As we enter the final quarter of 2025, we’re happy that a number of books that have been in the works for quite a while are finally published or very soon to be published.
First, an anthology of essays exploring the significance of the second volume of Whitehead’s Harvard lectures (HL2) was published in late August and is available for order from Edinburgh University Press (use discount code “NEW30” for 30% off). Titled Whitehead at Harvard, 1925–1927, the book is largely based on papers delivered at a 2022 WRP conference, but with new and revised contributions.
But more exciting than this is that both volumes of Whitehead’s Essays and Articles will be published later this month. They can be pre-ordered from EUP’s website here and here (again, use discount code “NEW30” for 30% off); we will post an announcement blog when the print volumes are actually in our hands. They will be the third and fourth volumes of the Critical Edition out of a projected seventeen. If you are attached to an academic library, please do ask them to purchase copies of these volumes. The long term viability of the Critical Edition depends on healthy academic library sales.
As for our other ongoing work, we continue to make progress on the third volume of Harvard Lectures (HL3), but submission of the manuscript to EUP is likely to be delayed from the end of this year to early next year, as the copyediting and proofing process for the Essays and Articles took more time than we’d hoped and expected (we hope that it can still be published in the 2026 calendar year). Meanwhile, we are still generating 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), which we still plan to submit to EUP at the end of 2026 for publication in 2027.
We are pleased to report that our NEH funding still appears to be intact. Our grant period runs through the end of 2026, and we are busy applying for a second NEH grant, which, if we win it, would begin just as our existing grant ends, funding most our costs for 2027–2029. We are proposing to complete HL4 (Harvard lectures for 1930–1933) and W3 (which will include An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge, The Concept of Nature, and The Principle of Relativity) in this period. If we manage to win another NEH grant (a big “if”!), then the Critical Edition will be in a good place financially. If not, then the project’s footing will become more precarious. That makes private donations all the more important, if work on the Critical Edition is to continue. If you are able to support our work with a donation, it would be much appreciated. 100% of donations go to support the Critical Edition. Just follow this link.
| Brian Henning, Founder & General Editor Critical Edition of Whitehead Professor of Philosophy, Gonzaga University | Joseph Petek, Executive Editor Critical Edition of Whitehead |
Excellent progress, and guardedly hopeful news for the future. Hang in there, guys, and fingers crossed that the federal lunacy will not interrupt your great work.
I’m impressed at the progress. The more ways Whitehead can be accessed, the better the foothold for the future as the process/subjective approach moves to include both poles vs today’s physics which only really recognize the final product, the objects. And Descartes’ Ghost still haunts our understanding of our psyche.
Thanks for the update!
I’ve posted a fascinating and informative message, but now this website is requiring of me a URL I don’t have. TESTING…
I have recently sent a request to the Archivist at Newnham College, Cambridge, for any record of Jessie Whitehead (1894-1980) enrolled there, because she told me she was Reading Modern History there when WWI broke out in August of 1914. Jessie immediately put aside her academic studies and volunteered–as did her two brothers–for war work and became a precis-writer at the Foreign Office through the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, where she saw the Big Three–Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, and Clemenceau–up close.
On an unknown member of the Whitehead family, Jessie’s younger brother Eric (1898-1918) about whom I was always, for 20 years, loath to ask her about, lest she might angrily explode about the pain it would give her, I’ve enjoyed searching a slew of Eric Whiteheads–reminding me of how really common the Whitehead name is. I did find the right one, whose middle name was Alfred, after his father’s first name. Thus, it was flagged by writers who recognized the English philosopher’s name. So, now it is a question of whether the Directors of this WRP are open to expanding the coverage to all members of ANW’s immediate family? Because there is ample fascinating material to be gleaned online about Eric’s history during World War I. He was a student at the prestigious Westminster prep school in London, and had passed his exams and been accepted at the equally renowned Balliol College in Oxford. During 1917 he enlisted in the Royal Flying Corps earned his wings and worked for a year as a flight instructor before volunteering for reconnaissance war service in France. In one of those rickety, flimsy, and primitive biplanes that were not much improved beyond what the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk in 1903, Eric was shot down–whether from groundfire or aerial dogfights that were just beginning, is not known. It is stated that he was shot down over the Forest of Gobain, which I’ve not located. There is conflicting info as to whether his body was recovered and received a proper burial at a known cemetery. He was flying apparently the latest version of the Grahame-White biplane, which the renowned designer brought to the USA and took off into the sky from the main wide boulevard of a city, with crowds of amazed Americans lining both sides of the street, cheering his precarious stability overhead, in this newfangled flying-machine. That was in 1917, just before America entered that war, and the Britons were trying to recruit American pilots. Amazingly, Mr. Grahame White lived 80 years, in spite of so many dangerous hours in the air, testing his new designs. At last, he retired to Florida where he got rich investing in real estate. It was not long before machine-guns–a version of the rapid-firing Gatling gun, invented during the Crimean War in 1855–was mounted on the top wing of those flimsy biplanes, requiring the pilot to stand up in his cockpit and fly the plane while he was firing his machine-gun, with no firm footing possible.
About the other Whitehead brother in WWI, T. North was a Captain and commanding officer in the British Army, in East Africa, defending a British colony from the raids of the German General Von Lettow Vorbeck, who had a large force harrowing the British, but they seldom clashed openly. After her brother’s funeral in the Swedenborgian Church near Harvard Square in 1969, Jessie loaned me his privately printed memoir on mimeograph, and recited with glee the story of the British General Staff holding a banquet in London in 1919, to which the Germans were invited. When Vorbeck’s name was announced, the British rose from their seats of one accord and greeted their erstwhile enemy with thunderous applause. That was the end of a long era when war was still the sport of kings, when unconditional surrender was unheard of, when Total War, mobilizing the entire population, was inconceivable, and when civilian populations were outside the war zone. Jessie’s eyes gleamed with merriment when she repeated her brother’s story. And yet no one ever loathed the Germans as viciously as she, who suffered from the loss of The Lost Generation. Thus, she never married, since the young men she knew were mostly killed in the trenches. T. North Whitehead’s son George would have his father’s unpublished memoir, and could be asked for permission to post some selected excerpts on this site. -Harold Kulungian