Whitehead's Lectures on “Abstraction”

The following statement written by Professor J. D. Goheen as a foreword to the Japanese translation of Whitehead's lectures would also be a good précis of the article. "These notes are an almost verbatim record of Whitehead's lectures in his course, Cosmologies; Ancient and Modern, on Dec. 3, 5, 8, 10, 1936. In the previous meeting of the course I had, as his assistant, given a lecture in which I asked Whitehead to make more explicit his doctrine of "vagueness". Students in the course sometimes received the impression that Whitehead disparaged clarity and advocated "vagueness" or "muddle-headedness" in philosophical thinking. Whitehead, of course, intended nothing of the kind, but he was profoundly interested in the relation of abstract thought to the "penumbral" background of experience. From one point of view, Whitehead's metaphysics could be construed as essentially concerned with this relation. The world of "process", which Whitehead thought of as initially disclosed in experience, is a world in which everything is related to everything else. Finite "facts", as well as finite truths or abstractions have, therefore, to be accounted for against a background of reality and experience which is unbounded. An abstraction or finite truth is, in this sense, arbitrary; there are always others in the background which might be expressed, but are, for good reasons or bad, suppressed.