The Vicarage Iconoclast: Whitehead, Leibniz, Relativity and the Quantum

This manuscript critically examines Alfred North Whitehead’s metaphysical system as it relates to quantum mechanics, relativity, and Leibnizian philosophy, presented through an extended philosophical dialogue. It challenges Whitehead’s core assumptions, particularly his interpretations of quantum discontinuity, internal relations, and the structure of spacetime. The author argues that Whitehead’s metaphysics, rooted in subjective experience, prehension, and the primacy of simultaneity, is undermined by its misreading of both modern physics and Leibniz’s metaphysics of substance and relation. Whitehead’s rejection of continuous becoming and motion, his treatment of actual occasions as discrete experiential events, and his notion of “eternal objects” are scrutinized in the context of process philosophy and critiques from contemporary physics. The dialogue also engages with recent reinterpretations, notably those of Carey Carlson, Florian Vermeiren, and Michael Epperson, addressing causal set theory, quantum potentia, and decoherence in light of Whiteheadian metaphysics. The manuscript ultimately questions the coherence of Whitehead’s system under relativistic constraints and critiques the theological and holistic presuppositions underlying his cosmology, and, by implication, any cosmologies assuming a wave function for the whole universe.