We’re three months into 2025, and working furiously on many different fronts, with some exciting publications getting nearer.
First, the two volumes of the Essays and Articles of Alfred North Whitehead (EA1 and EA2) have now been copy-edited, and are currently being typeset. When the typesetting is completed, we will then check the proofs, create the indexes, and create a back-of-book record of textual variations. Both volumes are still expected to be published by the end of the year.
We have also almost completed reviewing the proofs for Whitehead at Harvard, 1925–1927, a collection of essays examining the significance of the second volume of Whitehead’s Harvard Lectures (HL2). The book is expected to be published in August.
Meanwhile, we continue to make progress in our work for the NEH grant.
We have finished double verification of the notes which will make up the text of the third volume of Harvard Lectures (HL3), and have entered the stage of editing the notes for publication. This volume will be particularly significant for scholarship on Process and Reality, as it covers the period just before Whitehead delivered his Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh up until he had submitted the manuscript to Macmillan for publication, and it is clear that he was presenting some of this material to his students. The manuscript will be submitted by the end of the year and published in 2026.
We continue to generate clean electronic versions of all relevant editions of Science and the Modern World, Religion in the Making, and Symbolism for the fourth volume of the Works of Alfred North Whitehead (W4). Work on this will continue next year and it will be submitted for publication at the end of 2026.
Graduate student assistants are carrying on with transcription of all of Whitehead’s letters, to and from, in preparation for editing two volumes of correspondence. These volumes will not be published for some time yet, but the necessary first step continues to proceed smoothly.
Finally, we must make a worrying announcement about funding. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is apparently targeting the NEH with the aim of substantially reducing its staff, cutting the agency’s grant programs, and rescinding grants that have already been awarded. It is entirely possible that our project could lose the remaining funding we’ve already won, which could be as much as half of our three-year grant.
For U.S. residents, the National Humanities Alliance (NHA) has created pages for you to easily contact your members of Congress and contact your local elected officials with just a few clicks and let them know that you object to NEH awards being summarily canceled. We ask that you take a few moments to do so.
The precarious footing of the NEH has unfortunately made private donations all the more important if work on the Critical Edition of Whitehead is to continue. If you are able to support our work with a donation, it would be much appreciated. Just follow this link.
| Brian Henning, General Editor Critical Edition of Whitehead Professor of Philosophy, Gonzaga University | Joseph Petek, Executive Editor Critical Edition of Whitehead |
This may seem an unwarranted observation about the multitude of recently formed scholarly organizations dedicated to editing, elaborating on, and wearingly regurgitating the philosophical writings of any thinker whose name now sounds–in our sterile and hyperbolically hyperspecialized era–as though he spoke with the tongue not of men, but of geniuses. Thus, there has been created a multitude of philosophical societies and associations to provide grist for the talking mills that otherwise are in danger of becoming bored with life. So, we have instituted societies to endless rehash the writings of most of the modern philosophers, including the American philosophers Peirce, James, Dewey and Santayana, who have eclipsed Whitehead apparently in the current era. So, we direly need fresh ideas from Whitehead’s unpublished writings in order to revitalize his overall oeuvre. A measure of this critique could be the positive data on how well his writings continue to be reprinted and bought. From Whitehead’s own critique of how much intellectual labor by the brightest students of philosophy was being expended on editing Charles Sanders Peirce’s writings by Harvard scholars in the 1920s and 30s, according to his daughter Jessie (1894-1980), her father felt strongly this was an injustice he very much disapproved. Let the reader ponder how well that criticism applies in our time.
There is scholarship, and there is philosophy. The two are not quite the same, but are mutually supporting. Perhaps Harold Kulungian’s “observation,” or it is complaint, is that not enough philosophy is being done? One distinctive feature of the natural sciences or the STEM subjects in general in higher education is that university STEM departments routinely produce practicing mathematicians, physicists, chemists, bioscientists, and engineers who go on to make concrete contributions to the advancement of their various areas of specialty. The question is whether these departments’ “humanities” counterparts are doing the same or producing more scholars than practicing poets, novelists, or philosophers. In the case of philosophy, one has to ask, how does a practicing philosopher as philosopher count in this world? Perhaps this question is not being asked enough? Yet, it seems that more than perhaps ever before it ought to make itself count. (I put “humanities” in quotation marks, because I have always held that, much as philosophy or poetry, there is nothing more “human” than mathematics and physics and the other natural sciences, so that philosophers in particular and other “humanities” people ought to be much more ambitious in asserting their comprehensive importance in universities.)
PS: I was referring to Whitehead’s disapproval that his best graduate students, Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, had been assigned to edit Charles Sanders Peirce’s mass of disordered Papers, which took many years of taxing intellectual labor, and additional editorial staff; and yet when completed, was still not satisfactory for ready consultation, requiring yet a second editorial overhaul to reorder Peirce’s writings according to a better design by chronology. Perhaps there was a lucky silver lining, if one is superstitious, to all that academic drudgery in editing Peirce: both the lifespans of Hartshorne and Weiss, the original team, were drawn out a full century. But Whitehead’s grievance, according to his daughter, was that those two young philosophers should have been awarded grants to develop their own philosophical talents, rather poring over for years the writings of a deceased man who failed to keep his writings in good order. -Harold Kulungian