Whitehead and Kant at Copenhagen

Abstract

Jason Bell and Seshu Iyengar examine Whitehead’s complicated relationship to Kant, of whom he is highly critical in parts of the Harvard lectures, and yet with whom he also shares some common themes, including ‘the limits of both empirical and cognitive investigations, and the role of the subject in generating mechanics’. The chapter argues that while Whitehead called himself anti-Kantian, what he actually rejected was neo-Kantian analytic tendencies, and not Kant himself, who never intended to promote an epistemic prison or to promote subjectivism. In the end, Whitehead’s Harvard lectures ‘represent a harsh rejection of anti-scientific “Kantianism”, but a more careful editorial revision of the scientifically minded Kant, with the addition of new discoveries in science to which Kant did not have access.’