system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why was Being and Time more influential than Process and Reality?

One thing that has always puzzeled me. Both Heidegger's Being and Time and Whitehead's Process and Reality were released around the same time 1927. Both were groundbreaking texts but obviously Being and Time was the much more influential text. What's interesting about this is that I tend to view Process and Reality as being the more radical departure of the metaphysical tradition at the time, but i could honestly be wrong here. What are your thoughts?
gpt
The obvious answer here is that you probably couldn't have picked a better date for *Being & Time* than 1927; it is decidedly a book of the 1920s, both in terms of the questions it deals with and the thriving German intellectual landscape that it emerged out of. This is, ultimately, how books find their audience: Not by being the most "groundbreaking" but by adressing the right questions at the right time, at the right people. Meanwhile, Whitehead was a perennial outsider to philosophy and published *Process & Reality* in English, at a time when in the Anglosphere, the driving intellectual forces largely considered grand speculative metaphysics to be a dusty relic of the 19th century. Since then, Whitehead has simply faced the fate of all highly idiosyncratic, non-canonical thinkers: They are just too much effort to get into and too peripheral to common debates to be worthwhile for the general philosophical public (unless there is some sort of revival; Deleuze, the great gravedigger of philosophy, seems to at least have slightly increased interested in Whitehead over the last few decades).