Comprehensive information and links about Alfred North Whitehead

Alfred North Whitehead , OM (February 15, 1861 – December 30, 1947) was a British mathematician who evolved into a philosopher. He was born in Ramsgate, Kent, UK, and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. He wrote on algebra, logic, foundations of mathematics, philosophy of science, physics, metaphysics, and education. He is the coauthor, along with Bertrand Russell, of the epochal

Life

For a biography, see Lowe (1985) and Lowe and Schneewind (1990). A complicating factor is that unlike Bertrand Russell, Whitehead left no ; his family carried out his instructions that all of his papers be destroyed after his death.

Whitehead's career is conventionally divided into three phases:

1880-1910. He studied, taught, and wrote mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge University, spending the 1890s writing his (1898) and working on the , 1900-1913. On Whitehead the mathematician and logician, see Grattan-Guiness (2000, 2002), and Quine's chapter in Schilpp (1941), reprinted in Quine (1995). Whitehead left Cambridge just as the first volume of the appeared, to protest the dismissal, because of an adulterous affair, of a Trinity College colleague.1910-24. This period 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 is best known for a theory of gravity that differed from Einstein's general relativity. From the outset, Whitehead's theory received less attention than Einstein's, and was generally discredited by 1972, by a comparison of experimental and predicted variability of the gravitational constant 1924-47. In 1924, he accepted an offer of a Harvard University professorship in philosophy, a subject he had never taught before. The offer had been instigated by a Boston businessman who partly endowed the position. Whitehead was asked to give the 1927 Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, which resulted in his (1929), , the book that founded process philosophy and is a major contribution to modern metaphysics. For a remarkable picture of Whitehead the aged sage holding court in his Cambridge MA apartment, see Price (1954). is its philosophical use of mereological and topological notions. Bowman Clarke argued in the 1980s that this part of Whitehead's thinking was badly flawed, and showed how it could be repaired. Simons (1987) contains an accessible review of Clarke's work.

Another feature of is its argument in favor of a God of sorts, although it is debatable whether Whitehead's God is the God of revealed monotheism. Thus process philosophy gave rise to process theology, thanks to the theologianphilosophers Charles 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. Moreover, Whitehead's rejection of mind- dualism is similar to elements in faith traditions such as Buddhism.

Whitehead's political views were, roughly, libertarian 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."

Whitehead married Evelyn Wade, by whom he had a daughter and two sons. One died in action while serving in the Royal Air Force during WWI.

. Oxford University Press. 1990 paperback, ISBN 0195002113. (HTML at headmap.org) (This work was included into volume 56 of the . Cambridge Uni. Press. 2004 paperback, Prometheus Books, ISBN 1591022142. Being the Tarner Lectures delivered at Trinity College in November 1919 on the philosophy of science.. 1974, New American Library, ISBN 0452007232. 1996 hardcover, with introduction by Judith A. Jones, Fordham University Press, ISBN 0823216454; paperback, ISBN 0823216462.. 1979 corrected edition, edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, Free Press, ISBN 0029345707., 2nded., Paul Schlipp ed., New York, Tudor Publishing Company 1951. (Other references to this writing read:, with Introduction by Sir Ross David. 1977 Greenwood Press Reprint, ISBN 0837193419. 2001 paperback with Forward by Caldwell Titcomb, David R. Godine Publisher, ISBN 1-56792-129-9.Grattan-Guiness, Ivor, 2002, "Algebras, Projective Geometry, Mathematical Logic, and Constructing the World: Intersections in the Philosophy of Mathematics of A. N. Whitehead," . Van Nostrand. 2001, Dover reprint. By a mathematician. The final chapter is a lucid introduction to some of the ideas in Whitehead (1922, 1925b, 1929).