Whitehead at Harvard, 1925–1927

This book examines the significance of the second volume of The Edinburgh Critical Edition of the Complete Works of Alfred North Whitehead: The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead, 1925–1927: General Metaphysical Problems of Science, published in 2021, which covers Whitehead’s second and third years of American lectures in philosophy Aims to catalyse the broader scholarly community’s engagement with the new materials published in the second volume of the Edinburgh Critical Edition of the Complete Works of Alfred North Whitehead Questions how the Harvard Lectures and the Edinburgh Critical Editions change our understanding of the meaning or development of Whitehead’s thought Covers a broad range of ways in which Whitehead’s Harvard Lectures change and broaden our understanding of his work, from mathematics, to ethics, his view of time, and the role of biology in his thought Long-standing theories about Whitehead’s early philosophical efforts can now be challenged or overturned. In this volume, leading Whitehead scholars address the ways in which the 1925-1927 Harvard lectures challenge or confirm previous understanding of Whitehead’s published works, trace the development of Whitehead’s thought in the crucial period after Science and the Modern World but before Process and Reality, examine Whitehead’s singular guest lecture in Richard Clarke Cabot’s seminar in social ethics – a topic which Whitehead usually avoided – and elucidate how these lectures be seen as a bridge between his mathematical and philosophical work.