It’s been a couple of months since we announced the opening of the Whitehead Research Library, and about four months since the last general Critical Edition update. We are approaching the end of the scanning process for the newly discovered Whitehead papers. In order to scan them more quickly, we have been doing minimal cataloging,… Read More Critical Edition quarterly update
In our year-end update from about two months ago, I wrote that we were working to make more of our Whitehead letters, essays, photos, and student lecture notes publicly available. Today I am happy to announce that we are officially launching the digital Whitehead Research Library (WRL), which will make select archival Whitehead materials freely… Read More Announcing the opening of the Whitehead Research Library (WRL)
by Brian G. Henning For decades it has been well known that Alfred North Whitehead’s papers and correspondence were burned or destroyed. What unknown materials were forever lost to the flame has been a source of speculation for more than seventy years. Were there unpublished manuscripts? Were there early drafts of published works? With whom… Read More On the recently discovered Whitehead papers
Above: Evelyn Whitehead in 1890, age 24. The Whiteheads were married on December 16, 1890. Their first son, Thomas North, was born on December 31, 1891. Photo courtesy of Johns Hopkins University Library (MS 282, Department of Special Collections, Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University). It has been an eventful year for WRP. Rather than… Read More Critical Edition of Whitehead: 2018 Year-End Update
George R. Lucas, Jr., our General Editor for the Critical Edition of Whitehead, recently completed an east coast crawl that included visits to several archives that held Whitehead-related papers. While combing through the Victor Lowe and Whitehead papers held at Johns Hopkins, he not only recovered numerous letters, photographs, and student notes, but also one… Read More Whitehead and James Haughton Woods
Above: Three Whitehead students whose notes from his classes have been preserved. Lewis Feuer was a sociologist who wrote a dissertation on space and time under Whitehead, and later wrote a widely used reader on Marxian thought. Charles Malik was a Lebanese diplomat to the United Nations, and helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human… Read More Critical Edition quarterly update
Curtice Nelson Hitchcock (1892-1946) was Whitehead’s primary contact at Macmillan during the 1920s. Serving as Assistant to the President and later Vice President, Hitchcock would depart Macmillan in 1933 to found his own publishing house, Reynal & Hitchcock, with Eugene Reynal in 1934 (which published, among other works, the English translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s… Read More Critical Edition quarterly update
When we received Whitehead’s grading notebook from Harvard University Archives last July, one of the names that caught my eye was that of Étienne Gilson, the famed medieval philosopher. He was listed on page 53 of the notebook as a “frequent visitor” for Whitehead’s seminary in metaphysics for the Fall 1928 term. This list of… Read More Whitehead and Étienne Gilson
The Whitehead Research Project was lucky enough to receive a dozen photos of Whitehead back in August 2016 from a relative of Henry Osborn Taylor and Julia Isham Taylor, the couple who anonymously donated the entirety of Whitehead’s Harvard salary throughout his tenure from 1924-37, and thus made possible his appointment.
The following article also appears in issue 40.1 of Process Perspectives. The 9th International Whitehead Research Project Conference – Whitehead Revealed: Examining Whitehead’s First Year of Harvard Lectures by Joseph Petek From November 30th to December 2nd, 2017, the Whitehead Research Project held its annual conference in Claremont, California.
