Abstract

The difference between our interpretations can be put most succinctly by saying that whereas his is based on the works preceding Science and the Modern World, principally The Concept of Nature and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge ; mine finds the key in the works which succeed it, principally Process and Reality. Indeed it seems to me that the use of some such help from other works of Whitehead is inevitable. After a number of determined sallies, I have been forced to conclude that SMW is in itself unintelligible. If we are to make any coherent sense of it we must, I believe, construe its cryptic utterances in the light of a more systematic exposition of Whitehead's basic categories. And the difficulty in this procedure lies in the fact that there are two expositions available for this purpose--that of the earlier and that of the later works--which differ in certain crucial respects.