One Whitehead, Not Three

Abstract

‘… and a guru is the last thing he wanted to be.’ That is what Dorothy Emmet, who wrote her PhD with Alfred North Whitehead back in the 1920s, told me about her supervisor. Neither as a supervisor nor as a lecturer was he ever dogmatic about the process philosophy of his Process and Reality. And it is this dogmatic process reading of Whitehead which Emmet is and always has been opposed to because it would turn Whitehead into something he never wanted to be, namely a guru. According to Emmet—whom I take to be right here—Whitehead can only be understood properly if viewed through his earlier works on mathematics and the philosophy of science.