Shows how Whitehead's metaphysics of power and events is deeply rooted in mainstream Western philosophy. Illustrates how our understanding of the great masters of the past- Descartes, Locke, Hume, Leibniz and Spinoza - benefit from viewing them from the standpoint of Whitehead's metaphysics. Provides a critical assessment of Whitehead's metaphysics and his overall conception of philosophy

At the beginning of Process and Reality (1929), Alfred North Whitehead condemns a list of beliefs, which he thinks are widely held by contemporary philosophers, as dangerously mistaken. Pierfrancesco Basile is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Bern, Switzerland. Pierfrancesco Basile looks at these myths: where they came from and why Whitehead rejects them. In doing so, Basile makes it possible to grasp the main concepts of Whitehead's process metaphysics - especially the crucial notion that being and power are one and the same - and how it is rooted in the modern philosophical tradition.