Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead was a British mathematician and philosopher who co-authored Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell and then developed process philosophy — a metaphysical system in which reality consists not of static substances but of dynamic events or 'actual occasions of experience.' His ambitious speculative philosophy, presented in Process and Reality, proposed that all entities, from electrons to human minds, are processes of creative becoming, and that God is not an external creator but the principle of novelty within the ongoing creativity of the universe.
Key Ideas
Key Contributions
- ● Co-authored Principia Mathematica with Russell, attempting to derive all mathematics from logical axioms
- ● Founded process philosophy — the metaphysical view that reality consists of dynamic events (actual occasions) rather than static substances
- ● Developed the concept of 'actual occasions of experience' as the fundamental units of reality, replacing the notion of inert material particles
- ● Proposed that creativity is the ultimate metaphysical principle — the process by which novel entities come into being
- ● Developed a dipolar concept of God: God has a primordial nature (providing the possibilities for novelty) and a consequent nature (affected by the world's becoming)
- ● Critiqued the 'fallacy of misplaced concreteness' — the error of treating abstractions as if they were concrete realities
Core Questions
Key Claims
- ✓ The actual world is a process — reality consists not of enduring substances but of 'actual occasions of experience' that come into being and perish
- ✓ Creativity is the ultimate metaphysical principle — the process by which the many become one and are increased by one
- ✓ The fallacy of misplaced concreteness: treating abstract concepts (like 'matter' or 'mind') as if they were concrete realities is the fundamental error of traditional philosophy
- ✓ God is not an external creator but the principle of novelty — dipolar, with a primordial nature (providing possibilities) and a consequent nature (receiving the world's experience)
- ✓ All of Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato
Biography
Life
Alfred North Whitehead was born on February 15, 1861, in Ramsgate, Kent, England. He studied mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, where Russell was his student. Their collaboration produced Principia Mathematica (1910–1913), a monumental attempt to derive all mathematics from logical axioms.
Whitehead taught at Cambridge, the University of London, and finally at Harvard (from 1924), where he developed his process philosophy. His Process and Reality (1929) is one of the most ambitious speculative works of the 20th century.
He died on December 30, 1947, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Legacy
Whitehead's process philosophy has influenced theology (process theology), ecology (relational ontology), and contemporary metaphysics. His aphorism that all of Western philosophy is 'a series of footnotes to Plato' has become one of the most quoted lines in philosophy.
Methods
Notable Quotes
"The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato."
"The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order."
"It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious."
Major Works
- Principia Mathematica Treatise (1910)
- Science and the Modern World Lecture (1925)
- Process and Reality Treatise (1929)
- Adventures of Ideas Treatise (1933)
Influenced
- Gilles Deleuze · Intellectual Influence
Influenced by
- Bertrand Russell · Intellectual Influence
Sources
- Process and Reality: Corrected Edition (ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald Sherburne)
- Whitehead by Victor Lowe (Johns Hopkins)
- The Cambridge Companion to Whitehead (ed. Steven Shaviro)
External Links
Translations
Discussions
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