Educators are familiar with Alfred North Whitehead's three stages of education: romance, precision, and generalization. Philosophers are familiar with his metaphysical theories about the primacy of temporal processes. In Modes of Learning, George Allan brings these two sides of Whitehead's thought together for the first time in a book suitable for both those initially approaching Whitehead's metaphysics and experts alike.

Allan develops a series of analogies between Whitehead's ideas about how we learn and key concepts in his later metaphysical writings, demonstrating that both how we...