Whitehead's Philosophy of Time

Abstract

ONCE again, the King's Crown Press has done good service to scholarship in producing this monograph. Of all the great thinkers, Whitehead is one of the most difficult to read : this is not wholly ought is so profound, but partly it is on account of his use of a very special vocabulary, addition, his views on Nature were undergoing continuous transformation, which resulted in some of his terms connoting different things at different periods of his life. Nowhere is this tendency more marked than in his philosophy of time, and for that reason alone Dr. W. W. Hammerschmidt's monograph would be welcome. As it is, on many other scores it should prove its worth, not least because we have here an attempt to bring some logical order into Whitehead's prodigious output. One would not desire, or indeed expect, regimentation to be characteristic of so sublime a creative artist ; but his commentator has done well to stop short of organising the master's work more thoroughly than he seemed to intend.