This is not to say that Whitehead's thought was widely accepted or even well-understood. His philosophical work is generally considered to be among the most difficult to understand in all of the western canon. Even professional philosophers struggled to follow Whitehead's writings. One famous story illustrating the level of difficulty of Whitehead's philosophy centers around the delivery of Whitehead's Gifford lectures in 192728 following Arthur Eddington's lectures of the year previous which Whitehead would later publish as Process and Reality:
If it is possible to answer this question, answer it for me (else, reply "unanswerable"): Who also struggled to follow Whitehead's writings?
professional philosophers