摘要：Joseph Bracken proposes to modify Whitehead’s tendency to see the comprehensive entities of everyday life as
but aggregations of actual occasions. While there are resources in Polanyi’s notion of an emergent cosmos
to counter Whitehead’s atomism and reductionism, Bracken’s use of Polanyi’s theory of a morphogenetic field
as a corrective is argued to be only partially successful. Bracken must explain how morphogenetic fields evolve
and arise. This step would require (1) replacing Whiteheadian reductionism with a principle of ontological
parity that honors the reality of interaction between entities and the integration of their operational principles
within basic ontological levels and (2) setting forth principles of emergence to explain how these levels and
fields arise.
关键词：Michael Polanyi, Joseph Bracken, Whitehead, cosmology, morphogenesis, field
theory, evolution, operational principles.
