Whitehead at Harvard, 1924-1925

Abstract

This book examines the significance of Whitehead’s first year of lectures at Harvard, recently published in the first volume of The Edinburgh Critical Edition of the Complete Works of Alfred North Whitehead--The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead, 1924–1925: Philosophical Presuppositions of Science (2017). After spending a long career in England teaching mathematics, including publishing the seminal Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell, Whitehead was invited to join the Harvard philosophy department in 1924 at the age of 63. He would produce his most important philosophical works after his move to America, including Science and the Modern World and Process and Reality. His first year of Harvard lectures, edited together from the notes of his students, show for the first time Whitehead in the midst of developing his metaphysics and ‘philosophy of organism’ that would appear in a more polished form in his published writings. These essays by leading Whitehead scholars discuss how long-standing interpretations of Whitehead’s philosophy can now be challenged or confirmed.