Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time can be broadly termed a transcendental inquiry into the structures that make human experience possible. Such an inquiry reveals the conditions that render human experience intelligible. Using Being and Time as a model, I attempt to show that Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality not only aligns with Being and Time in opposing many elements of traditional Western philosophy but also exhibits a similar transcendental inquiry.

With this reading, Process and Reality contains concepts much like Being-in-the-world, ecstatic temporality, and others found in Being and Time. More important, this interpretation considers Whitehead’s treatment of human experience paradigmatic for understanding his cosmological scheme in general. Finally, the results of this study are employed to sketch a phenomenology of holy experience.

— Prefatory Note to Heidegger and Whitehead

Ron Cooper is a native South Carolinian who received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Rutgers University. He currently lives with his wife in St. Petersburg where he is Resource Center Director for the Florida Humanities Council and occasionally teaches as an adjunct at colleges around the Tampa Bay area.