SOURCE: “Alfred North Whitehead,” in Founders of Constructive Postmodern Philosophy, State University of New York Press, 1993, pp. 165-95.

In the following essay, Cobb presents a detailed survey of Whitehead's speculative philosophy.

I. Speculative Postmodernism

Although Whitehead (1861-1947) never used the term “postmodern,” the way he spoke of the modern has a definite postmodern tone. Especially in his book Science and the Modern World, the modern is objectified and its salient characteristics are described. Whitehead is appreciative of the accomplishments of the modern world, but he clearly recognizes its limitations as well, and he points beyond it. He sees his own time as one of new beginnings as fundamental as those that constituted the shift from the medieval to the modern world.

Whitehead explicitly identifies the new beginnings in two areas. The first is physics. Both relativity and quantum theory break with the assumptions of modern physics and call...