Mathematician and Idealist philosopher, born in Ramsgate, Kent, SE England, UK. He studied at Cambridge, where he was senior lecturer in mathematics until 1910. He then taught at London (191014), becoming professor of applied mathematics at Imperial College (191424), and was then professor of philosophy at Harvard (192437). He collaborated with his former pupil, Bertrand Russell, in writing the Principia mathematica (191013). His best known philosophical works are The Concept of Nature (1920) and Process and Reality (1929). Other more popular works include Adventures of Ideas (1933) and Modes of Thought (1938). He received the Order of Merit in 1945.
Alfred North Whitehead, OM (February 15, 1861 Ramsgate, Kent, England – December 30, 1947 Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA) was an English-born mathematician who became a philosopher. He wrote on algebra, logic, foundations of mathematics, philosophy of science, physics, metaphysics, and education.
Life
Although his grandfather, Thomas Whitehead, was known for having founded Chatham House Academy, a fairly successful school for boys, Alfred North was educated at Sherborne School, Dorset, then considered one of the best public schools in the country.
Between 1880 and 1910, Whitehead studied, taught, and wrote mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, spending the 1890s writing his Treatise on Universal Algebra (1898) and the 1900s collaborating with his former pupil, Russell, on the first edition of Principia Mathematica. On Whitehead the mathematician and logician, see Grattan-Guinness (2000, 2002), and Quine's chapter in Schilpp (1941), reprinted in Quine (1995).
Whitehead married Evelyn Wade, an Irish woman from France, in 1891; Although Whitehead visited his co-author in prison, he did not take his pacifism seriously, while Russell sneered at Whitehead's later speculative Platonism and panpsychism. After the war, Russell and Whitehead seldom interacted, and Whitehead contributed nothing to the 1925 second edition of Principia Mathematica.
Surprisingly for a scientist of his standing, Whitehead was always interested in theology, especially in the 1890s. Perhaps influenced by his wife and the writings of Cardinal Newman, Whitehead leaned towards Roman Catholicism.
Concomitantly, Whitehead developed a keen interest in physics: his fellowship dissertation examined James Clerk Maxwell's views on electricity and magnetism. His attitudes towards mathematics and physics were more philosophical than purely scientific; Without much prospect of ever attaining a professorship in mathematics, Whitehead left Cambridge just as the first volume of the Principia appeared.
He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1922 to 1923.
The period between 1910 and 1924 was mostly spent at University College London and Imperial College London, where he taught and wrote on physics, the philosophy of science, and the theory and practice of education. In physics, Whitehead articulated a rival doctrine to Einstein's general relativity. A more lasting work was his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919), a pioneering attempt to synthetize the philosophical underpinnings of physics;
Whitehead's address The Aims of Education (1916) pointedly criticized the formalistic approach of modern British teachers who do not care about culture and self-education of their disciples: "Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. He was sixty three when Henry Osborn Taylor invited him to implement his ideas and teach philosophy at Harvard University. The Whiteheads spent the rest of their life in the United States.
Despite abstruse mathematical and metaphysical questions associated with his name, Whitehead had wise and witty opinions about a vast range of human endeavour. Most Sunday afternoons when they were in Cambridge, the Whiteheads hosted an open house to which all Harvard students were welcome, and during which talk flowed freely. Some of the obiter dicta Whitehead spoke on these occasions were recorded by Lucien Price, a Boston journalist, who published them in 1954. That book also includes a remarkable picture of Whitehead as the aged sage holding court.
The standard biography is mainly by his Harvard student Victor Lowe; A comprehensive appraisal of Whitehead's work is difficult because (unlike his colleague Russell) Whitehead left no Nachlass; There is also no critical edition of Whitehead's writings.
Process philosophy
The genesis of Whitehead's process philosophy may be attributable to the shocking collapse of the Newtonian physics that he had witnessed. His metaphysical views began to emerge in his 1920 The Concept of Nature and were fully framed in the 1925 treatise Science and the Modern World, also an important study in the history of ideas, and the role of science and mathematics in the rise of Western civilization.
Though indebted to Henri Bergson's philosophy of change, Whitehead was also a Platonist who "saw the definite character of events as due to the "ingression" of timeless entities" (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2006). Given this tradition, Whitehead has few rival claimants to the title of the greatest British metaphysician ever.
In 1927, Whitehead was asked to give the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh. These were published in 1929 as Process and Reality, the book that founded process philosophy, a major contribution to Western metaphysics. Process philosophy has a fair following around the world except, ironically, in the United Kingdom. Able exponents of process philosophy include Charles Hartshorne and Nicholas Rescher.
Process and Reality is famous for its defense of theism, although Whitehead's God differs essentially from the revealed God of Abrahamic religion. Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism gave rise to process theology, thanks to Hartshorne, John B. Just as the entire universe is in constant flow and change, God, as source of the universe, is viewed as growing and changing.
The main tenets of Whitehead's metaphysics were summarized in his last and most accessible work, The Adventures of Ideas (1933), which also provides definitions of beauty, truth, art, adventure, and peace. Whitehead's political views were similar to libertarianism without the label.
A signal technical feature of Process and Reality is its philosophical use of mereological and topological notions.
The Big Bang cosmology that became canonical about 20 years after Whitehead's death, whereby the universe began a finite time ago in a very simple state and has subsequently grown ever more complex, is a scientific consensus that is compatible with process metaphysics. See also process physics for a fringe theory which claims inspiration in part from Whitehead's ideas.
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