On the Trail of Whitehead: Part One: The Spy Who Came in to Take Notes (with Apologies to John le Carré)

Abstract

Abstract A young Canadian mathematician and philosopher, Winthrop Bell, who was Edmund Husserl’s first doctoral student from North America, taught as a postdoc at Harvard in the 1920s, where he took a complete set of notes in the first class at Harvard taught by Alfred North Whitehead during the 1924-1925 academic year. These notes, missing for over 80 years, have recently been found. The notes transform scholarship concerning the early development of Whitehead s mature metaphysical views, while the note-taker’s own career illuminates a remarkable collaboration between the pragmatists in the U. S. and Canada and the early phenomenology movement in Europe, an intellectual exchange that was shattered during the tumultuous events of World War I and its aftermath.