I tried to wade though Whitehead's Process and Reality unarmed several times and was routed by hoards of "actual entities", "eternal objects" and other beasts. Finally, fortified by Sherburne, I made it. And you can too, but don't think the going is easy even with Sherburne at your side.

He does a good job of reorganizing the text so that the concepts build in a more linear fashion, he also provides some insightful introductions to his chapters. Still, I give the book only a 4, because it's still hard to get the big picture from the onslaught of details.

...if you want to understand Whitehead but haven't attempted him yet. Sherburne does indeed provide a key to Whitehead by unlocking his concepts one by one and explaining them in plain English. Recommended.

This book is the place to start if you want to understand Whitehead's Process and Reality.

Sherburne has done a masterful job of explaining Whitehead's many neologisms.

Process and Reality is one of the masterworks of 20th century philosophy, however its terminology make it hard to comprehend.

Sherburne's book makes Process and Reality accessible even to non-philosophers.

Ask any mathematician working today and they will tell you that this book is completely useless for modern mathematics. While it is no doubt an important historical document, it is only that and is largely irrelevent right now. It is certainly NOT the most influential work in the mathematics of the 20th century (not by a long shot!). It's not even the most influential work in mathematical logic. Maybe it's the most influential work in philosophical logic? .... Buy a good book on category theory instead. (p.s. I'm currently a PhD student in mathematics. A student of philosophy might have a different opinion.)

I read the first two volumes of this massive treatise. I will soon get to third as time permits. Although surely this isn't everyone's cup of tea, I found it very enjoyable, and I am not a philospher or a mathematician. I'm just a second year med student with a claculus background. What I'm trying to say is that anyone who wants to can read this book can, and he or she will take a lot away from it if they want.

I don't completely understand how this book reduces (or at least attempts to) all of mathematics to logic nor do I understand why it supposedly fails. Maybe if you majored in math or philosophy these things are obvious to you, but it is a fascinating book, and I find it remarkable knowing there are/were human beings that could think in such terms.

Buy this book! (the only reason I didn't give it four stars is for the fact that it's a little too deep to be enjoyed, like a marathon. I'd give "Crime and Punsihment" or "Being and Nothingness" five stars.)

This is a terse review, but quite literally this is the greatest achievement of twentieth century logic and mathematics. Only reading it can compel one to understand it.

If you'd like to study the tread wear on old tires in a junk yard rather than actually driving a car, this is for you. Otherwise, this is the last book you should bother reading. It's not like Emil Artin, or J.P. Serre decided to write on book on the foundations of math. It's by two logicians who splash around in the shallow tide pools while oceans of results have been pouring in for millennia. This NEVER became the "Euclid" of our age. And trust me, it will NEVER become the "Euclid" of any age. It's the most unread, yet well-known math book ever. Do yourself a favor, don't read it either. Flip through it in the library, and you'll never need to see it again. No mathematician has ever taught math from this book. Sure a few logicians might teach from it, but they're not teaching math per se, they're bantering about logic.

If you're one of those people who like to pretend the world waits on the pronouncements of philosophers before marching on, this will help in your game of make believe. You shall know the tree by it's fruit, and Russell is indeed a fruitless mathematician! Just try and find a proof or theorem in higher math that a young Russell proved before taking on the foundations of math, you won't find any. At least David Hilbert, Richard Dedekind and others proved themselves worthy of the task well before becoming "philosophers" of math.

The notation of PM is hard to read by anyone who learned logic post 1960, say. The typesetting is archaic. Hundreds of theorems are proved, but it is not clear where
they all lead. Russell and Whitehead are guilty of a number of major philosophical confusions, such as use and mention, between meta- and object language, and their confused notion of "propositional function." Their choice of axioms can be much improved upon. The PM theory of types and orders is a complicated horror; Chwistek, Ramsey, and others later showed that it could be radically simplified. R & W think they can substitute the intensional for the extensional, and ultimately define sets and relations in logical terms. PM does not have a clue about model theory or metatheory. There is no hint of proofs of consistency, completeness, categoricity, and Loewenheim-Skolem. In this sense, the fathers of modern logic are Skolem, Goedel, Tarski, and Church. And Goedel did indeed prove that there must exist mathematical truths that cannot be proved true using the axioms of PM, or any other finite set of axioms.

But this is still one of the greatest works of mathematics and philosophy of all time. The long prose introduction is a philosophical masterpiece. The collaboration between Russell and Whitehead may be the greatest scientific collaboration in British history. Whitehead, who was trained as a mathematician, went on to become one of the shrewder philosophers of the 20th century, and supervised Quine's PhD thesis. PM's treatment of the algebra of relations (a brilliant generalisation of Boolean algebra that
has not received the study it deserves) is perhaps the most thorough ever.

Mathematical logic is indeed the abstract structure that underlies the digital electronics revolution. And PM is still perhaps the greatest work of math logic ever penned.

To the person who wrote that Godel proved the Principia wrong is incorrect. He only proved that not every math truth can be proved logicaly. He did not disprove the notion that all truths can be expressed logicaly, and therefore a truth of logic.

The ideas and philosophical concepts in this book are generally sensible, rational, and correct, but the writing style and execution leaves much to be desired. In other words, this book is extremely difficult. The impenetrable density of this prose is intolerable, especially considering it was written IN ENGLISH, in the TWENTIETH CENTURY! If someone had handed me this book with a blank cover, I would have been convinced that it was originally written in old German during the time of Kant, and verbosely translated by some frustrated acedemic. It is beyond me how any book writeen in English so recently could be so unreadable.

I might recommend this book to someone with a highly scientific, mathematical and empiricist mind-set. After all, Whitehead is an accomplished mathematician, and his book has an aire of unbiased, empirical objectivity. For a mathematician with a desire to cross over into the philosophy genre, this might be a good choice. But for normal philosophy readers who come from a liberal arts/literary background, this book will probably come across as obfiscated and tortuous.

In short: A serious and thoughtful book about the meaning and impact of science. This is not light, popular science reading. (If you're looking for that, I highly recommend the works of folks like Freeman Dyson or Stephen Jay Gould.)

_Science and the Modern World_ has some stunning, timeless insights, and many things I'm fond of quoting. Here's a favorite, from the last chapter:

"Modern science has imposed upon humanity the necessity for wandering. Its progressive thought and its progressive
technology make the transition through time, from generation to generation, a true migration into uncharted seas of adventure.
The very benefit of wandering is that it is dangerous and needs skill to avert evils. We must expect, therefore, that the future
will disclose dangers."

(Here it comes:)

"It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties."

(*P*O*W*!*)

"The prosperous middle classes, who ruled the nineteenth century, placed an excessive value upon the placidity of existence. They refused to face the necessities for social reform imposed by the new industrial system, and they are now refusing to face the necessities for intellectual reform imposed by the new knowledge."

(Same as it ever was!)

"The middle class pessimism over the future of the world comes from a confusion between civilization and security. In the immediate future there will be less security than in the immediate past, less stability. It must be admitted that there is a degree of instability which is inconsistent with civilization. But, on the whole, the great ages have been unstable ages."

Whew.

I found this a curious blend of sparkling expression with sometimes impenetrable prose. It seems worth reading from a general-semantics view because of Whitehead's influence on Alfred Korzybski's work. In this book, Whitehead uses the history of western science as a backdrop for examining some of its basic assumptions and for discussing his own alternative to scientific materialism, which he calls the "theory of organic mechanism," (81) a forerunner of general-systems theory. Whitehead strongly emphasizes a process view of nature: "...nature is a structure of evolving processes. The reality is the process" (74). His discussion of what he calls the fallacy of misplaced concreteness seems close to Korzybski's notion of confusion of orders of abstraction. Whitehead pushes for including the concerns of philosophy, art and religion in a broadened view of science. He argues against "A self-satisfied rationalism [that] is in effect a form of anti-rationalism. It means an arbitrary halt at a particular set of abstractions" (201). Opposed to such limitations, he argues instead that "...almost any idea that jogs you out of your current abstractions may be better than nothing" (62). You may skip the book's at times difficult metaphysics and still find many gems to jog you.