Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Power

Pierfrancesco Basile is a lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Bern, Switzerland.

'Whitehead's speculative cosmology and willingness to reform language in its service set him against the philosophical trends of his time. Pierfrancesco Basile's discerning study eschews adulation, revealing a carefully revolutionary Whitehead grappling with matter, mind and metaphysics, a tempered rationalist indebted to Leibniz, whose philosophy "escapes any easy judgment."'Peter Simons, Trinity College Dublin

How Whitehead's metaphysics developed out of his reading of the history of philosophy

At the beginning of his magnum opus, Process and Reality (1929), Whitehead lists a series of beliefs which he thinks are widely held by contemporary philosophers. They are all condemned as dangerously mistaken.

What are these myths? Why are they rejected? In the works of which modern thinkers did they arise? What precisely went wrong? At what stage in the development of Western thought did this happen? By tackling these questions, Pierfrancesco Basile makes it possible to grasp the main concepts of Whitehead's process metaphysics - especially the crucial notion that being and power are one and the same - as well as to appreciate the complex way this is rooted in the modern philosophical tradition.

Pierfrancesco Basile is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Bern and at the KSA Luzern, Switzerland.

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