The year is halfway done, and it’s time for another update on the Critical Edition. We have more progress and some exciting discoveries to report.

Let’s start with the discoveries. In reviewing the Victor Lowe papers that we had scanned from Johns Hopkins —about 15,000 pages of material—we discovered a brand new, or at least long-forgotten, Whitehead address. This brief speech of about 600 words was delivered at the 50^th anniversary celebration of Wellesley College in May 1925, just after the completion of Whitehead’s first year at Harvard.

Lowe mentioned this speech of Whitehead’s in his biography, but gave no indication that the text of it appeared in the Wellesley Alumnae Magazine. Amusingly, the magazine lists Whitehead’s academic affiliation as “Victoria University of Manchester.” This is wrong on several levels. Manchester had awarded Whitehead an honorary doctorate in 1920, but he was not otherwise associated with it; his former post in the U.K. had been at Imperial College London, and of course he had left this post and become a professor of philosophy at Harvard in fall 1924. And when the New York Times reported on the event the next day, they not only repeated this error, but got Whitehead’s name wrong, listing his initials as “A.M.”

Whitehead’s remarks at Wellesley College will appear in the forthcoming second volume of Essays and Articles.

A second exciting find is another of Whitehead’s books with his own emendations in it. We were alerted to the existence of Whitehead’s copy of The Principle of Relativity by a 1954 letter from Martin W. Gross, who said that one of Whitehead’s old teaching assistants, Hillis Kaiser, was in possession of it. We shared this information with the WRP editorial board, and Ronny Desmet was able to track down the book, which had since been donated to Princeton University Library. We are now in possession of scans of every page of the book that contained Whitehead’s emendations. Of course these will be incorporated into the critically edited version of the book, though it will be some years before we embark on editing it.

Now, on to project progress. First, we are pleased to say that three weeks ago we submitted proposals to Edinburgh University Press for the third volume of Whitehead’s Harvard lectures and the volume of monographs containing SMW, RM, and S, these being the two volumes that are scheduled to be submitted for publication by the end of our three-year NEH grant period—the former by the end of 2025 and the latter by the end of 2026. The proposals will now undergo formal peer review.

In terms of our actual editorial progress, we have been working on three different fronts.

First, we have continued to work to finish up the two volumes of Essays and Articles (EA1 and EA2), which will be submitted by the end of August 2024. The extra time we gained in delaying EA2 allowed us to submit our editorial introductions for each article for review by the Editorial Advisory Board, allowing for a bit of extra scholarly scrutiny that will make them that much better. The final math-heavy articles are being finished up by Dr. Robert Valenza, our intrepid and invaluable collaborator on this volume, who retired from Claremont McKenna College this May.

Second, we have begun verifying for accuracy the initial transcriptions of notes for the third volume of Harvard lectures (HL3). The six note-takers include:

• Sinclair Kerby-Miller (an assistant in the Harvard Philosophy Department)
• Edwin L. Marvin (later a professor of philosophy at the University of Montana)
• Susanne Langer (later a famous philosopher at Radcliffe, Columbia, and Connecticut College)
• Dorothy Emmet (later a famous philosopher at Manchester University)
• Victor Lowe (later Whitehead’s biographer and professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins)
• J. Raymond Cope (later a Unitarian minister in Berkeley, California)

We are nearing the halfway point of double-verification, which we are aiming to complete by the end of the year. The volume will then be critically edited in 2025 and submitted by the end of that year.

Third, we have begun preliminary work on the monograph volume. This began by creating a list of all versions of SMW, RM, and S that were published in Whitehead’s lifetime, as well as searching for any of Whitehead’s own corrections and lists of errors made by others in the intervening years. We have now begun the process of creating clean and accurate electronic versions of all editions of each of these three books. Verification of these will take place next year, and editing in 2026, with manuscript submission to EUP by the end of that year. We are very pleased to report that we will be joined in editing this volume of Whitehead’s works by Dr. Daniel A. Dombrowski, the long-time editor of Process Studies; his extensive editorial experience will no doubt prove invaluable.

We will have our hands full with the NEH grant work over the next three years, but currently we remain on schedule.

The work of searching for, transcribing, and editing archival materials is time-consuming and costly. The NEH grant does require $50,000 in matching funds, so ongoing support of the community is welcome and needed. Even with this new grant, we still have decades of work ahead of us, and there is no guarantee that future NEH support will be forthcoming. If you are able to support our work with a donation, it would be much appreciated. Just follow this link.