Work Classification Layer
Compare Works
Pick two or more works to set their attribute fingerprints, dimension-by-dimension passages, and shared school embodiments side by side. Especially useful for author-stage comparisons (Wittgenstein early vs late) and for setting a single tradition's foundational texts against each other.
Process and Reality
Reality consists of actual occasions of experience — drops of process — concrescent with their relations; God is the principle of concretion
Attribute Fingerprint
Rows where works disagree are highlighted in gold. The full ontology grid is shown.
| Attribute | Process and Reality (Late) |
|---|---|
| Time · Extent | Infinite |
| Time · Ontological Status | Relational |
| Time · Grain | Discrete |
| Time · Freedom | Both |
| Time · Traversability | Linear |
| Time · Dimensionality | One |
| Time · Direction | Uni-directional |
| Space · Extent | Infinite |
| Space · Ontological Status | Relational |
| Space · Curvature | Flat |
| Space · Dimensionality | Three |
| Space · Locality | Local |
| Matter · Extent | Infinite |
| Matter · Ontological Status | Relational |
| Matter · Conservation | Conserved |
| Matter · Dimensionality | Three |
| Matter · Locality | Local |
| Observer · Time Instance | Multiple |
| Observer · Space Instance | Single |
| Observer · Knowledge Extent | Immediate |
| Observer · Knowledge Retainment | Total |
| Observer · Physicality | Both |
| Observer · Agency | Active |
| Observer · Number | Plural |
| Observer · Metaphysical Agency | Personal |
| Observer · Moral Authority | Reason |
| Observer · Theological Method | — |
| Energy · Extent | Infinite |
| Energy · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Energy · Conservation | Conserved |
| Energy · Dispersibility | Irreversible |
| Information · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Information · Cosmic Conservation | Conserved |
| Information · Personal Conservation | Conserved |
| Information · Granularity | Discrete |
Dimension-by-Dimension Evidence
What each work's passages reveal about its stance on each of the six dimensions.
Time
Process and Reality
Time is the medium of concrescence — each actual occasion arises, integrates its data, achieves satisfaction, and perishes. Whitehead treats the temporal grain as quantised (atomistic) at the level of actual occasions: each occasion is a "drop" with no internal duration; continuous time is constructed from their succession. Time Grain is Discrete in this precise Whiteheadian sense.
Space
Process and Reality
Spatial extension is constituted by the relational structure of co-occurrent actual occasions. Space is relational rather than substantival, three-dimensional in our cosmic epoch (Whitehead leaves open that other cosmic epochs might have different geometries).
Matter
Process and Reality
There are no enduring material substances — only societies of actual occasions with sufficient internal order to count as ordinary objects. Matter is relational, conserved (the data of perished occasions are objectively immortal in subsequent occasions), and locally interactive.
Observer
Process and Reality
Every actual occasion is an experiencing subject; observation goes all the way down. Human observers are highly complex societies of occasions, embodied and active. Knowledge is immediate (each occasion prehends its world directly) but limited to what its standpoint permits. The metaphysical agency is personal: Whitehead's God is genuinely an actual entity, with primordial and consequent natures, participating in but not coercing the world.
Energy
Process and Reality
Energy in Whitehead's sense is the "creative advance" — the principle of novelty by which each occasion arises from the many of its predecessors. Substantival in the precise sense of being a real metaphysical principle, conserved across the cosmic process, and irreversibly directional.
Information
Process and Reality
God's consequent nature is the substantival preservation of all that has happened — "the dead are immortal because they live for ever in the consequent nature of God" (V.II). Personal information is conserved in this divine experience after the perishing of the temporal occasions that composed the person.
Internal Tensions
Where each work's argument pulls against itself.
Process and Reality's technical vocabulary — "prehension," "concrescence," "objectification," "eternal object," "actual occasion" — makes it forbiddingly hard, and Whitehead's own usage is not always consistent across the five parts. The relation between the early mathematical Whitehead (Principia Mathematica) and the late metaphysical Whitehead (Process and Reality) has been disputed: continuous philosophical development, or a speculative turn that the analytic tradition largely declined to follow. Process theologians treat the late Whitehead as a working metaphysics; analytic philosophers have tended to treat it as an exotic exception.