Description:

Whitehead's background was an unusual one for a speculative philosopher. Educated as a mathematician, he became, through his co-authorship with his student and disciple Bertrand Russell and publication in 1913 of Principia Mathematica, a major logician. Later he wrote extensively on physics and its philosophy, proposing a theory of gravity in Minkowski spaceas a logically possible alternative to Einstein's general theory of relativity. Whitehead's Process and Reality<sup id="cite_ref-Whitehead_1929_1-0" class="reference" style="line-height: 1; font-size: 0.75em; unicode-bidi: isolate; white-space: nowrap;">[1]</sup> is perhaps his philosophical master work.

The following is an attempt to provide an accessible outline of some of the main ideas in Whitehead's Process and Reality, based on the book itself, but guided by a general reading of secondary sources, especially I. Leclerc's Whitehead's Metaphysics. An Introductory Exposition.<sup id="cite_ref-2" class="reference" style="line-height: 1; font-size: 0.75em; unicode-bidi: isolate; white-space: nowrap;">[2]</sup> Whitehead often speaks of the metaphysics of Process and Reality as 'the philosophy of organism'.

The cosmology elaborated in Process and Realityposits an ontology based on the two kinds of existence of entity, that of actual entity and that of abstract entity or abstraction.