Adventures of Ideas.

INSCRIBED BY THE AUTHOR

First edition. 8vo. xii, 392 pp. Original navy blue cloth, spine lettered and ruled in gilt, fore and bottom edges untrimmed (some very faint rubbing to extremities, otherwise an excellent copy). New York, The Macmillan Company. 

A presentation copy, inscribed by the author to the American philosopher John Daniel Wild (1902-1972) "J.D. Wild from AN Whitehead" to the title page. Autographed Whitehead material is notably scarce and comes seldom on to the market.

The pair were colleagues at Harvard University Philosophy Department, where Whitehead had moved in 1925 and produced his most important contributions to philosophy and metaphysics. Wild completed his doctorate at Harvard in 1926 and joined the faculty the following year. He received a fellowship for study at the University of Freiburg in 1931 where he attended lectures by both Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, going on to become an important proponent of existentialism and phenomenology in North America (McKenna & Scott, American Philosophy: From Wounded Knee to the Present, p. 188).

Adventures of Ideas represented a renewal of the expository style of Science and the Modern World (1925) and a more accessible entry point to Whitehead's later metaphysical thought than the notoriously dense Process and Reality (1929). It contains a use of history in the spirit of what Edmund Burke called 'philosophic analogy', elucidating "the categories of Process and Reality with the help of a vast picture of the major ideas haunting civilizations. We have here not only a philosophy of history insisting on the concept of persuasion, but also an assessment of the impact of the scientific world-view on European culture, and a renewed exposition of the ontology of process" (Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century British Philosophers, p. 1240).

Stock Code: 243119