Alfred North Whitehead

Alfred North Whitehead was born in 1861 in Ramsgate, Kent, England, and died in 1947. He studied at Cambridge, where he was senior lecturer in mathematics until 1910. He then taught at London from 1910 until 1914, becoming professor of applied mathematics at Imperial College from 1914 until 1924. He then taught at Harvard University from 1924 until 1937.

Whitehead had become famous as a scientist, as one of the founders of modern mathematical logic, before he concentrated upon philosophy. He was sixty-three years old when he renounced his professorship of mathematics at the Imperial College of Science and Technology, London, in order to become professor of philosophy at Harvard. However, his mathematical investigations remained relevant to his metaphysics, and even Whitehead, the metaphysician who protested that "the final outlook of philosophical thought cannot be based upon the exact statements which form the basis of special sciences," retained his grand vision of the possibilities of abstract theory.

Whitehead never hesitated to confess his indebtedness to William James, Samuel Alexander and Henri Bergson for the development of his own philosophical thoughts, or that Minkowski's assimilation of space and time and Einstein's theory of relativity had stimulated his thought. But this indebtedness meant not so much an actual influence as rather the creation of a new situation which allowed Whitehead to proceed in his own way.

The decisive feature of this new situation was shaped by James' denial that the subject-object relation is fundamental to knowledge. By denying that in the occurrence of knowing one entity, regarded as the knower, as a mind or soul, standing in front of an object, be it externally existent or the self-consciousness of the knower himself, James also removed the habitual distinction of mind and matter. Whitehead, while constantly contending that the "bifurcation of nature," the sharp division between nature and mind, established by Descartes, had "poisoned all subsequent philosophy" and jeopardized the very meaning of life, restored the subject-object relation as a fundamental structural pattern of experience, "but not in the sense in which subject-object is identified with knower-known."

To Whitehead, "the living organ or experience is the living body as a whole." Human experience has its origin in the physical activities of the whole organism which tends to readjustment when any part of it becomes unstable. Although such experience seems to be more particularly related to the brain, Whitehead held that "we cannot determine with what molecules the brain begins and the rest of the body ends." Human experience therefore is deemed as "an act of self-origination, including the whole of nature, limited to the perspective of a focal region, located within the body, but not necessarily persisting in any fixed coordination within a definite part of the brain."

Upon this concept of human experience, Whitehead founded his new philosophy of the organism, his cosmology, his defense of speculative reason, his ideas on the process of nature, his rational approach to God. The aim of his speculative philosophy was "to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every item of our experience can be interpreted."

Whitehead thought that philosophy, speculative metaphysics included, was not, or should not be, a ferocious debate between irritable professors but "a survey of possibilities and their comparison with actualities," balancing the fact, the theory, the alternatives and the ideal. In this way the fundamental beliefs which determine human character, will be clarified.

The first period of Whitehead's activities was devoted to mathematics and logic. It began with Universal Algebra published in 1898 after seven years of work, continued with Mathematical Concepts of the Material World (1905) and culminated in the monumental Principia Mathematica (1910-1913) written in collaboration with Bertrand Russell. Characteristic of Whitehead's second period, in which he was preoccupied with a philosophy of natural science without metaphysical exposition, are An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919), The Concept of Nature (1920), The Principle of Relativity (1922) and Science and the Modern World (1925), which already mentions but not yet attempts a metaphysical synthesis of existence.

Most significant of Whitehead's metaphysical views are Process and Reality (1929), Adventures of Ideas (1933) and Modes of Thought (1938).