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five hundred items from Whitehead’s Lost Papers that were recently posted online, there was a two-page preface to an unpublished collection of Whitehead’s essays with handwritten emendations (see above).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
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
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
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 medievalist 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
