburg, advised by General Kurt von Schleicher, appointed the Catholic nobleman Franz von Papen as Chancellor, a member of the Centre's right wing and former cavalry captain. The intention was to break the connection of the Centre with the other republican parties or to split the party and integrate it into a comprehensive conservative movement. However, the Centre refused to support Papen's government in any way and criticised him for "distorting and abusing good old ideals of the Centre, acting as the representative of reactionary circles". Papen forestalled being expelled by leaving the party.


title: Centre Party (Germany)

text: Following Brüning's resignation, the Centre Party entered the opposition. Though they also opposed the Nazi Party, their energies were directed mainly against the renegade Papen. Some Centre politicians were soothed by Hitler's strategy of legality into downplaying the Nazi threat.


title: Centre Party (Germany)

text: In regard to the government, the Centre Party rejected a "temporal solution", such as Papen's presidial cabinets, and rather advocated a "total solution", i.e., a government according to the rules of the constitution. Since the Centre considered Papen's administration of being "in a dangerous way dependent on radical right-wing parties", chairman Ludwig Kaas advised the President to recognise this connection by basing the government on a coalition with the rising right-wing parties, the "logical result of current development". This would force the radicals to "take their share in responsibility" and "acquainting them with international politics". The Centre would then act as the party of opposition to this administration.