Whitehead at Harvard, 1925-1927
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Published 28 February 2027
About this book
This book examines the significance of the second volume of The Edinburgh Critical Edition of the Complete Works of Alfred North Whitehead: The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead, 1925–1927: General Metaphysical Problems of Science, published in 2021, which covers Whitehead’s second and third years of American lectures in philosophy
- Aims to catalyse the broader scholarly community’s engagement with the new materials published in the second volume of the Edinburgh Critical Edition of the Complete Works of Alfred North Whitehead
- Questions how the Harvard Lectures and the Edinburgh Critical Editions change our understanding of the meaning or development of Whitehead’s thought
- Covers a broad range of ways in which Whitehead’s Harvard Lectures change and broaden our understanding of his work, from mathematics, to ethics, his view of time, and the role of biology in his thought
Long-standing theories about Whitehead’s early philosophical efforts can now be challenged or overturned. In this volume, leading Whitehead scholars address the ways in which the 1925-1927 Harvard lectures challenge or confirm previous understanding of Whitehead’s published works, trace the development of Whitehead’s thought in the crucial period after Science and the Modern World but before Process and Reality, examine Whitehead’s singular guest lecture in Richard Clarke Cabot’s seminar in social ethics – a topic which Whitehead usually avoided – and elucidate how these lectures be seen as a bridge between his mathematical and philosophical work.
Table of contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction: Assessing and Defining Whitehead's Harvard Lectures
Part I: The role of biology in Whitehead’s philosophy
1. From a Philosophy of Evolution to a Philosophy of Organism
Paul A. Bogaard
2. Assessing Whitehead’s ‘biological turn’
Philippe Gagnon
3. Whitehead and Biology – A reply to Philippe Gagnon
Dennis Sölch
4. Further Clarifications Concerning ‘Assessing Whitehead’s “biological turn”’
Philippe Gagnon
Part II: Mathematics, Logic, and Symbolism
5. Symbolic cognition of infinity: Using Whitehead’s HL2 to bridge Symbolism and Principia Mathematica
Landon D. C. Elkind
Part III: Whitehead’s Philosophical Context
6. The dipolar character of being in Plato and Whitehead
Daniel A. Dombrowski
7. The emergence of organic empiricism in Whitehead’s Harvard lectures: relational stubbornness and the being of practice
Christian Frigerio
8. Reason in action: Dewey’s place in Whitehead’s Harvard lectures (1925–27)
Maria Regina Brioschi
Part IV: Metaphysical Reflections
9. Whitehead’s ethics: Fill in the blanks
Milan Stürmer and Daniel Bella
10. Whitehead on solidarity: From the concrete to the system
Alessia Giacone
11. Standing firm in the flux: On Whitehead’s eternal objects
Matthew David Segall
12. Whitehead’s 1925–27 view of function and time
Ronny Desmet
Notes on Contributors
Index