Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

... what does Whitehead have to say about the emergence of consciousness and its place in a largely hostile cosmos? Still working my way through his masterpiece, Process and Reality.  I'm looking especially at Part III (The Theory of Prehensions), Chapter III, "The Transmission of Feelings,' Section IV, where our man seems to be working this through in real time himself.  "It is evident," he says, "that adversion and aversion ... only have importance in the case of high-grade organisms. They constitute the first step toward intellectual mentality, though in themselves they do not amount to consciousness."  He uses the phrase "adversion and aversion" and sometimes "adversion or aversion" repeatedly, with "adversion" apparently meaning attraction and "aversion" meaning repulsion. The two words suggest reaction to lures, positive or negative.  These "high-grade organisms" approach food and they avoid preda...

What follows may appear to have been plagiarized from the wikipedia article on The Problem of Universals. It isn't though: I was the original author of much of that article, and the material that follows still survives there in roughly the form I originally gave it years ago.  So I feel free to steal it back from myself.  --------------- William James learned pragmatism, the way of understanding an idea by its practical effects, from his friend Peirce, but he gave it new significance. (Which was not to Peirce's taste - he came to complain that James had "kidnapped" the term and eventually to call himself a "pragmaticist" instead.) Although James certainly agreed with Peirce and against Berkeley that general ideas exist as a psychological fact, he was a nominalist in his ontology: From every point of view, the overwhelming and portentous character ascribed to universal conceptions is surprising. Why, from Plato and Aristotle, philosophers should...