Whitehead’s Biological Turn

Dennis Sölch discusses Whitehead’s perception that science was undergoing a paradigm shift (especially given the confusion in the field of physics at the time), and hoped to bridge the physical and biological sciences and create a more unified concept of nature. With Lawrence Henderson, Whitehead would emphasize the reciprocal relationship between organism and environment, counter to both the vitalist and reductive materialist theories. He believed that biology would become the dominant science of the coming era, providing the best hope for radical innovations in human understanding.

Whitehead and His Philosophy of Evolution

Paul Bogaard discusses Whitehead’s ‘philosophy of evolution’, tracing the concepts of organism, environment and evolution through the Harvard lectures and his published works, concluding that ‘evolution’ as a concept seems to fade in importance for Whitehead in subsequent years (somewhat surprisingly, given its prevalence in the lectures). Of special importance to Whitehead was the work of his new Harvard colleague Lawrence Henderson, whose book The Fitness of the Environment he recommended to his students’ attention.