Whitehead, A.N. (1978) Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Corrected edn. Edited by D.R. Griffin and D.W. Sherburne. New York: The Free Press.

Whitehead’s Process and Reality constructs a speculative cosmology in which reality is not composed primarily of enduring substances but of actual entities, momentary occasions of experience whose being consists in becoming. Its central proposition is that philosophy must frame a coherent, logical, necessary, applicable, and adequate scheme through which every element of experience can be interpreted; hence the “philosophy of organism” rejects vacuous actuality, the subject-predicate model, and the notion that relations are secondary to qualities. The development of the argument pivots on prehension, Whitehead’s term for the way each occasion feels, incorporates, and transforms the world it inherits: the dead past becomes objectively immortal by entering the living immediacy of new becoming. A useful case synthesis lies in his reinterpretation of nature: space, time, causality, perception, value, and even God are not isolated doctrines but recurrent problems gradually redescribed within one relational scheme. The image of thought is therefore not a static map but a cosmological process in which creativity names the ultimate principle of novelty, concrescence names the gathering of many data into one occasion, and perishing names actuality’s passage into future relevance. Whitehead’s conclusion is at once metaphysical and methodological: reality is a creative advance of interdependent events, and philosophy’s task is not to mirror finished facts, but to articulate the generative pattern through which facts become, perish, and continue to matter.