There is one question that any potential reader who suspects that Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) might be important for past, contemporary, and future philosophy inevitably raises: how should I read Whitehead? How can I make sense of this incredibly dense tissue of imaginative systematizing, spread over decades of work in disciplines so different and specialized as algebra, geometry, logic, relativistic physics and philosophy of science? Accordingly, this monograph has two main complementary objectives. The first one is to propose a set (...) of efficient hermeneutical tools to get the reader started. These straightforward tools provide answers that are highly coherent and probably the most applicable to Whitehead’s entire corpus. The second objective is to illustrate how the several parts of Process and Reality are interconnected, something that all commentators have either failed to recognise or only incompletely acknowledged. (shrink)

Whitehead's Pancreativism: The Basics has provided tools to understand Whitehead secundum Whitehead. We now seek to bring him in dialogue with James. It will be a pragmatic dialogue looking for two types of synergy: to establish the relevance of a Jamesian background to read Whitehead, and to adumbrate how Whitehead can help us understand the stakes of James's works. After one hundred years of scholarship, it appears that James's legacy has mainly been studied from the perspective of his own blend (...) of pragmatism and that this blend has moreover chiefly been put into dialogue with Peirce and analytic philosophy at large. This double interpretational shift has allowed James to keep a fair amount of visibility on the academic scene but, over the years, it has significantly obliterated his vision. It is time to rediscover James from the perspective of his radical empiricism. (shrink)

Craig Eisendrath reinterprets and unifies the writings of the late-nineteenth-century psychologist William James and the twentieth-century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. James's psychology achieves greater depth by its grounding in philosophic doctrine, and Whitehead's abstract and frequently abstruse philosophy gains greater specificity through the concrete illustrations provided by a wealth of psychological evidence. The result is an extension of James and an exegesis of Whitehead. The merging of James's theory of will and Whitehead's theory of concrescence and organism is the central (...) pivot of the book. Eisendrath discusses as well the philosophical traditions behind both men and analyzes their theories on perception, time, space, causality, the nature and role of ideas, the laws of nature, God and civilization. (shrink)

Alfred North Whitehead wrote a letter to Charles Hartshorne in 1936 in which he referred to William James as the American Plato. Especially given Whitehead’s admiration of Plato, this was a high compliment to James. What was the basis for this compliment and analogy? In responding to that question beyond the partial and scattered references provided by Whitehead, this article briefly explores the following aspects of the thought of James in relation to Whitehead: the one and the many, the denial (...) of Cartesian dualism, James’s background in physiology, refutation of Zeno’s paradoxes, religious experience, and other kinships. In the end, the author agrees with Robert Neville that James had seminal ideas which could correctly result in a complimentary analogy with Plato. Therefore, a greater focus on the important thought of James is a needed challenge in contemporary philosophy. (shrink)