Cook, Gary A. "George Herbert Mead (1863-1931)." Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought Vol. II. Edited by Michel Weber and Will Desmond. Heusenstamm, Germany: Ontos Verlag, 2008. 449-456.

Abstract

On the morning of September 14th, 1926, George Herbert Mead and Alfred North Whitehead appeared together on the program of the Sixth International Congress of Philosophy meeting at Harvard University, both presenting papers at a session entitled "Physics and metaphysics, with special reference to the problem of time." Later that day Mead reported in a letter to a family member that he had been particulrly pleased by the fact that after the session "Whitehead said he wanted to chat with me, that he thought we should get together." "There are metaphysical abysms between us," Mead observed, "but what are they between gentlemen?" Cook 1993, 138). While there is no evidence that the proposed "chat" ever took place,  or that Mead had any other communication with Whitehead,  it is clear from his essays and correpondence that he maintained a serious interest in Whitehead's thought throughout the period stretching from the summer of 1921, when he first read a book by Whitehead, until death ended his career in 1931. Despite the "metaphysical abysms" Mead saw looming  between their two philosophical orientations, he made repeated efforts to assimilate Whiteheadian concerns and concepts into his own evolving thought. And these efforts did much to shape Mead's intellectual work  during the last decade of his life. G.H. Mead was born on February 27th, 1863 in South Hadley, Massachusetts, but spent most of his early life in Oberlin Ohio. He attended Oberlin College, earning a BA degree in 1883, and then worked for several years as a tutor for college-bound students before resuming his formal education at Harvard University in the fall of 1887. While at Harvard he studied philosophy with Josiah Royce and George Herbert Palmer; he also served during the summer of 1888 as a tutor for the 10-year-old son of William James at the James summer home in New Hampshire. In the fall of 1888 Mead left Harvard for three years of additional work at the universities of Leipzig and Berlin, where he studied with professors Wilhelm Wundt, Hermann Ebinghaus, Friedrich Paulsen, and Wilhelm Dilthey. Mead began his professional career in 1891, teaching philosophy and psychology at the University of Michigan under the guidance of departmental chairman John Dewey. When Dewey moved to the University of Chicago in 1894 to head up a new department of Philosophy, Psychology, and Pedagogy, he arranged for Mead to go with him and join two others who had previously been associated with the University of Michigan - James H. Tufts and James Rowland Angell. Together these four men laid the foundation for what came to be known in later years as the Chicago School of Pragmatism. Dewey left Chicago in 1904 and moved on to a position at Columbia University, while Mead remained on the faculty of the University of Chicago for the remainder of his life. Although Mead completed no book-length manuscripts during his lifetime, he did publish many articles and book reviews. The most important of these, (including all of those cited by title in later sections of the present essay) have been reprinted in two collections, edited respectively by Reck (Mead 1964) and Petras (Mead 1968). In addition, Mead's academic reputation rests upon a series of four posthumously published volumes: Mind, Self and Society (1934) and Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century (1936) are based upon student notes taken in two of the courses Mead taught regularly at the University of Chicago; The Philosophy of the Present (1932) is based primarily upon the Carus Lectures Mead delivered in December 1930 at the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association; The Philosophy of the Act (1938) consists of a large and diverse collection of previously unpublished manuscripts left among Mead's papers at the time of his death.