Process and Reality

Process and Reality is a book by Alfred North Whitehead that propounds a philosophy of organism, also called process philosophy. The book, published in 1929, is a revision of the Gifford Lectures he gave in 1927-28.

Process philosophy lays the groundwork for a paradigm of subjectivity, which Whitehead calls a "completed metaphysical language." (p. 18)

We diverge from Descartes by holding that what he has described as primary attributes of physical bodies, are really the forms of internal relationships between actual occasions. Such a change of thought is the shift from materialism to Organic Realism, as a basic idea of physical science.

— Process and Reality, p. 471.

A signal technical feature of Process and Reality is the way its ontology is grounded in mereotopology, a mathematical formalism combining mereological and topological notions.

See also

• Alfred North Whitehead
• Mereotopology
• Philosophy of Organism
• Process philosophy
• Whitehead's point-free geometry

Publication data

Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929). 1979 corrected edition, edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, Free Press. ISBN 0-02-934570-7 (Part V. Final Interpretation)

Secondary literature

• Biacino L., and Gerla G., 1991, "Connection structures," Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 32: 242-247.
• Clarke, Bowman, 1981, "A calculus of individuals based on 'connection'," Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 22: 204-18.
• ------, 1985, "Individuals and Points," Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 26: 61-75.
• Cobb, John Boswell, Jr., Whitehead Word Book, Claremont, P&F Press, 2008.
• Lowe, Victor, 1962. Understanding Whitehead. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.
• Nicholas Rescher, 2000. Process Philosophy: A Survey of Basic issues. Univ. of Pittsburgh Press.
• Sherburne, Donald W., 1966. A Key to Whitehead's Process and Reality. Macmillan.
• Simons, Peter, 1987. Parts. Oxford Univ. Press.
• Weber, Michel, Whitehead’s Pancreativism. The Basics. Foreword by Nicholas Rescher, Frankfurt / Paris, ontos verlag, 2006.
• Weber, Michel and Will Desmond (eds.), Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought, Frankfurt / Lancaster, ontos verlag, 2008.
• Van Wyk, Alan and Michel Weber (eds.), Creativity and Its Discontents. The Response to Whitehead's Process and Reality, Frankfurt / Lancaster, ontos verlag, 2009.

External links

• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "Process Philosophy" -- by J. R. Hustwit.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "Process Philosophy" -- by Nicholas Rescher.
• M. Weber:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Weber_(philosopher)