Alfred North Whitehead

Alfred North Whitehead a British mathematician and philosopher (1861-1947) who, after a distinguished career in logic and the foundations of mathematics, developed an ambitious metaphysics of process in which reality is understood as a web of becoming events rather than of enduring substances. He spent the last part of his life in the United States.

Life and Education

Alfred North Whitehead was born in Ramsgate, Kent, in 1861, the son of an Anglican clergyman and schoolmaster. He studied mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became a fellow and lecturer, and where he was in due course the teacher of Bertrand Russell. He remained at Cambridge until 1910, working on mathematics and mathematical physics.

He then moved to University College London, where he taught applied mathematics for some years, and in 1924, at the age of sixty-three, he was invited to Harvard University as professor of philosophy. The move marked a decisive turn from mathematics to metaphysics, and it was in America that he wrote the works for which he is best known.

He was a patient and influential teacher, and his Harvard lectures shaped a generation of American philosophers and theologians. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1947. He was awarded the Order of Merit and received many honorary degrees.

Principia Mathematica and the Foundations of Mathematics

Whitehead's early reputation rested on his collaboration with Bertrand Russell on Principia Mathematica, published in three volumes between 1910 and 1913. The work sought to derive the whole of mathematics from logic, and it remains one of the most ambitious and technically demanding achievements in the history of the subject.

The project addressed a crisis in the foundations of mathematics provoked by paradoxes in naive set theory. Whitehead and Russell introduced a theory of types to avoid vicious circles and devoted enormous care to the construction of number, so that even the proof that one plus one equals two occurs only deep in the work.

Earlier, Whitehead had written A Treatise on Universal Algebra, which helped to establish abstract algebra as a field, and later he wrote works on the principles of natural knowledge and the concept of nature. These studies of space, time and relativity showed his growing interest in the philosophy of physics.

Process Philosophy and Metaphysics

Whitehead's mature philosophy is set out in Science and the Modern World, Process and Reality and Adventures of Ideas. Its central claim is that the basic units of reality are not enduring things but occasions of experience, momentary events that arise, achieve their form and perish, each taking account of the others in a process he called prehension.

On this view the world is a society of events in which everything is internally related to everything else. Creativity is the ultimate category, and God is understood not as a static ruler but as a fellow sufferer who lures the world toward richer forms of order and value. This dipolar God has both a primordial nature of eternal possibilities and a consequent nature that receives the world's achievements.

The philosophy is notoriously difficult and uses a technical vocabulary of its own, but it offers a systematic alternative to the substance metaphysics that dominated Western thought. It treats change, relation and becoming as fundamental, and it integrates science, aesthetics and religion in a single scheme.

Science, Education and Religion

Whitehead wrote perceptively about the philosophy of science, criticising the notion of nature as a mere collection of material particles and defending the reality of qualities and purposes. He argued that the scientific world view, valuable as it is, leaves out the concrete experience from which it abstracts, and that philosophy must reconnect abstract theory with the fullness of life.

In The Aims of Education he advanced a theory of learning based on cycles of romance, precision and generalisation, and he insisted that education should cultivate a sense of style and of the worth of knowledge. His essays on education have been widely quoted and remain influential in discussions of teaching.

He also wrote on religion, arguing in Religion in the Making and in later works that religious experience should grow with knowledge and that a fixed dogma is a sign of decay. He described religion as what a person does with their solitude, and he held that the world is characterised by a persuasive rather than a coercive ordering power.

Influence and Legacy

Whitehead founded a tradition of process philosophy and process theology that continues to attract followers around the world. The Center for Process Studies and a substantial body of scholarship developed his ideas, and thinkers in ecology, education and theology have drawn on his account of interdependence and value.

His philosophy has been used to address questions in environmental ethics, in the dialogue between science and religion and in social theory. Its emphasis on relatedness and becoming anticipated themes that later became prominent in continental and feminist thought, though often by independent routes.

He is remembered as a mathematician who became a metaphysician and who sought to hold together the insights of science with the values of art, morality and religion. Few thinkers have attempted so broad a synthesis, and his vision of a world of process remains a fertile source of ideas.

See also

• Process philosophy
• Principia Mathematica
• Process theology
• Metaphysics