SOURCE: “The Nature of Nature: Kant and Whitehead,” in Metaphysics as Foundation, edited by Paul A. Bogaard and Gordon Treash, State University of New York Press, 1993, pp. 42-58.

In the following essay, Treash compares Whitehead's philosophy of organism to the modern, Kantian conception of nature.

If Whitehead's philosophy of organism marks the beginning of either a revival of concern for the philosophy of nature or a substantiative contemporary metaphysics, then it is quite true that from its outset this movement has been intimately concerned with the problem of how nature is conceived. Neither is it an exaggeration to suggest that by the time he wrote Process and Reality a large part of Whitehead's undertaking was defined by his reliance on a sharp distinction between how the philosophy of organism understands nature and what he repeatedly insists is the conception of nature that dominates in modern thought. This modern...