Metaphysics

Process and Reality

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Alfred North Whitehead

1929

The culminating achievement of Whitehead's metaphysical career, Process and Reality sets out a complete speculative cosmology in which the basic units of existence are not substances but events — "actual occasions" of experience that arise, reach their completion, and perish, each synthesising all prior occasions into a novel moment of becoming. Drawing on Plato, Leibniz, and William James, Whitehead replaces the classical picture of a fixed, static universe with a vision of reality as a creative advance into novelty. God enters not as an omnipotent controller but as the ground of possibility — the primordial lure toward value and beauty that shapes but never coerces.