Introduction
The discussions in this special issue took place in the Summer of 1981 under semi-camping conditions in the hostel of an old Quaker Meeting House at Pardshaw in West Cumbria, and were continued in Cambridge in 1984. They were taped, and are reproduced here with only minor amendments, so as to preserve the cut and thrust of the actual conversations. The participants were members of the Epiphany Philosophers group which had produced the journal Theoria to Theory, and they had a concern in seeing how philosophy might contribute to new developments in science. Margaret Masterman had found that reading Whitehead’s Symbolism and The Concept of Nature suggested the kind of philosophical background she was needing for her theory of language. She therefore opened the Dialogues by quoting from The Concept of Nature, and the other participants were invited to say whether they could see a bearing on their own work. There was general agreement that Whitehead’s earlier books, up to and including Science and the Modern World of 1926, would be likely to be more fruitful for this purpose than the later Whitehead of Process and Reality. The earlier Whitehead was closer to the philosophy of science; the difficulties in his views are ones that philosophers of science can recognize. On the other hand, obscurities in the terminology of the later Whitehead, if not in his thought, make it difficult for philosophers of science to see ways in which what he is saying would bear on their own problems. This may be why the work of the later Whitehead has become a world of a special exegetical industry, and one largely closed to other philosophers. Those inside it have been more often concerned to connect his views with theology than with the philosophy of science. (The two Whitehead seminars held in Germany in 1981 and 1983, however, along with some numbers of Process Studies, show a welcome widening of interest).
