Adolf Bastien lived in the early 1800s and traveled around the world working as a ship's doctor but developing an understanding of the world like an anthropologist. He saw the same issues around cosmology coming up in all the societies he came across. The base issues were the same but the solutions followed cultural lines. He called the local solutions Folk Ideas (Volkergedanken) and the universal form of the cosmological understanding, Elementary Ideas (Elementargedanken). Bastien also inspired others to look for these universals, such as Carl Jung in his Theory of Archetypes.
Whitehead uses the language of his culture, especially descriptive and mathematical language, to create Folk Ideas, a cosmology that fits our culture and called it the Philosophy of Organism (what we call Process Philosophy). Although it is difficult to see beyond the limits of the culture we are in, Whitehead strove to find a universal thread in the history of western philosophy that was both relevant to our current understanding of the world and yet stood within the cultural limits of our knowledge so as to appear natural to us.
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