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Process and Reality
Whitehead's 1929 masterwork — the Gifford Lectures that articulate his process metaphysics in full technical detail, and the book whose difficulty has ensured both its neglect and its enduring philosophical fertility.
Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology is the core text of process philosophy. Delivered as the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 1927–1928 and published in 1929, the book constructs a complete metaphysical system — an account of the fundamental character of reality adequate to the full range of human experience, from quantum physics to aesthetic enjoyment. Its technical vocabulary (actual occasions, prehension, concrescence, eternal objects, creativity) has kept most readers at bay; those who persist find the most adequate philosophical framework available for thinking about emergence, novelty, and process.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Whitehead wrote the book in his mid-sixties, after having already had a distinguished career as a mathematician. He had co-authored Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell (1910–1913) and had moved from Cambridge to University College London to Imperial College, where he taught applied mathematics. In 1924, at the invitation of Harvard, he crossed the Atlantic