A. N. Whitehead

A. N. Whitehead (1861-1947), British mathematician and metaphysician, generally recognized as one of the greatest 20th-century philosophers. Born in Ramsgate, Kent, on February 15, 1861, Alfred North Whitehead was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he taught mathematics from 1885 to 1911. He taught applied mathematics and mechanics at the University of London from 1911 to 1924 and was Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University from 1924 to 1936. He was professor emeritus at Harvard until his death on December 30, 1947, and was also a fellow of the Royal Society and a member of the British Academy.

A brilliant mathematician who made lasting contributions in the field of theoretical mathematics, Whitehead also had a deep knowledge of philosophy and literature, and this background led him to the study of the foundations of mathematics and the philosophy of science and to the development of symbolic logic. He collaborated with his Cambridge pupil, the British mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell, to write the three-volume Principia Mathematica (1910-1913), one of the world's greatest works on logic and mathematics.

Opposed to the concepts of scientific materialism, Whitehead developed, early in the 20th century, his “method of extensive abstraction”, by which he endeavoured to explore and explain fundamental natural concepts in scientific terms and thereby to formulate a philosophy of natural science. To accomplish this, he examined concepts that, although acceptable to the pure scientist as unexplained hypotheses, had to be explained and verified through his method of philosophical analysis. This method was based on the reality of the perception of objects and the relations between objects. He wrote two books on the philosophy of natural science, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919) and The Concept of Nature (1920).

In his later work Whitehead turned to more specific, heterogeneous philosophy, including metaphysics, religion, and the principles of knowledge. His concepts of knowledge created a revolution in epistemology. In this period he wrote Science and the Modern World (1925), Religion in the Making (1926), Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (1927), Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929), The Function of Reason (1929), Adventures of Ideas (1933), and Modes of Thought (1938). He also wrote A Treatise on Universal Algebra (1898), The Principle of Relativity (1922), and An Introduction to Mathematics (1911) for the general reader.