Whitehead at Harvard, 1924-1925

CoverWhitehead at Harvard, 1924-25

(Edinburgh University Press)

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Examines the significance of The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead, 1924–1925
  • Responds to the question of whether the Harvard Lectures and The Edinburgh Critical Edition of the Complete Works of Alfred North Whitehead project change our understanding of the meaning or development of Whitehead’s thought
  • Written by international experts on Whitehead – including Maria-Teresa Teixeira, Gary Herstein and Jude Jones – who address a range of different aspects of the scholarly implications of the Lectures
  • The first monograph responding to the Critical Edition: has the potential to establish the tone and influence the direction of subsequent work
  • Includes the text of Whitehead’s first lecture at Harvard, recently gifted to the Critical Edition
  • Contributes towards setting scholarly conventions for how to cite and reference the volumes of the Critical Edition
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 in this volume is the text of Whitehead’s first lecture at Harvard, recently gifted to the Critical Edition of Whitehead, allowing for a clearer understanding of Whitehead’s plans and goals for his first course of lectures in philosophy than has previously been possible.

Contents

Preface
A Brief History of the Critical Edition of Whitehead
Brian G. Henning
Introduction
Tales from the Whitehead Mines: On Whitehead, His Students, and the challenges of Editing the Critical Edition
Joseph Petek
Part I: The First Lecture
1. First lecture: September, 1924
Alfred North Whitehead
2. Examining Whitehead’s ‘First lecture: September, 1924’
Paul A. Bogaard
Part II: The Fitness of the Environment
3. Whitehead and his Philosophy of Evolution
Paul A. Bogaard
4. Some Clarifications on Evolution and Time
Maria-Teresa Teixeira
5. Whitehead’s Biological Turn
Dennis Sölch
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
Gary L. Herstein
7. From Physics to Philosophy, and from Continuity to Atomicity
Ronny Desmet
8. Whitehead’s Highly Speculative Lectures on Quantum Theory
Ronny Desmet
9. On Herstein’s ‘Quanta and Corpuscles’
Ronny Desmet
10. Reply to Desmet
Gary L. Herstein
Part IV: Whitehead’s Philosophical Context
11. Whitehead and Kant at Copenhagen
Jason Bell, Seshu Iyengar
12. Whitehead’s Early Harvard Period, Hartshorne, and the Transcendental Project
George W. Shields
13. Footnotes to Plato
Aljoscha Berve
Part V: Metaphysical Reflections
14. Diagrams and Myths
George Allan
15. How ‘Eternity’ got ‘Thrown Forward’ into ‘Perishing’
Jude Jones
Part VI: Reinterpreting Whitehead
16. Uncovering a ‘New’ Whitehead
George R. Lucas, Jr.
17. Whitehead in Class: Do the Harvard-Radcliffe Course Notes Change How we Understand Whitehead’s Thought?
Brian G. Henning