Whitehead Basics
for the "Walking with Whitehead" course
offered by the Cobb Institute
If you are especially interested in the details of Whitehead's philosophy as articulated in Process and Reality, there are twelve concepts you might want begin with: (1) actual occasions as the fundamental units of reality, (2) eternal objects as pure potentialities, (3) prehensions as what holds the universe together, (4) concrescence as the activity of experiencing a world, (5) creativity as the ultimate reality, (6) God as the eternal companion of the universe, (7) interconnectedness the way actual entities are present in other, (8) novelty as the newness of each moment, (9) the universal activity of the "many becoming one," (10) the idea that all things are present in, and pervade, an extensive continuum (space-time); (11) the idea of two kinds of process, and (12) the ideas of nexus and subjective forms. You can find no better interpreter of these six ideas than John B. Cobb, Jr. in his Whitehead Word Book. Click on these links for excerpts. If you want to undertake a sustained study of Process and Reality, try Whitehead Videos: Reading Process and Reality.
