From Physics to Philosophy, and from Continuity to Atomicity

Abstract

This chapter by Ronny Desmet has two major sections. The first is a close reading of Whitehead’s first lecture as illustrating the synthetic and critical and common sense character of Whitehead’s philosophy in conversation with Aristotle, Hume, and Kant, concluding that all three are guilty of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness and performative contradictions. The second section traces a change in Whitehead’s metaphysics from continuous to atomic becoming between his first and second semester of lectures, with Whitehead using the concept of process to harmonise divisibility and indivisibility, but eventually concluding that atomicity requires a theory for discontinuous existence.