FROM APPREHENSION TO PREHENSION: EXPLORING A DIFFERENT EXPERIENCE FOR PHILOSOPHICAL SPECULATION

Authors

  • Tomas G. Rosario, Jr.

Abstract

Both Aristotle and St. Thomas are acknowledged to have firmly established, at least in a general way, the close link between our experience of the material world and the metaphysical articulation of the said sphere of reality. Their philosophies are recognized to have provided the rational confirmation of the beliefs and convictions of ordinary men who rely mainly on their experiences for their understanding of what is real. On this premise it is plausible to esteem the two as philosophers of the common man. And yet, like all thinkers who generate and nourish philosophical inquiry through reliance on experience, both Aristotle and Aquinas confined experience to conscious experience or what Whitehead has called 'sense-perception'. Whitehead considered this traditional view on the starting point of philosophical analysis as erroneous although he clarified that "the mistake was natural for mediaeval and Greek philosophers: for they had not modern physics before them as a plain warning." 

Whitehead therefore initiates an inquiry into the radically new conception of experience. This entirely new view of experience is called by Whitehead "prehension", which is the theme of this paper.As we shall see, it appears to be the implicit thesis of Whitehead that the only way to access the so called 'ultimately primitive experience' is not by means of traditional sense apprehension but only through a non-cognitive act of appropriation.

Author Biography

Tomas G. Rosario, Jr.

Ateneo De Manila University, Philippines

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Vol. 7 No. 1 (2006): January - June 2006

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