Process and Reality

To address the problems that naturally arise, I have considered the group of philosophers and scientists from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—specifically Descartes, Newton, Locke, Hume, and Kant. Each of these thinkers presents a somewhat one-sided view of the foundations of experience; however, taken together, they provide a general framework that has dominated the development of philosophy ever since. I began this investigation expecting to focus on explaining how my views differed from every member of this group. But a careful examination of their actual statements revealed that, for the most part, the "philosophy of organism" is a return to ways of thinking that existed before Immanuel Kant Immanuel Kant: an influential German philosopher (1724–1804) who argued that the human mind shapes our experience of reality. Whitehead is suggesting that earlier thinkers were closer to his own view of a "real" external world.. These philosophers were troubled by the contradictory assumptions built into the language they inherited. When they or their followers tried to be strictly systematic, they tended to discard the very elements of thought that the philosophy of organism relies upon. I have tried to point out exactly where we agree and where we disagree.

In the second part, the discussions of modern thought are limited to the most general concepts of physics and biology, carefully avoiding technical details. Furthermore, a complete cosmology cosmology: the philosophical study of the origin, nature, and structure of the universe as a whole must aim to build a system of ideas that connects our aesthetic, moral, and religious interests with the concepts of the world derived from natural science.

In the third and fourth parts, the cosmological scheme is developed using its own specific categories and concepts original: categoreal notions, without much reference to other systems of thought. For example, in Part II, there is a chapter on the "Extensive Continuum" Extensive Continuum: Whitehead’s term for the underlying field of space and time that connects all events into a single world. This chapter mostly focuses on the ideas of Descartes and Newton and compares them to how the philosophy of organism interprets this aspect of the world. However, in Part IV, this topic is explored by developing the detailed method...