The Conception of Substance: Whitehead, Russell, and Leibniz

Abstract

Whitehead is usually regarded as the advocate of process-philosophy and as the arch-enemy of substance-metaphysics. And yet he writes in The Concept of Nature that ‘Aristotle asked the fundamental question, What do we mean by “substance”?’¹ Surely, we do not expect a revolutionary thinker to recognize that his predecessors have asked the right question, but to deny that the question needs to be raised in the first place.