Process and Reality

Introduction

Whitehead gave the Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh in 1927–28 and expanded them into this dense book of 1929, subtitled An Essay in Cosmology. He replaces the idea of enduring substances with “actual entities” or “actual occasions”: momentary events of experience that come into being by taking up (“prehending”) the past world and then become part of it. “Eternal objects”, comparable to Platonic forms, make novelty possible, and God has a “primordial” and a “consequent” nature. Whitehead remarks that the European philosophical tradition consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. Its technical vocabulary has kept the book at the margins of academic philosophy, but it became the basis of process theology, developed by Charles Hartshorne, John B. Cobb and others.

Connections

Builds on

• Timaeusc. 360 BCE · Plato

Taken up in

• Cosmopolitics1997 · Isabelle Stengers

More works by Alfred North Whitehead

• 1910Principia Mathematica
• 1925Science and the Modern World