Alfred North Whitehead

1861-1947 · British (later American) · Metaphysics, Cosmology, Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Education, Mathematical Logic

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.

For sixty-three years Alfred North Whitehead was a mathematician. At Cambridge he co-wrote, with his student Bertrand Russell, the three-volume Principia Mathematica, the most ambitious attempt of its age to derive all mathematics from pure logic. Then, in 1924, he crossed the Atlantic to take up a chair at Harvard and did something almost unheard of: he became, late in life, a builder of metaphysical systems. From that final phase came Process and Reality, his strange and demanding cosmology.

Topics Alfred North Whitehead addresses

• actual entities and actual occasions
• concrescence
• prehensions
• creativity
• eternal objects
• satisfaction
• objective immortality
• the categoreal scheme
• physical and conceptual feelings
• the ontological principle
• nexus and societies
• the dipolar God
• the primordial nature of God
• the consequent nature of God
• ingression
• the phases of concrescence
• the categoreal obligations
• causal efficacy
• presentational immediacy
• symbolic reference
• the fallacy of misplaced concreteness
• the bifurcation of nature
• the reformed subjectivist principle
• positive and negative prehensions

Converse with Alfred North Whitehead on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Alfred North Whitehead's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.