By Joseph Petek
Joseph Petek is the co-editor of The Essays and Articles of Alfred North Whitehead, 1886-1916 which presents Whitehead’s published and unpublished essays and articles.
The Essays and Articles of Alfred North Whitehead, 1917-1942 is a chronological and critically edited collection of all of Whitehead’s essays and articles, including previously unknown essays.
When the first two volumes of Alfred North Whitehead’s Harvard lectures were published in 2017 and 2021, they changed the landscape of Whitehead scholarship by adding what was effectively new primary source material to the established Whitehead philosophical canon, a collection of texts that largely had not changed since Whitehead’s death and the publication of his last book in 1947.
The two soon-to-publish volumes of Whitehead’s essays and articles are set to change that landscape, but in a slightly different way—and in some senses a more radical way.
Like the Harvard lectures volumes, there will be new, never-published material in these collections of essays and articles. One of these is an 1899 paper on set theory that was rejected by the Royal Society for publication, the hand-written original of which languished in the bowels of its archives for over a century before we re-discovered it. Another is the text of a 1939 address delivered to an ecclesiastical society in which Whitehead made his harshest known criticisms of church leadership, writing that ‘In reading ecclesiastical history one longs for the Athenian pagans who removed their finest moralist by the kindly device of a cup of hemlock.’ Such intriguing material could hardly help but draw interest.
But unlike the Harvard lectures, the two volumes of Essays and Articles also upend and reshape Whitehead’s canon by breaking up and chronologically reorganizing The Organisation of Thought (1917), The Aims of Education (1929) and Essays in Science and Philosophy (1947). At first blush, breaking up three of Whitehead’s established texts might seem like an overly aggressive and interventionist move, but in reality, it was the only sensible choice.
In the case of the first two books, it can be easy to forget that The Organisation of Thought (OT), with its eight chapters, and The Aims of Education (AE), with its ten chapters, actually share six chapters in common. In publishing a new, critical and definitive edition of all of Whitehead’s writings, the duplication of so much repeated material was not a real option.
As for Essays in Science and Philosophy (ESP), it was always an odd grab-bag of a book that lacked any real thematic consistency. Published in the last year of Whitehead’s life, the only unifying factor of its chapters was that they had not been re-published in any book of Whitehead’s previously. One reviewer described it this way:
‘These two new books thus combine all of the material found in OT, AE, and ESP with all of Whitehead’s other known essays and articles into a single chronologically ordered set. The new volumes track all changes, even very minor ones, between different versions of each essay—some of which were published in as many as eight different places. Finally, they add editorial introductions and footnotes to each individual essay and article that surface their publication history and historical context.’
Misleadingly heralded as a ‘new book’ by Professor Whitehead, this is in fact a collection of previously printed papers, ranging in date of initial publication from 1911 to 1941, whose novelty consists chiefly in the occurrence, in this reprinting, of typographical errors happily absent from the original. The reader who here encounters for the first time the essay on ‘Mathematics and the Good’ will be relieved, I am sure, to know that the ‘deflections’ of the author referred to on page 102 were ‘reflections’ in the volume from which this imperfect copy is derived.1
For Whitehead scholars who have been citing OT, AE and ESP for a very long time, their replacement by these new texts will undoubtedly feel odd for a while. But much as Griffin and Sherburne’s ‘corrected edition’ of Process and Reality slowly became the standard version of that book, we both hope and expect that these two new volumes of The Essays and Articles of Alfred North Whitehead will be accepted as the new scholarly standard; or, one might say, ‘version 2.0’ of the Whitehead philosophical canon.
About the author
Joseph Petek is the Director of Research and Publication for the Whitehead Research Project and Executive Editor for the Critical Edition of Whitehead.
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The two forthcoming volumes of Whitehead’s Essays and Articles include his largely forgotten earliest published writings, including a whimsical short article in the March 1888 Cambridge Fortnightly.
References
- Arthur E. Murphy, ‘Review: Essays in Science and Philosophy,’ The Philosophical Review, Vol. 56, 1947, pp. 709–711. ↩︎
