Process and Reality

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.Whitehead's background was an unusual one for a speculative philosopher.

Educated as a mathematician, he became, through his co-authorship with his student and disciple Bertrand Russell and publication in 1913 of Principia Mathematica, a major logician.

For example, for Aristotle, the actual entities were the substances, such as Socrates (a particular citizen of Athens) and Bucephalus (a particular horse belonging to Alexander the Great).

With one exception, all actual entities for Whitehead are temporal and are occasions of experience (which are not to be confused with consciousness, or with mere subjectivity).

An entity that people commonly think of as a simple concrete object, or that Aristotle would think of as a substance – a human being included – is in this ontology considered to be a composite of indefinitely many occasions of experience.

The first comprises processes in a physical vacuum such as the propagation of an electromagnetic wave or gravitational influence across empty space.

The brain is part of the body, both being abstractions of a kind known as persistent physical objects, neither being actual entities.

We may say that the brain has a material and a mental aspect, all three being abstractions from their indefinitely many constitutive occasions of experience, which are actual entities.

This is in perfect agreement with the viewpoint of the Einstein theory of special relativity and with the Minkowski geometry of spacetime.

[10] It is clear that Whitehead respected these ideas, as may be seen for example in his 1919 book An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge[11] as well as in Process and Reality.

One can explain this atomicity by saying that an occasion of experience has an internal causal structure that could not be reproduced in each of the two complementary sections into which it might be cut.

An example of a nexus of temporally overlapping occasions of experience is what Whitehead calls an enduring physical object, which corresponds closely with an Aristotelian substance.

There are indefinitely many other causal antecedents and consequences of the enduring physical object, which overlap, but are not members, of the nexus.

For Whitehead, besides its temporal generation by the actual entities which are its contributory causes, a process may be considered as a concrescence of abstract ingredient eternal objects.

Whitehead's ontological principle is that whatever reality pertains to an abstraction is derived from the actual entities upon which it is founded or of which it is comprised.

[15] The book is also the source of the frequently heard aphoristic reference to Western philosophy all being "footnotes to Plato": The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.The several originally published editions of Process and Reality were from New York and from Cambridge UK.

A largely corrected scholarly redaction was eventually prepared and published as Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929).