Process And Reality: An Essay In Cosmology

PROCESS AND REALITY AN ESSAY IN COSMOLOGY GIFFORD LECTURES DELIVERED IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH DURING THE SESSION 1927-28 BY ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD F.R.S., Sc.D. (Cambridge), Hon. D.Sc. (Manchester), Hon. LL.D. (St. Andrews), Hon. D.Sc. (Wisconsin), Hon. Sc.D. (Harvard and Yale) CORRECTED EDITION EDITED By DAVID RAY GRIFFIN AND DONALD W. SHERBURNE THE FREE PRESS A DIVISION OF MACMILLAN PUBLISHING CO., INC. NEW YORK Copyright ® 1978 by The Free Press A Division of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. Copyright, 1929, by Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. Copyright renewed 1957 by Evelyn Whitehead. AU rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher. The Free Press "'" Division of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. 866 Third Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022 Collier Macmillan Canada, Ltd. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 77-90011 Printed in the United States of America printing number 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Whitehead, Alfred North, 1861-1947. Process and reality. (Gifford lectures ; 1927-28) Includes index. 1. Cosmology--Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Science--Philosophy-~ddresses, essays, lectures. 3. Organism (PhilosOPhy)--Addresses, essays lectures. I. Griffin, David II. Sherburne: Donald W. III. Title. IV. Series. BD511.W5 1978 113 77 90011 ISBN 0-02 -934580-4 - EDITORS' PREFACE Process and Reality, Whitehead's magnum opus, is one of the major philosophical works of the modern world, and an extensive body of secondary literature has developed around it. Yet surely no significant philosophical book has appeared in the last two centuries in nearly so deplorable a condition as has this one, with its many hundreds of errors and with over three hundred discrepancies between the American (Macmillan) and the English (Cambridge) editions, which appeared in different formats with divergent paginations. The work itself is highly technical and far from easy to understand, and in many passages the errors in those editions were such as to compound the difficulties. The need for a corrected edition has been keenly felt for many decades. The principles to be used in deciding what sorts of corrections ought to be introduced into a new edition of Process and Reality are not, however, immediately obvious. Settling upon these principles requires that one take into account the attitude toward book production exhibited by Whitehead, the probable history of the production of this volume, and the two original editions of the text as they compare with each other and with other books by Whitehead. We will discuss these various factors to provide background in terms of which the reader can understand the rationale for the editorial decisions we have made. Whitehead did not spend much of his own time on the routine tasks associated with book production. Professor Raphael Demos was a young colleague of Whitehead on the Harvard faculty at the time, 1925, of the publication of Science and the Modern World. Demos worked over the manuscript editorially, read the proofs, and did the Index for that volume. The final sentence of Whitehead's Preface reads: "My most grateful thanks are due to my colleague