The philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead differs from most of those that have been influential in the West in its emphasis on process and on internal relations instead of substances and their external relations. For human beings this supports a model of person-in-community instead of the widely influential and highly individualistic and substantialist model of Homo economicus. Communities are societies that are held together by internal relations. The importance of community is widely recognized in organizational studies, but most business decisions are informed chiefly but the substantialist thinking expressed in Homo economicus. To endure and prospers, communities need institutional structures, but these should serve community.

The dominant neo-Darwinian theory of evolution locates the causes of evolutionary change in the random mutation of genes and in the environment. The animal organisms are viewe as passive in this process. However, there is a great deal of evidence that animal activity plays a large role in evolution. Some of this, no doubt, is random or even mechanically determined. However, there are good reasons to think that some of it is porposice and intelligent. Animals repeat successful actions and learn them from other members of the species. These actions many prove beneficial for surbibal' so genes that facilitate them are naturally selected. Animal action also changes the environment. Including human beings in an evolutionary development that is partly determined by intelligent and purposive behavior does not have the reductionistic and nihilistic implications of currently standard teaching about evolution.

Postmodern philosophy is often dismissed as unintelligible, self-contradictory, and as a passing fad with no contribution to make to the problems faced by philosophers in our time. While this characterization may be true of the type of philosophy labeled postmodern in the 1980s and 1990s, David Ray Griffin argues that Alfred North Whitehead had formulated a radically different type of postmodern philosophy to which these criticisms do not apply. Griffin shows the power of Whitehead's philosophy in dealing with a range of contemporary issues--the mind-body relation, ecological ethics, truth as correspondence, the relation of time in physics to the (irreversible) time of our lives, and the reality of moral norms. He also defends a distinctive dimension of Whitehead's postmodernism, his theism, against various criticisms, including the charge that it is incompatible with relativity theory.