Skip to main content

Process and Reality


 I have recently purchased a copy of Alfred North Whitehead's notorious volume, PROCESS AND REALITY.  I have long promised myself I would read this book some day.  It has long played a part in my own view of the history of philosophy through the 20th century, and I have had sporadic pangs of guilt over not having tackled it myself.

I gather from the secondary literature that Whitehead tried to bring a philosophy akin to Henri Bergson's into the world of Anglophonic analytical philosophy. 

Whitehead of course knew the latter tradition from the inside. The title page of a classic work therein, the PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA, three volumes on the logical foundations of mathematics, bears his name, along with Bertrand Russell's. 

The third and final volume of PRINCIPIA appeared in 1913.  PROCESS came out in 1929. So there were sixteen years between them -- a lot of history (and one world war) and a lot of time for reflection. 

So ... you might consider Whitehead's magnum opus a "bucket list" item for me. 

I see that Whitehead starts by telling us that his inspiration for this work comes largely from his reading of  the great canonical philosophers from Descartes to Hume. I imagine the first of a line of books on a shelf at his home as saying "Descartes" on the spine, and the last saying "Hume".  You might name the collection after the book-ends rather than by the first and last books.  One might call it the period after Galileo yet before Kant. 

At any rate, this admission as to the source of Whitehead's inspiration is a bit odd given Whitehead's famous remark (in this book somewhere?) that all of western philosophy has been a series of "footnotes to Plato." It turns out Whitehead was really fascinated by the footnotes compiled between circa 1630 and circa 1780. Who knew? 

Labels:

Comments

  1. Paul D. Van PeltFebruary 24, 2024 at 9:25 AM

    An old philosophy saw said something about *standing on the shoulders of giants*. I don't recall where I first read that. But it is true, not only for philosophy. Science, mathematics and medicine also come to mind. ANW and Russell were among those giants who stood on other shoulders,IMHO. It is also a paradigm that says those who do not learn from their mistakes are destined to repeat them. We know how that turns out.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Paul D. Van PeltFebruary 28, 2024 at 1:13 PM

    I think processing reality is different now. Due to different interpretations of what reality is. Russell and ANW were not realists in the modern sense, seems to me. No one, from their time was. It is also interesting that many talk of 'processing' experience and information. I still think about that activity, because my notion of human contemplation and reasoning is about thought, not mechanistic, AI, uh, processing. Yeah, well, sure. I do not buy the braver, newer world, envisioned by some. My nephews and their wives, all past forty years of age, don't buy that stuff, either. Not do my stepsons and their families. Comme ci, Comme ca.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Paul D. Van PeltFebruary 29, 2024 at 1:46 PM

    The form of reality that matters to most people is a contextual sort. Those "most people" identify with others, of like interests, motives and preferences. Another blog today spoke of reviving democracy. I left a comment, suggesting ---if, obliquely---that democracy is comatose, if not, outright, dead. Friends, including my brother of 74+ years, think more or less as I do. Tribalism, much as we may wish to deny it, was a foundation of society, conferring structure to chaos. It was not the best we could do, but, it was the best we could do, with what we had and knew then. It re-emerges and subsides, intermittently. I don't expect that cycle to change.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Paul D. Van PeltMarch 1, 2024 at 9:30 AM

    ...and then, there is the issue of competition vs. cooperation...oh, dear, it is complicated.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti
7 comments
Read more

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

  Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave.   First, Plato  is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability.  I  only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers
Post a Comment
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak
13 comments
Read more