Whitehead in Class: Do the Harvard-Radcliffe Course Notes Change How We Understand Whitehead’s Thought?

Brian Henning’s chapter takes a close look at numerous key passages that shift our understanding of Whitehead (including, for instance, the influence of C. D. Broad as a philosophical foil), and, just as importantly, notes the subjects and terms missing from this first year of lectures which we might have expected to find, including God and even (mostly) creativity. While there may be no ‘smoking gun’ in the lectures which fundamentally contradicts previous understandings of Whitehead, they deepen our understanding of his philosophical development, not to mention reveal his explicit thoughts on specific philosophers and scientists who are seldom discussed in his published works.

Uncovering a ‘New’ Whitehead

George Lucas’ chapter begins with a discussion of all the ways in which he and others (including Victor Lowe and Lewis Ford) had misinterpreted aspects of Whitehead’s life and philosophy throughout the years, owing in some cases to a lack of adequate information, and in others to a simple lack of adequately attentive scholarship, both of which this collection of essays and the first volume of the Critical Edition help to correct. He further claims that it is Whitehead’s daily and yearly classroom lectures for serious students, not the occasional popular talks for general audiences, that should define his thought, and that the newly published Harvard lectures are thus the primary archival source materials that take us deeper into the real Whitehead than anything he formally published.

How ‘Eternity’ Got ‘Thrown Forward’ Into ‘Perishing’

Jude Jones argues that eternity haunts Whitehead’s 1924-25 Harvard lectures, a concept which Whitehead claims is explicit in most of our mental operations. In Whitehead’s metaphysics, the entire past is, for any occasion, part of the standing condition of valuative potential out of which that occasion will emerge, the realisation of value in particular, noneternal things or processes which nonetheless have standing value as expressions of and relations to that Eternal. But perishing is its necessary mirror; the achievement of relational value requires radical finitude in the form of realised limitation by perpetual perishing in order to be real. Value and grief become two sides of the same coin, a paradox revealing the nature of ecstatic individuation.

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.

Diagrams and Myths

In this chapter, George Allan attempts to clarify Whitehead’s statement in the Harvard lectures that metaphysical philosophy is ‘not the mere handmaiden of Science’, but rather ‘stands as near to Poetry as to Science, and needs them both’. Both poetry and science are crucial to metaphysics because they offer methods to help grasp the ungraspable. With this understood, the chapter examines the use of diagrams and myths as abstract surrogates in Whitehead’s lectures, and particularly the metaphor the ‘shadow of truth’ as giving us crucial insight into Whitehead’s metaphysics.

Whitehead’s Early Harvard Period, Hartshorne and the Transcendental Project

In this chapter, George Shields compares Whitehead’s Harvard lectures to the philosophy of Charles Hartshorne, arguing that the two are united in defending the possibility of a ‘transcendental project’ and an ‘ontological approach’. The chapter argues that for both philosophers, ‘something exists’ is a necessary postulate, ontology precedes epistemology, that their critiques of Kant’s noumena are sound and their return to pre-Kantian modes of thought is justified, and that formal logic and mathematical analysis are wholly necessary in philosophy.

On Herstein’s ‘Quanta and Corpuscles’

In this chapter Ronny Desmet airs some disagreements with Gary Herstein’s earlier chapter on ‘Quanta and Corpuscles’, arguing for a more nuanced understanding of Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation. He also notes that concept of continuity can be reasonably easily understood as the divisibility-indivisibility contrast, and that Lewis Ford’s temporal atomism thesis is note definitively dead, since Whitehead did change his mind from an idea of continuous becoming to one of atomic becoming

Some Clarifications on Evolution and Time

Maria-Teresa Teixeira examines the concepts of evolution and time as they appear in the Harvard lectures and Whitehead’s The Function of Reason five years later, noting Whitehead’s influences and the ways in which his philosophy shifted. Unsurprisingly, in the Harvard lectures Whitehead’s views on evolution were still developing, and he did not yet associate it with reason as its guiding force. He was eventually led to ‘an original theory of evolution that emphasised time, the dialectical symbiosis between beings and their environment, and the overall importance of the environment.’

Examining Whitehead’s ‘First Lecture: September, 1924’

A quick comparison of Whitehead’s manuscript for his first Harvard lecture and the notes of his Harvard and Radcliffe students reveals that the manuscript does not exactly reflect the lecture that he actually delivered at Harvard on September 25, 1924. Paul Bogaard, the editor of the first year of Whitehead’s Harvard lectures during the academic year 1924-1925, undertakes a thorough examination of the manuscript and the notes of Winthrop Bell and Louise Heath and draws some conclusions which help explain the differences between these different sources. The manuscript was likely a little long to be delivered within the allotted time on the day, and it seems that Whitehead made some adjustments of the fly, including the removal of British anecdotes with which Americans would have been less familiar.

Footnotes to Plato

Aljoscha Berve examines Whitehead’s relationship to Plato’s philosophy in the Harvard lectures, arguing that the lectures clarify Plato’s influence on Whitehead as one half of an idealised contrast with Aristotle, the mathematician as opposed to the biologist. In his published writings, Plato’s influence on Whitehead could already be seen in his adoption of Plato’s chorá, his discussion of seven general notions in Adventures of Ideas, his juxtaposition of Plato and Ulysses as representing two modes of reason in The Function of Reason, and his style of presentation. But the Harvard lectures show that Whitehead also conceived of Plato as mainly a mathematician whose metaphysics is a result of his dealing with eternal forms.