"Process and Reality" (Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology) by Alfred North Whitehead remains a dark comet in the philosophical sky of the twentieth century. Published in 1929, it represents the culmination of the personal problematic developed by its author after parting ways with Bertrand Russell.

In this work, Whitehead, striving to bring into conversation the worldview emerging from modern sciences with a set of problems that scientists in the age of specialization tend to neglect as "non-scientific" (aesthetic, ethical, ontological, and theological problems), reinstates the theoretical program of a metaphysical ontology that aims to adequately explain all aspects of the real.

By bypassing the modern critical trajectory of Kantianism, he seems to return to the philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with John Locke as a starting point; and just as Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz struggled to construct a holistic worldview that could encompass and interpret the rapid scientific developments of their time, Whitehead seems to aspire to the equivalent concerning the dramatic innovations in mathematics, subatomic physics, and biology that marked the first half of the twentieth century.