Leemon McHenry argues that Whitehead's metaphysics provides a better basis for achieving a unification of physical theory than a traditional substance metaphysics. He investigates the influence of Maxwell's electromagnetic field, Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum mechanics on the development of the ontology of events and compares Whitehead's theory to his contemporaries, C. D. Broad and Bertrand Russell, as well as W. V. Quine. In this way, McHenry defends the naturalised and speculative approach to metaphysics as opposed to analytical and linguistic methods that arose in the 20th century.

At the base of Whitehead's philosophy of organism is a vision of the solidarity of all final actualities. Each actuality is a discrete individual enjoying autonomous self-determination, yet each also requires all other actualities as essential components and partial determinants of its own nature. This vision of universal solidarity, Nobo demonstrates, is the fundamental metaphysical thesis whose truth the categories and principles of Whitehead's philosophy were expressly designed to elucidate. The received interpretations of Whitehead's thought, Nobo shows, have ignored the mutual relevance of the solidarity thesis and the organic categoreal scheme and, for that reason, have grossly misrepresented many of Whitehead's most important metaphysical doctrines. Contending that the difficult tasks of interpreting and developing Whitehead's metaphysics presuppose an understanding of the solidarity thesis, Nobo explores that thesis and the metaphysical categories and principles most relevant to its elucidation. In the process, he not only corrects many misinterpretations but also develops important metaphysical doctrines that Whitehead neglected to make sufficiently explicit in his published writings. It is precisely in terms of the neglected doctrine of eternal extensive continuity, Nobo demonstrates, that the more puzzling aspects of the solidarity thesis are satisfactorily explained. He then shows that the extensional solidarity of all final actualities is an essential ingredient of the generalized conception of experience on which Whitehead builds his ontology, cosmology, and epistemology.

This is an extended analysis of the intricate relationships between relativity theory, quantum mechanics and Alfred North Whitehead's cosmology. Michael Epperson illuminates the intersection of science and philosophy in Whitehead's work.

This collection of essays stages a dialogue between Friedrich Schleiermacher and Alfred North Whitehead on significant features of 'open' system. The volume offers new options for rehabilitating system for future theological and philosophical thinking by opening system to a flexible relation with changing reality. Key ingredients for system are discussed in three areas of contact between Schleiermacher and Whitehead. One such ingredient concerns historical precedents figuring crucially in Western systematic philosophy. Another feature is the systematic categorization of experience that relates epistemology, metaphysics, and the empirical sciences. System is also brought to bear on pressing contemporary issues, such as ethics and religious pluralism.

Whitehead and the Pittsburgh School: Preempting the Problem of Intentionality proposes a revisionary history of the relationship between Alfred North Whitehead and analytic philosophy, as well as a constructive proposal for how thinking with Whitehead can help disabuse analytic philosophy of the problem of intentionality. Lisa Landoe Hedrick defines “analytic” philosophy as primarily the intellectual tradition that runs from Gottlob Frege to Bertrand Russell to Wilfrid Sellars, or, geographically speaking, from Vienna to Cambridge to Pittsburgh between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As key members of the Pittsburgh School of philosophy, Robert Brandom and John McDowell pick up the Sellarsian project of reconciling nature and normativity in different ways, yet each of them presupposes a problematic relationship between language and the world precisely bequeathed to them by an implicit metaphysics of subjecthood that characterized analytic thinkers of the early twentieth century. Hedrick both investigates Whitehead’s published and archived critiques of early analytic thought—as an extension of a wider critique of modern philosophy—and employs Whitehead to reimagine nature and normativity after the problem of intentionality by way of his aesthetics of symbolism. This book thereby builds upon a burgeoning effort among philosophers to interface process and analytic thought, but it is the first to focus on contemporary analytic thinkers.

All the authors of the sixteen essays gathered in this volume are concerned, in their different ways, to clarify, criticize, and develop key ideas and insights of Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), one of the towering figures of twentieth-century speculative thought, whose "process philosophy" has, in recent decades, aroused intense intellectual interest both in this country and abroad. The present volume is intended to complement, but not to duplicate, an earlier selection of important Whitehead studies, Alfred North Whitehead: Essays on His Philosophy, ed. G. L. Kline (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1963).

The basic aims of contemporary thinking in education are to cultivate a proper comprehension of the meaning and purpose of education and the role of the teacher, and to develop adequate theoretical and methodological frameworks that combine some of the positive sides of the leading theories, while avoiding their disadvantages. Toward these ends, one excellent candidate for consideration is Alfred North Whitehead’s (1861-1947) process-relational philosophy of education, as set forth in The Aims of Education (1929) and elsewhere. The contributors to this volume analyze Whitehead’s philosophy of education in a detailed and critical fashion, including inquiring into the development of cycle-based approaches to education, like Whitehead’s, in intellectual history as well as its potential objective bases. They also demonstrate how this relates to, and can be integrated with, other leading theories of education and contemporary pedagogical thinking, and identify avenues for its positive, practical application in schooling across the globe as well as in scientific research. The book further critically evaluates current educational practices and the organization of educational institutions in this light and the effectiveness of teaching strategies that are founded upon some of its principles, while also exploring the ramifications of its selection and application in education for society in general, as well as for our common civilizational aspirations, including humanity’s addressing of global problems, such as the ecological crisis. In addition, the volume also serves to lay some of the groundwork for its potential further development.

One of the major philosophical texts of the 20th century, Process and Reality is based on Alfred North Whitehead’s influential lectures that he delivered at the University of Edinburgh in the 1920s on process philosophy. Whitehead’s master work in philsophy, Process and Reality propounds a system of speculative philosophy, known as process philosophy, in which the various elements of reality into a consistent relation to each other. It is also an exploration of some of the preeminent thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as Descartes, Newton, Locke, and Kant. The ultimate edition of Whitehead’s magnum opus, Process and Reality is a standard reference for scholars of all backgrounds.