Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology

Whitehead is the man who taught Bertrand Russell his mathematics

Whitehead is the man who taught Bertrand Russell his mathematics and collaborated with him on PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA, the work that founded the symbolic logic for men like Wittgenstein and Carnap. PROCESS AND REALITY is his master philosophical work presenting his definitive metaphysical & cosmological system.
Be warned: this is not a book for the philosophical novice. P&R is a dense and difficult work that demands a working familiarity with the history of philosophy from Plato to Locke. But don't be deterred by the abstraction of the "Categoreal (not misspelled !) Scheme" in Part One; just read it quickly, and then move on to its explication and development in the subsequent parts as he sets his "categories" in dialogue with the classical thinkers of the Enlightenment from Descartes to Kant.
Whitehead's purpose is to present a novel set of philosophical categories in terms of which we can obviate the modern cap between "hard" physical and the "soft" psychological & social sciences. In short Whitehead anticipated C.P.Snow's "two cultures" while providing an intellectually coherent basis for a new synthesis. Whitehead was the first humanistic philosopher to grasp the affirmative implications of relativity and quantum theories for ontology, and P&R proposes a hypothetical scheme on which to ground a new understanding of the process that is reality.
I recommend reading his SCIENCE AND THE MODERN WORLD, and ADVENTURES OF IDEAS as companion works.

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Good and simple exposition of process and its relation to theology

This book is a must read for anyone interested in understanding process theology, liberation and the general understanding of process. The book will open your mind into a whole new world of understanding everyday life.

Difficult but worth it

I would suggest the lay person (I'm one of them) to have the ideas in this book, particularly the theological ones, explained first by someone else, then read Whitehead's original work. I had read a paper by one of my professors a while back which helped immensely. It's just wonderful to read what he has to say and actually understand it. Everything is in here. It's an advanced course on the philosophy of everything.