Alfred North Whitehead Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Herbert W. Wendler

Critical Essay by Herbert W. Wendler

SOURCE: “Alfred North Whitehead: A Shift of Emphasis,” in The Texas Quarterly, Vol. VIII, No. 1, Spring, 1965, pp. 39-45.

In the following essay, Wendler discusses Whitehead's significant contribution to the shift in contemporary thought from an emphasis on substance to a focus on process.

The world according to ordinary human experience is a world of objects which for all practical purposes are separate, distinct, and individual. The classic statement of this view—arrived at by a quite natural extension of the presuppositions of simple human practice—is able to be found in the works of the philosopher Aristotle, who placed discrete substances and their modes of qualification among the metaphysical ultimates, and made them fixtures of logic and language as well. The same view, considerably modified, received its modern physical formulation in the guise of seventeenth-century scientific materialism, according to which the final character of reality—all of it, and every aspect...
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