Most of those who have succeeded in plotting a path through Process and Reality have done so in the form of an ‘introduction’, or, one might say, an ‘education’ in the sense given to the term by Foucault in The Hermeneutics of the Subject. Foucault connects ‘education’ not to educare but to educere: an outstretched hand, leading us towards an outside. Outside of what, though, in this case? Perhaps, first of all, outside of the habits formed at university desks at which we learn to ‘read a philosophy’, yes, as it asks to be read, but in a mode in which our respect excludes our making it accountable for the manner in which it deals with what matters to us.

It is said that the first philosophy lecture Whitehead ever attended was his own, a mathematician turned, at the end of his life, philosopher. If he was committed to philosophy, then, it was because the questions posed there mattered to him; it had nothing to do with choosing a subject out of the range offered by the university. Whitehead had read the ‘great philosophers’ long before becoming a philosopher, of course. But he read them in a way that ‘took them seriously’, that is, without first submitting to their greatness. He asked the question of what they do to us, what they ask us to forget.