Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead [Hardcover]

Alfred North Whitehead (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 25, 1977 | ISBN-10: 0837193419 | ISBN-13: 978-0837193410

Philosopher and man of science, Whitehead is the man who went farthest on the road we all must travel. Here, recorded as conversations in his own home and clearly modeled on Eckermann s dialogues with Goethe, are some of the landmarks, signposts, milestones and noble scenery of that journey, and they are presented there in a volume The Washington Post called "as readable as it is provocative." Whitehead's mind is a compass for the modern world. In these pages the immense reaches of his thought in philosophy, religion, science, statesmanship, education, literature, art and conduct of life are gathered and edited by critic and writer Lucien Price. Time, the present; scene, the Cambridge of Harvard (with flashbacks to London, Cambridge, England, and his native Ramsgate in Kent); cast, undergraduates along with men and women, often eminent, who join in his penetrating, audacious, and exhilarating verbal forays. The subjects discussed range for the homeliest details of modern living to the greatest ideas that have animated the mind of man over the past thirty centuries. A noble mind is here exposed.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Here is the talk that shifts effortlessly among the most pertinent issues in the past and present in such a way that it breaks bonds of convention to create new issues and is a complex view of a great mind. A valuable tribute.”–Kirkus

From the Publisher

Here is the talk that shifts effortlessly among the most pertinent issues in the past and present in such a way that it breaks bonds of convention to create new issues and is a complex view of a great mind. A valuable tribute.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 396 pages
• Publisher: Greenwood Press Reprint (February 25, 1977)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0837193419
• ISBN-13: 978-0837193410
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,479,224 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Intimate View into the Mind of a Genius, May 29, 2007

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Barrie W. Bracken "Researcher" (Daytona Beach, FL) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (Nonpareil Book) (Paperback)

The more you read in this book the more you will resent the fact that the author/editor was able to spend time with Dr. Whitehead and you couldn't. We are offered an intimate view of Whitehead's breadth of interests and his famiylife. We sit in the home sharing refreshment and easvesdropping on the conversations. We gain a feeling of knowing the very human philosopher. If you enjoy the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table and the like, you will read this again and again.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A record of civilized and intelligent interaction, April 5, 2011

By 

Jordan Bell (Toronto, Canada) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (Nonpareil Book) (Paperback)

I like the dialogue style of presentation. Reading a dialogue lets one see how a thinker actually thinks, rather than just reading works where all the rough edges have been sanded down. The main impression these dialogues made on me was not about Whitehead specifically, but rather that the salon is an excellent form of intelligent, civilized and civilizing interaction.

Price gives too detailed descriptions of the scenery on his trips to and from the Whiteheads. It would be better to have one or two lines setting the stage for the dialogues and a few lines between topics to give the reader a breather.

A complaint I have about these dialogues is that I was not familiar with many of the day to day subjects with which the dialogues deal, and I think that footnotes would be useful to orient the reader. For example, Dialogue IX starts with a discussion of some books about Boston that had appeared in 1936-1937.

An idea to which Whitehead returns is that we can't verbalize some important thoughts. "The real history does not get written, because it is not in people's brains but in their nerves and vitals." (p. 24) "Words do not express our deepest intuitions." (p. 238) He says that Bertrand Russell was a writer who composed in words directly, while he composed in concepts and then tried to find words into which those concepts can be translated (p. 149). I find Russell a much clearer writer than Whitehead. I agree with Whitehead that we have intuitions that we cannot express with words, but I think that hard work sorting out just what one means and rewriting (which Whitehead says in one of these dialogues that he doesn't do much) goes a long way.

Whitehead makes many statements in this books that are worth reading and thinking about. Let me give my favorite quote from this book. Talking about free will, Whitehead says "I think that although in the final act we are so conditioned by unconscious previous thought that it looks automatic, as a matter of fact we have been determining that act by an enormous amount of rejection and selection. It all depends on what ideas are entertained and how we entertain them; some may be dismissed at once as horrible and repugnant, others dwelt upon as pleasant. After this rejection and selection has gone on for a sufficiently long period, the final act is conditioned, but we have had a large share in doing it." (pp. 157-158)

There is a nice discussion on pp. 204-205 about developing the latent abilities of people. Also on p. 278 there is a brief discussion about adult education. On p. 264 Whitehead mentions that by continual expression rather than getting intellectually worn out, a thinker "brings vague ideas into precision by putting them into speech or writing; and by expression he develops his ideas and finds his ways to new ones."

9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Pleasure of Ideas and Good Conversation, May 17, 2005

By 

Steven L. Chenault (Newport News, VA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (Nonpareil Book) (Paperback)

I read this as a freshman in college, again years later, and am finishing my latest reading. A pleasure to read, forcing one to think. Some of the ideas are clearly dated, Whitehead being truly of the 19th century, but what he and the other discussants say makes one think.