Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology

By Alfred North Whitehead

Book Overview

"Process and Reality" is a monumental work of speculative philosophy by Alfred North Whitehead, representing the definitive statement of his process metaphysics. In this profound "Essay in Cosmology," Whitehead seeks to construct a coherent, logical, and necessary system of general ideas that can interpret every element of our experience. He rejects traditional substance-based metaphysics in favor of an ontology centered on dynamic processes, "actual entities," and the interconnectedness of all things.

The text explores the categories of existence, explanation, and obligation, providing a rigorous framework for understanding the nature of being and becoming. Whitehead introduces key concepts such as "prehension," the "nexus," and the "primordial and consequent natures of God," bridging the gap between science and philosophy. This work serves as the foundation for modern process philosophy and has influenced diverse fields including physics, biology, and ecology. "Process and Reality" remains an essential read for those interested in the deep structures of reality, the relationship between the mind and the physical world, and the continuous evolution of the universe.

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1025929063
• ISBN13: 9781025929064
• Release Date: February 2026
• Publisher: Tradd Street Press
• Length: 564 Pages
• Weight: 2.12 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Process & Reality

Studied this in college and was totally blown away! Process & Reality is, in a nutshell, mathematics-based, process metaphysics, with quantum mechanics thrown in for good measure. Say that 3 times fast! Given that he wrote this in 1927-28, many of the concepts he proposed were way ahead of the times. The concepts he proposed were similar to Spinoza & Meister Eckhart, although more advanced than either one. I found it fascinating! I was a Philosophy major at the time & this was one of the first texts that really ignited my passion for philosophy & quantum mechanics. I would recommend this to Philosophers, Physicists, and anyone who is just naturally inquisitive about the way the world and its parts work.

The Brilliance of Hard Work and Imagination

Early in this century American philosophy made a 'linguistic' turn that determined the direction it would take all the way to the present day. In the spirit of the times, language made its way to the forefront of philosophy, the end result being (among other things) Positivism and a scientistic approach to the Geisteswissenschaften. It is a turn many of us, looking back, wish it had never made. Because of this turn, certain philosophers and ways of doing philosophy all but stopped being considered. Among these philosophers were Dewey and James. These thinkers have in recent decades been resurrected by contemporary neopragmatists, most notably Richard Rorty, who look back at the arid desert of mid-twentieth century philosophy and wonder how far we have come after all. To quote Rorty (who is certainly no Whiteheadian), American philosophical thought 'began taking its cue from Frege rather than Locke.' Broadly considered, this meant that language rather than experience, mind rather than body, was taken to be the most serious matter for philosophy.Whitehead stayed with Locke. Whitehead wanted to critique most Modern philosophy with what he termed the 'philosophy of organism;' that is, Whitehead insisted that experience or 'feeling' rather than disembodied thinking was the hallmark of human existence, and that all experience was subjective. Now, this does not sound like Locke. Anyone writing this side of modernity knows that Locke was the quintessential modern philosopher, with all the baggage that entails. But when Whitehead wrote in the preface to Process and Reality that `the writer who most fully anticipated the main positions of the philosophy of organism is John Locke,' he was stressing the fact that Locke discarded metaphysics, seeking rather to look at what was actually happening, as far as he could tell.In many ways, and though they wrote at the same time but in complete isolation from each other's thought, Whitehead and Heidegger were searching for the same thing, the thing both philosophers thought that Plato and Aristotle had known, but that had been forgotten in the intervening centuries: what it actually meant to experience something, or, as Cooper puts it, how `to make intelligible our immediate experience so that we can discover how it is possible to have any experience of the actual world.' Rather than reading Whitehead as an elaborate and old-school metaphysician, one ought to read him as a phenomenological empiricist, if such a beast exists, and thus find an answer to the people who dismiss Whitehead as `behind the times,' people who simply don't bother to actually read Whitehead. It is true that thinkers still committed to a reductionist/linguistic approach to philosophy will not see Whitehead's importance as a critic of closed systems (Whitehead's is expressly open and revisable, one reason it has endured as long as it has without being widely read in philosophy departments). It is also true that American philosophy

Foundational work for Process Theology

Whitehead's book is a seminal work on freedom and becoming. His neologisms make it a difficult read but with help from Sherburne's "Key" even a beginner can make a lot of sense out of what Whitehead is saying. This is where Process Theology got its start. The book is essential for anyone interested in freedom, creativity and a modern philosophy of becoming.I have problems with the book's optimism. The values specified in the primordial beginning seem to me to be more interested in certain differential equations than in any kind of human flourishing. I recommend the book highly as an ambitious, interesting, and systematic approach to doing philosophy in the grand old sense.

Foundational work for Process Theology

Whitehead's book is a seminal work on freedom and becoming. His neologisms make it a difficult read but with help from Sherburne's "Key" even a beginner can make a lot of sense out of what Whitehead is saying. This is where Process Theology got its start. The book is essential for anyone interested in freedom, creativity and a modern philosophy of becoming.I have problems with the book's optimism. The values specified in the primordial beginning seem to me to be more interested in certain differential equations than in any kind of human flourishing. I recommend the book highly as an ambitious, interesting, and systematic approach to doing philosophy in the grand old sense.

Our century's best systematic metaphysic.

Process and Reality was published the year that Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge to begin the movement known as linguistic analysis. Whitehead's masterpiece is everything that analysts despise: metaphysical, jargon-filled, and systematic. Whitehead's philosophy of language is terse: "philosophy redesigns language in the same wat that, in a physical science, pre-existing appliances are redesigned." The book is arrainged in five "Parts". The first part gives an overview of philosophy, its aims and methods, together with a set of premises on which the substance of his philosophy will be built. He calls this set "The Categoreal Scheme" and intends the remainder of his book to be an exposition of this scheme. His work is, then, "systematic" in a way that the 20th century has largely rejected, and hearkens back to the 19th century. In fact, he does so explicitly, naming his book after Bradley's "Appearance and Reality", and stating that, despite their metaphysical differences, he and Bradly come to much the same conclusions. The second part discusses the categoreal scheme in terms of the history of philosophy, with emphasis on the Empiricist tradition that begins with Locke, but covering the range of modern an ancient philosophy. In this section he elaborates his "philosophy of organism" which sees each actual entity as a psycho-physical unity of its environment. Deeply influenced by early 20th century physics, Whitehead presents us with a universe that is dynamic. Grounded in Plato (Western Philosophy consists of "a series of footnotes to Plato"), he also presents us with a changeless ground for this dynamism. The result is a fascinating, modern interpretation of an ancient mode of thought. The third and forth parts develop the philosophy of organism in its own terms, rather than in relationship to the history of philosophy or to science. These sections are of special interest to the technical philosopher, and continue to be the subject-matter of articles and books by professional philosophers. The fifth and final part is a rhapsodic interpretation of the philosophy he has presented. This "Final Interpretation" has inspired a theological movement called "Process Theology", and provides provocative oracles for the amateur philosopher. This is not an easy book to read once you get into part two, and it is recommended that the reader have some familiarity with philosophy. However, the determined undergraduate or the dedicated amateur will find that the complexity of Whitehead's jargon is not merely to impress the unintiated, but expresses a view of reality that aims to be "consistent, coherent, applicable, and adequate". The view from inside makes it worth the effort necessary to enter into Whitehead's universe. Once entered, it is a world you will not forget.