by Joseph Petek, Assistant Editor, Critical Edition of Whitehead Shortly after posting last week’s blog about Whitehead’s influence on Martin Luther King Jr., we discovered another oblique connection between King and Whitehead that we had overlooked: the introductory course on Plato that King attended in 1952–53 was taught by none other than Raphael Demos, Whitehead’s… Read More Whitehead and Raphael Demos
By Brian G. Henning, Executive Editor, Critical Edition of Whitehead[1] It is not yet widely known that Martin Luther King, Jr. was influenced by Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of organism. In honor of Martin Luther King day 2022, we thought we’d share what we’ve learned about this unexpected connection. I first learned of the connection… Read More A. N. Whitehead’s Influence on Martin Luther King Jr.
We recently received an email from our friend Rachel Hassall, the Archivist over at Sherborne School—Whitehead’s school from 1875–1880—who wanted to let us know about some of the records she’d discovered about a young Whitehead participating in the Debating Society. In his A History of Sherborne School (1979), A. B. Gourlay described the Debating Society:… Read More Teenage Whitehead and the Sherborne School Debating Society
If Whitehead had taken care to preserve the drafts of his books and essays, his lecture notes, and his correspondence—in short, left behind the sort of Nachlass that important scholars often do—then a critical edition of his writings would no doubt have taken place long before now. As it stands, the idea of a Critical… Read More The missing drafts of Whitehead’s books
Last week we discussed the preface to a 1936 collection of Whitehead’s essays that never appeared. Now it’s time to look at the book into which those essays were eventually subsumed: Essays in Science and Philosophy. In the process of doing the groundwork for two volumes of Whitehead’s collected papers for the Critical Edition, we… Read More Some notes on Essays in Science and Philosophy
Amongst the roughly five hundred items from Whitehead’s Lost Papers that were recently posted online, there was a two-page preface to an unpublished collection of Whitehead’s essays with handwritten emendations (see above). This preface was briefly discussed and parts of it quoted in the second volume of Lowe’s biography on Whitehead,[1] but it has not… Read More The Whitehead book that never was
We are very pleased to announce that the bulk of what we are calling “Whitehead’s Lost Papers” is now publicly available at the online Whitehead Research Library (WRL). Donated by Whitehead’s grandson and heir in early 2019, the papers have now been scanned, cataloged, processed, and uploaded to the WRL. There was some discussion of… Read More Whitehead papers now available online
Alfred North Whitehead had three children, two sons and a daughter. It is not uncommon for Whitehead scholars to reference T. North and Eric Alfred. We hear decidedly less about A. N. Whitehead’s second child and only daughter, Jessie Marie. This is a shame, as Jessie is perhaps the most interesting of ANW’s three children.… Read More Whitehead’s Daughter, Jessie
The status of Lucien Price’s Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead has been of interest to Whitehead scholars for some time. Research for the Critical Edition of Whitehead has revealed several accounts that invite a reassessment. Junius Lucien Price (1883-1964) was born in Brimfield, Ohio. After graduating from Western Reserve Academy in Ohio, he moved to… Read More Revisiting Lucien Price’s Dialogues
Whitehead had a considerable number of famous friends and colleagues, but few were more notable than Felix Frankfurter (1882–1965), who would become a US Supreme Court Justice in 1939. It is unclear exactly when and how the two men first met. Frankfurter had been given a chair at Harvard Law School in 1921, fresh off… Read More Whitehead and Felix Frankfurter
