The Rehabilitation of Whitehead: An Analytic and Historical Study (review)

nOOK REVIEWS 629 gated disaster most people nowadays assume. It constituted (though often in outline only) a vast system of philosophy, encompassing a full philosophical analysis and reconstruction of the various sciences and their mutual relations.., worked out with an attention to detail unparalleled among British philosophers of his day" (vi). In Griffin's view, it was the need to account for the relatio~ within the various sciences that proved to be the weakest link in Russell's neo-Hegelian dialectical chain. That chain depended on the existence of internal relations, and Russell, Griffin argues, had less than a clear grasp of this concept at the beginning of the Millhangar years (hardly surprising for a young man in his mid-twenties); it was only later, after he was well into his neo-Hegelian reconstruction, that Russell came to realize how vital and yet how damaging the doctrine of internal relations was to the project on which he had embarked. For Russell's reconstruction, relying as it did on the doctrine of internal relations, was intended to overcome those antinomies to which the several sciences are heir; and yet, as the argument developed, Russell came to recognize that "with the doctrine [of internal relations] there was no hope of entirely eliminating them [that is, the antinomies]" (87). "It was," Griffin argues, "this discover,/that led Russell to abandon both the doctrine of internal relations and the neo-Hegelianism of which it was an integral part" (87-88) . Griffin's is a well-told tale that should be of interest to any student of twentiethcentury Anglo-American philosophy in general and Russell's philosophy in particular. Although being ignorant of Russell's neo-Hegelian past does not condemn other philosophers to repeat it, knowledge of his motivations for constructing, and some of the details of, the "vast system of philosophy" Griffin surveys not only fills "a gap" in Russell's biography of ideas, it adds importantly to our understanding of how and why early twentieth-century British philosophy took the shape it did and has the feel it does. TOM REGAN North Carolina State University George R. Lucas, Jr. The Rehabilitation of Whitehead: An Analytic and Historical Study. State University of New York Series in Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, a99o. Pp. xiv + 961. Cloth, $44.5o. Paper, $14.95. The need for a "rehabilitation" of Whitehead must be occasioned by some sort of domestic decrepitude, and this is indeed the case, as Lucas shows in this extraordinary volume. The decrepitude is double-sided. On the one side, Whitehead, and process metaphysics generally, has been unduly ignored by most mainstream philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition. On the other, Whitehead's devotees have tended to treat him as a unique and exotic plant to be cultivated and propagated as if he were not in a larger garden of philosophers. To be sure, Whitehead's language is technical and forbidding, so that those who do not know it need a reason to make the effort to learn, and those who have learned it are often too exhausted to ask whether it was worth the effort. But the language alone is no more technical than that of symbolic logic, or 630 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 30:4 OCTOBER 1992 Husserl's phenomenology, or Wittgenstein's language philosophy. So Whitehead's need of rehabilitation is special. Lucas situates Whitehead in the larger historical movements of our time. He begins with an insightful discussion of process philosophy in general, which he divides into several main families or schools: (1) the "revolutionary" French thinkers such as Diderot and Lamarck; (9) German idealists and romantic "nature philosophers" such as Hegel, Goethe, and Schelling; (3) the "emergent" evolutionists such as Alexander, Morgan, and Bergson; (4) English and American realists, such as Moore, Broad, Russell , Santayana, Drake, Perry, and Sellars. Unlike the first, Whitehead did not interpret process as evolution to something higher; unlike the last he took his view of science from physics and mathematics. He was a rationalist, not an empiricist, and although he combined many idealistic and realistic elements, his philosophy was a metaphysics distinct from both. Next, Whitehead is studied in...