Whitehead’s Universe · Chapter 4: The Modern Process Tradition
Nobody comes from nowhere.
Whitehead wasn’t an island, and in this fourth conversation Andrew Davis introduces some of the thinkers who walked the same road. Chapter 4 names ten. We picked three.
Leibniz, whose mind Whitehead never stopped admiring, saw the world not as dead matter but as living units with an inner life. Whitehead had one question for him: if the monads have windows open to God, why are their windows closed to each other? And he would have none of Leibniz’s “best of all possible worlds.” Any world, Whitehead said, is a collaborative achievement, never God’s work alone.
William James refused to dismiss experience for the sake of a tidy system. He began with the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of life and gave us the stream of consciousness. When Whitehead later called reality “drops of experience,” he was borrowing James’s words.
And Henri Bergson, in his day the most famous philosopher in the world, filled stadiums. He argued with Einstein about the nature of time, and Whitehead took Bergson’s side.
This chapter closes Part One, the historical side of the prism. Next week we turn to the heart of Whitehead’s own thought.
New here? Start with Episode 1: Introduction & Chapter 1. Catch up with Episode 2: Ancient Intuitions of Flux and Permanence and Episode 3: Misconceptions of Philosophy and Science.
Listen here on Substack, on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify. If you’d rather watch, this conversation is on YouTube. A new chapter arrives every Tuesday.
We’re four weeks in. If these conversations are meaningful to you, would you take ten seconds to rate the show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify? It helps other curious people find us.
The universe is not a noun. It is a verb, and we are part of it.
With love, André & Mary-Anne
