Uncovering a ‘New’ Whitehead

Abstract

George Lucas’ chapter begins with a discussion of all the ways in which he and others (including Victor Lowe and Lewis Ford) had misinterpreted aspects of Whitehead’s life and philosophy throughout the years, owing in some cases to a lack of adequate information, and in others to a simple lack of adequately attentive scholarship, both of which this collection of essays and the first volume of the Critical Edition help to correct. He further claims that it is Whitehead’s daily and yearly classroom lectures for serious students, not the occasional popular talks for general audiences, that should define his thought, and that the newly published Harvard lectures are thus the primary archival source materials that take us deeper into the real Whitehead than anything he formally published.