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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? 

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  1. Paul D. Van PeltFebruary 24, 2024 at 12:25 PM

    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.

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  2. Paul D. Van PeltFebruary 28, 2024 at 4:13 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.

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  3. Paul D. Van PeltFebruary 29, 2024 at 4:46 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.

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  4. Paul D. Van PeltMarch 1, 2024 at 12:30 PM

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

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