Alfred North Whitehead

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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. With Bertrand Russell, he coauthored the epochal Principia Mathematica.

Contents

[edit] 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. His childhood was described as over-protected, but when at school he excelled in sports, mathematics and was head prefect of his class.

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; they had a daughter and two sons. One son died in action while serving in the Royal Air Force during World War I. Meanwhile, Russell spent much of 1918 in prison because of his pacifist activities. 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. This may be explained by the fact that his family was firmly anchored in the Church of England: his father and uncles were vicars, while his brother would become bishop of Madras. Perhaps influenced by his wife and the writings of Cardinal Newman, Whitehead leaned towards Roman Catholicism. Prior to the Great War, he considered himself an agnostic. Later he returned to religion, without formally joining any church.

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; he was more concerned about their scope and nature, rather than about particular tenets and paradigms. Without much prospect of ever attaining a professorship in mathematics, Whitehead left Cambridge just as the first volume of the Principia appeared. The pretext for leaving the alma mater was his protest at the dismissal of a Trinity College colleague because of an adulterous affair.

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. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society since 1903 and was elected to the British Academy in 1931. In physics, Whitehead articulated a rival doctrine to Einstein's general relativity. His theory of gravitation is now discredited because its predicted variability of the gravitational constant G disagrees with experimental findings.[1]. A more lasting work was his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919), a pioneering attempt to synthetize the philosophical underpinnings of physics; the text proved too hermetic to influence professional physicists, however.

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. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it." He was sixty three when Henry Osborn Taylor invited him to implement his ideas and teach philosophy at Harvard University. This was a subject he had not previously taught, but was always interested in. The Whiteheads spent the rest of their life in the United States. The aged philosopher did not retire from Harvard until 1937. After his death ten years later, there was no funeral as his body was cremated.

Despite abstruse mathematical and metaphysical questions associated with his name, Whitehead had wise and witty opinions about a vast range of human endeavour. These opinions pepper the many essays and speeches he gave on various topics between 1915 and his death, reprinted in his (1917, 1925a, 1927, 1929a, 1929b, 1933, 1938). His Harvard lectures (1924-37) are studded with quotations from his favourite poets, Wordsworth and Shelley. 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; see Lowe (1985) and Lowe and Schneewind (1990). A comprehensive appraisal of Whitehead's work is difficult because (unlike his colleague Russell) Whitehead left no Nachlass; his family carried out his instructions that all of his papers be destroyed after his death. There is also no critical edition of Whitehead's writings.

[edit] 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). The Anglo-Saxon world was never particularly receptive to speculative metaphysics along the lines of Leibniz and Hegel. 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. Cobb, Jr, and David Ray Griffin. Some Christians and Jews find process theology a fruitful way of understanding God and the universe. Just as the entire universe is in constant flow and change, God, as source of the universe, is viewed as growing and changing. [1]

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. He believed that "there are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil." Whitehead's political views were similar to libertarianism without the label. He wrote: "Now the intercourse between individuals and between social groups takes one of two forms, force or persuasion. Commerce is the great example of intercourse by way of persuasion. War, slavery, and governmental compulsion exemplify the reign of force."

A signal technical feature of Process and Reality is its philosophical use of mereological and topological notions. Bowman Clarke argued in the 1980s that the mereotopology of Process and Reality was seriously flawed, and showed how it could be repaired. Simons (1987) contains an accessible review of Clarke's work. The work of Clarke was criticized in Biacino and Gerla (1991) where one proves that in a model of Clarke's system of axioms the connection relation coincides with the overlapping relation. This is very far from Whitehead's ideas.

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.

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Whitehead's rejection of mind-body dualism is similar to elements in faith traditions such as Buddhism.

[edit] See also

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Works by Whitehead

  • 1898. A Treatise on Universal Algebra with Applications. Cambridge Uni. Press. 1960 reprint, Hafner.
  • 1911. An Introduction to Mathematics. Oxford Univ. Press. 1990 paperback, ISBN 0-19-500211-3. Vol. 56 of the Great Books of the Western World series.
  • 1917. The Organization of Thought Educational and Scientific. Lippincott.
  • 1920. The Concept of Nature. Cambridge Uni. Press. 2004 paperback, Prometheus Books, ISBN 1-59102-214-2. Being the 1919 Tarner Lectures delivered at Trinity College.
  • 1922. The Principle of Relativity with Applications to Physical Science. Cambridge Uni. Press.
  • 1925 (1910-13), with Bertrand Russell. Principia Mathematica, in 3 vols. Cambridge Uni. Press. Vol. 1 to *56 is available as a CUP paperback.
  • 1925a. Science and the Modern World. 1997 paperback, Free Press (Simon & Schuster), ISBN 0-684-83639-4. Vol. 55 of the Great Books of the Western World series.
  • 1925b (1919). An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge. Cambridge Uni. Press.
  • 1926. Religion in the Making. 1974, New American Library. 1996, with introduction by Judith A. Jones, Fordham Univ. Press.
  • 1927. Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect. The 1927 Barbour-Page Lectures, given at the University of Virginia. 1985 paperback, Fordham University Press.
  • 1929. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. 1979 corrected edition, edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, Free Press.
  • 1929a. The Aims of Education and Other Essays. 1985 paperback, Free Press, ISBN 0-02-935180-4.
  • 1929b. Function of Reason. 1971 paperback, Beacon Press, ISBN 0-8070-1573-3.
  • 1933. Adventures of Ideas. 1967 paperback, Free Press, ISBN 0-02-935170-7.
  • 1934. Nature and Life. University of Chicago Press.
  • 1938. Modes of Thought. 1968 paperback, Free Press, ISBN 0-02-935210-X.
  • 1947. Essays in Science and Philosophy. Runes, Dagobert, ed. Philosophical Library.
  • 1947. The Wit and Wisdom of Whitehead. Beacon Press.
  • 1951. "Mathematics and the Good" in Schilpp, P. A., ed., 1951. The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, 2nd. ed. New York, Tudor Publishing Company: 666-81. Also printed in:
    • in The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, 1941, P. A. Schilpp, Ed.;
    • in Science & Philosophy; Philosophical Library, 1948.
  • 1953. A. N. Whitead: An Anthology. Northrop, F.S.C., and Gross, M.W., eds. Cambridge Univ. Press.
  • Price, Lucien, 1954. Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, with Introduction by Sir Ross David. Reprinted 1977, Greenwood Press Reprint, ISBN 0-8371-9341-9, and 2001 with Forward by Caldwell Titcomb, David R. Godine Publisher, ISBN 1-56792-129-9.

[edit] Works about Whitehead and his thought

  • Biacino L., Gerla G., 1991. "Connection structures", Notre Dame J. of Formal Logic, 32 242-247.
  • Browning, Douglas and Myers, William T., eds., 1998. Philosophers of Process. Fordham Univ Press. ISBN 0-8232-1879-1, contains some primary texts including:
    • "Critique of Scientific Materialism"
    • "Process"
    • "Fact and Form"
    • "Objects and Subjects"
    • "The Grouping of Occasions"
  • Ivor Grattan-Guinness, 2000. The Search for Mathematical Roots 1870-1940. Princeton Uni. Press.
  • ------, 2002, "Algebras, Projective Geometry, Mathematical Logic, and Constructing the World: Intersections in the Philosophy of Mathematics of A. N. Whitehead," Historia Mathematica 29: 427-62. Many references.
  • Charles Hartshorne, 1972. Whitehead's Philosophy: Selected Essays, 1935-1970. University of Nebraska Press
  • Kneebone, G., 2001, (1963). Mathematical Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics. Dover reprint: ISBN 0-486-41712-3. The final chapter is a lucid introduction to some of the ideas in Whitehead (1919, 1925b, 1929).
  • LeClerc, Ivor, ed., 1961. The Relevance of Whitehead. Allen & Unwin.
  • Lowe, Victor, 1962. Understanding Whitehead. Johns Hopkins Uni. Press.
  • ------, 1985. A. N. Whitehead: The Man and His Work, Vol. 1. Johns Hopkins U. Press.
  • Lowe and Schneewind, J. B., 1990. A. N. Whitehead: The Man and His Work, Vol. 2. Johns Hopkins U. Press.
  • Richard Milton Martin, 1974. Whitehead's Categorial Scheme and Other Essays. Martinus Nijhoff.
  • Mays, Wolfgang, 1959. The Philosophy of Whitehead. Allen & Unwin.
  • ------, 1977. Whitehead's Philosophy of Science and Metaphysics: An Introduction to his Thought. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
  • Nobo, Jorge L., 1986. Whitehead's Metaphysics of Extension and Solidarity. SUNY Press.
  • Willard Quine, 1941, "Whitehead and the rise of modern logic" in Schilpp (1941). Reprinted in his 1995 Selected Logic Papers. Harvard Uni. Press.
  • Nicholas Rescher, 1995. Process Metaphysics. SUNY Press.
  • ------, 2001. Process Philosophy: A Survey of Basic Issues. Univ. of Pittsburg Press.
  • Schilpp, Paul A., ed., 1941. The Philosophy of A. N. Whitehead (The Library of Living Philosophers). New York: Tudor.
  • Simons, Peter, 1987. Parts. Oxford Uni. Press.
  • Will, Clifford, 1993. Theory and Experiment in Gravitational Physics. Cambridge University Press.

[edit] External links

Persondata
NAME Whitehead, Alfred North
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Whitehead, A. N.
SHORT DESCRIPTION British mathematician and American philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH February 15, 1861
PLACE OF BIRTH Ramsgate, Kent, UK
DATE OF DEATH December 30, 1947
PLACE OF DEATH Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../a/l/f/Alfred_North_Whitehead_a6bd.html"