Whitehead at Harvard, 1924–1925

✍ Scribed by Brian G. Henning (editor), Joseph Petek (editor)

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Year: 2020
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 401
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

In these newly commissioned essays, leading Whitehead scholars ask a range of important questions about Whitehead’s first year of philosophy lectures. Do these lectures challenge or confirm previous understandings of Whitehead’s published works? What is revealed about the development of Whitehead’s thought in the crucial period after London but before the publication of Science and the Modern World? What should we make of concepts and terms that were introduced in these lectures but were never incorporated into subsequent publications? Also included is the text of Whitehead’s first lecture at Harvard, recently gifted to the Critical Edition, allowing for a clearer understanding of Whitehead’s plans and goals for his first course of lectures in philosophy than has previously been possible.

✦ Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Preface: A Brief History of the Critical Edition of Whitehead
Introduction: Tales from the Whitehead Mines – On Whitehead, His Students and the Challenges of Editing the Critical Edition
Part I The First Lecture
1 First Lecture: September, 1924
2 Examining Whitehead’s ‘First Lecture: September, 1924’
Part II The Fitness of the Environment
3 Whitehead and His Philosophy of Evolution
4 Some Clarifications on Evolution and Time
5 Whitehead’s Biological Turn
Part III Physics and Relativity
6 Quanta and Corpuscles: The Influence of Quantum Mechanical Ideas on Whitehead’s Transitional Philosophy in Light of The Harvard Lectures
7 From Physics to Philosophy, and from Continuity to Atomicity
8 Whitehead’s Highly Speculative Lectures on Quantum Theory
9 On Herstein’s ‘Quanta and Corpuscles’
10 Reply to Desmet
Part IV Whitehead’s Philosophical Context
11 Whitehead and Kant at Copenhagen
12 Whitehead’s Early Harvard Period, Hartshorne and the Transcendental Project
13 Footnotes to Plato
Part V Metaphysical Reflections
14 Diagrams and Myths
15 How ‘Eternity’ Got ‘Thrown Forward’ Into ‘Perishing’
Part VI Reinterpreting Whitehead
16 Uncovering a ‘New’ Whitehead
17 Whitehead in Class: Do the Harvard-Radcliffe Course Notes Change How We Understand Whitehead’s Thought?
Notes on Contributors
Index