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Title: ADVENTURES OF IDEAS by Alfred North Whitehead ISBN: 0-02-935170-7 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 01 January, 1967 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (4 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Hard Going
Comment: The thought in this book is profound and enlightening, the style and language are clear enough, but I found it unbearably hard going to get through it.
Rating: 5
Summary: Creative Platonist's Perspective on History and Civilization
Comment: There are four parts to this text: "Sociological," "Cosmological," "Philosophical," and "Civilization." The first part is a history of how ideas, especially moral ideas, have influenced the progress of civilization. Whitehead is by training mathematician and by nature a philosopher, not a historian. As a consequence, he covers a great deal of historical ground at a high level of generality which, in Whitehead's case, I consider a virtue. He has a beautiful, long-term perspective; his account of the transition from a world in which slavery was taken for granted to one in which it is no longer legitimate, and the role that the ideas of Platonism and Christianity played in that 2500 year transition, makes me quite optimistic about the long-term possibility of humane progress in the world.
I describe the first section in depth because it is among the more accessible pieces of Whitehead's writing. The remainder of the book calls upon his unique metaphysical perspective to some extent, and is thus more of a struggle for the casual reader. It, too, is beautiful and valuable for those who are willing to learn how to read Whitehead, but it is not easy. Buy the book for the first part, then if you like Whitehead's highly idiosyncratic view of reality, train yourself to read the rest of the book.
Personally, although Whitehead has fallen out of favor of academic philosophers for most of this century, I think that his work is more likely to be read 200 years from now than are most other works written this century. Whitehead is definitely thinking of the big picture with a certain serene timelessness. Far more people should be exposed to his 20th century articulation of the eternal search for the True, the Good, and the Beautiful (and the Adventure).
Rating: 5
Summary: The Ideas Are Still Adventurous
Comment: Whitehead was the foremost twentieth-century advocate of Process Philosophy--he called it "The Philosophy of Organism"--the conviction that reality is composed of processes rather than of substances or matter.
Students of process thought frequently focus on Whitehead's major work, _Process and Reality_, sometimes to the neglect of his other books. But Whitehead's thought was, fittingly, in continual flux; and _Adventures of Ideas_, written after _Process and Reality_, contains new themes which, some would say, provide needed correctives to some of the notions in Whitehead's earlier books. _Adventures of Ideas_ is also considerably more readable than _Process and Reality_. It should not be passed over.
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Title: MODES OF THOUGHT by Alfred North Whitehead ISBN: 002935210X Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 01 February, 1968 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: SCIENCE AND THE MODERN WORLD by Alfred North Whitehead ISBN: 0684836394 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 01 August, 1997 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: PROCESS AND REALITY (Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927-28) by Alfred North Whitehead ISBN: 0029345707 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 01 July, 1979 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (A Nonpareil Book) by Alfred North Whitehead, Lucien Price, Caldwell Titcomb, David, Sir Ross ISBN: 1567921299 Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher Pub. Date: 01 August, 2001 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: Religion in the Making: Lowell Lectures 1926 by Alfred North Whitehead ISBN: 0823216462 Publisher: Fordham University Press Pub. Date: 01 September, 1996 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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