The Systems of Whitehead’s Metaphysics

This is the earliest work of philosophy extracted in 1937 by Charles H. Malik from his doctoral dissertation but never before published. The book is an intricate study of the metaphysics of his philosophy professor at Harvard, Alfred North Whitehead, with whom he shared a background in mathematics and physics. In this book, the author offers one of the earliest systematization of the principles and categories with which Whitehead interprets the phenomenon of human experience. Whitehead's conceptions of such a fundamental principles as God, relevance, environment, process, past, contemporaneity, concrescence, the ontological principle, negative prehensions, and much elses, receive careful and critical systematic definition.

The author, Charles H. Malik (1906-1987), was both an influential philosopher from Lebanon and a celebrated diplomat on the world stage. He is one of the shapers of the twentieth century through his substantive contributions to the framing of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Among his many publications are Christ and Crisis (1962), Man in the Struggle for Peace (1963), The Wonder of Being (1974), A Christian Critique of the University (1980), and a twenty-thousand word essay on diplomacy published in 1973 in the Encyclopedia Britannica. He was decorated with over fifty honorary doctoral degrees.

The current volume is the first in a series of publications of the Charles Malik heritage on subjects ranging from philosophy to the West, as well as theology and human rights.