Stephen David Ross presents an extensive, detailed, and critical interpretation of Whitehead s mature thought, emphasizing the fundamental role of perspective in Whitehead s cosmology, and tracing the conflicts and difficulties therein to tensions involving perspective in relation to other central features of Whitehead s thought. Ross isolates four principles as having a fundamental role in whitehead s metaphysics: perspective, cosmology, experience, and mechanical analysis. He argues that many of Whitehead s difficulties can be eliminated by raising the principle of perspective to prominence and by revising the other central features of Whitehead s theory accordingly.
This book addresses key Whiteheadian texts and secondary interpretations of Whitehead. The discussion ranges over most of Whitehead s theory in Process and Reality, and offers a number of significant and, in some cases, novel views on different aspects of Whitehead s theory: perception, prehension, causation, objective immortality, self-causation, the extensive continuum, natural order, possiblity, concreteness, and God. Ross s concluding suggestions for modifying Whitehead s system promise to occasion much debate among process philosophers, theologians, and anyone concerned with Whitehead s thought."