In his early career Whitehead wrote primarily onmathematics,logic, andphysics. He wrote the three-volumePrincipia Mathematica (1910–1913), with his former studentBertrand Russell.Principia Mathematica is considered one of the twentieth century's most important works inmathematical logic, and placed 23rd in a list of the top 100 English-language nonfiction books of the twentieth century byModern Library.[3]
Beginning in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Whitehead gradually turned his attention from mathematics tophilosophy of science, and finally tometaphysics. He developed a comprehensive metaphysical system which radically departed from most ofWestern philosophy. Whitehead argued thatreality consists ofprocesses rather than material objects, and that processes are best defined by their relations with other processes, thus rejecting the theory that reality is fundamentally constructed by bits of matter that exist independently of one another.[4] Whitehead's philosophical works – particularlyProcess and Reality – are regarded as the foundational texts of process philosophy.
Whitehead's process philosophy argues that "there is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have consequences for the world around us."[4] For this reason, one of the most promising applications of Whitehead's thought in the 21st century has been in the area ofecological civilization andenvironmental ethics pioneered byJohn B. Cobb.[5][6]
Whewell's Court north range atTrinity College,Cambridge. Whitehead spent thirty years at Trinity, five as a student and twenty-five as a senior lecturer.
Alfred North Whitehead was born inRamsgate,Kent, England, in 1861.[7] His father, Alfred Whitehead, became an Anglican minister after being headmaster ofChatham House Academy, a school for boys previously headed by Alfred's father, Thomas Whitehead.[8] Whitehead himself recalled both of them as being very successful schoolmasters, with his grandfather being the more "remarkable" man.[8]
Whitehead's mother was Maria Sarah Buckmaster. Her maternal great-grandmother was Jane North (1776–1847), whose maiden surname was given to Whitehead, and several other members of his family over time. His mother, Maria Buckmaster had eleven siblings. The son of her brother Thomas,Walter Selby Buckmaster, was twice an Olympics silver medal winner for Polo (1900, 1908) for Britain, and is said to be "one of the finest polo players England has ever produced".[9] Whitehead does not appear to have been close to his mother, although he and Evelyn (full name: Evelyn Ada Maud Rice Willoughby Wade), whom he married in 1890, are recorded in the English Census of 1891 as living with Alfred's mother and father. Lowe notes that there appears to have been mutual dislike between Whitehead's wife, Evelyn, and his mother, Maria.
Griffin relates how Bertrand Russell, a colleague and collaborator of Whitehead, was a very close friend of Whitehead and of his wife, Evelyn. Griffin retells Russell's story of how, one evening in 1901, "they found Evelyn Whitehead in the middle of what appeared to be a dangerous and acutely painful angina attack. ... [but] It seems that she suffered from a psychosomatic disorder ... [and] the danger was illusory." Griffin posits that Russell exaggerated the drama of her illness, and that both Evelyn and Russell were habitually given to melodrama.[10] Intensity of emotion was encouraged by their avant-garde associates in the turbulentBloomsbury Group which "discussed aesthetic and philosophical questions in a spirit of agnosticism and were strongly influenced byG.E. Moore'sPrincipia Ethica (1903) and by A. N. Whitehead's and Bertrand Russell'sPrincipia Mathematica (1910–13), in the light of which they searched for definitions of the good, the true, and the beautiful".[11]
Alfred's brotherHenry becameBishop of Madras and wrote the closely observed ethnographic accountVillage Gods of South-India (Calcutta: Association Press, 1921).
Bertrand Russell in 1907. Russell was a student of Whitehead's at Trinity College, and a longtime collaborator and friend.
In 1910, Whitehead resigned his senior lectureship in mathematics at Trinity and moved to London without first obtaining another job.[19] After being unemployed for a year, he accepted a position as lecturer in applied mathematics and mechanics atUniversity College London but was passed over a year later for the Goldsmid Chair of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics, a position for which he had hoped to be seriously considered.[20]
In 1914, Whitehead accepted a position as professor of applied mathematics at the newly charteredImperial College London, where his old friendAndrew Forsyth had recently been appointed chief professor of mathematics.[21]
In 1918, Whitehead's academic responsibilities began to seriously expand as he accepted a number of high administrative positions within theUniversity of London system, of which Imperial College London was a member at the time. He was elected dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of London in late 1918 (a post he held for four years), a member of the University of London's Senate in 1919, and chairman of the Senate's Academic (leadership) Council in 1920, a post which he held until he departed for America in 1924.[21] Whitehead was able to exert his newfound influence to successfully lobby for a newhistory of science department, help establish a Bachelor of Science degree (previously only Bachelor of Arts degrees had been offered), and make the school more accessible to less wealthy students.[22]
Toward the end of his time in England, Whitehead turned his attention tophilosophy. Though he had no advanced training in philosophy, his philosophical work soon became highly regarded. After publishingThe Concept of Nature in 1920, he served as president of theAristotelian Society from 1922 to 1923.[23]
In 1924,Henry Osborn Taylor invited the 63-year-old Whitehead to join the faculty atHarvard University as a professor of philosophy.[24] The Whiteheads would spend the rest of their lives in the United States.
In 1890, Whitehead married Evelyn Wade, an Irishwoman raised in France; they had a daughter, Jessie, and two sons,Thomas and Eric.[14] Thomas followed his father to Harvard in 1931, to teach at theBusiness School. Eric died in action at the age of 19, while serving in theRoyal Flying Corps during World War I.[28]
The Whiteheads remained in the United States after moving to Harvard in 1924. Alfred retired from Harvard in 1937 and remained inCambridge, Massachusetts, until his death on 30 December 1947.[31]
The two-volume biography of Whitehead by Victor Lowe[32] is the most definitive presentation of the life of Whitehead. However, many details of Whitehead's life remain obscure because he left noNachlass (personal archive); his family carried out his instructions that all of his papers be destroyed after his death.[33] Additionally, Whitehead was known for his "almost fanatical belief in the right to privacy," and for writing very few personal letters of the kind that would help to gain insight on his life.[33] Wrote Lowe in his preface, "No professional biographer in his right mind would touch him."[7]
Led by Executive Editor Brian G. Henning and General Editor George R. Lucas Jr., theWhitehead Research Project of theCenter for Process Studies is currently working on a critical edition of Whitehead's published and unpublished works.[34] The first volume of theEdinburgh Critical Edition of the Complete Works of Alfred North Whitehead was published in 2017 by Paul A. Bogaard and Jason Bell asThe Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead, 1924–1925: The Philosophical Presuppositions of Science.[35]
In addition to numerous articles on mathematics, Whitehead wrote three major books on the subject:A Treatise on Universal Algebra (1898),Principia Mathematica (co-written withBertrand Russell and published in three volumes between 1910 and 1913), andAn Introduction to Mathematics (1911). The former two books were aimed exclusively at professionalmathematicians, while the latter book was intended for a larger audience, covering thehistory of mathematics and itsphilosophical foundations.[36]Principia Mathematica in particular is regarded as one of the most important works in mathematical logic of the 20th century.
In addition to his legacy as a co-writer ofPrincipia Mathematica, Whitehead's theory of "extensive abstraction" is considered foundational for the branch ofontology andcomputer science known as "mereotopology," a theory describingspatial relations among wholes, parts, parts of parts, and theboundaries between parts.[37]
At the time, structures such asLie algebras andhyperbolic quaternions drew attention to the need to expand algebraic structures beyond the associatively multiplicative class. In a reviewAlexander Macfarlane wrote: "The main idea of the work is not unification of the several methods, nor generalization of ordinary algebra so as to include them, but rather the comparative study of their several structures."[40] In a separate review,G. B. Mathews wrote, "It possesses a unity of design which is really remarkable, considering the variety of its themes."[41]
A Treatise on Universal Algebra sought to examineHermann Grassmann's theory of extension ("Ausdehnungslehre"),Boole's algebra of logic, and Hamilton'squaternions (this last number system was to be taken up in Volume II, which was never finished due to Whitehead's work onPrincipia Mathematica).[42] Whitehead wrote in the preface:
Such algebras have an intrinsic value for separate detailed study; also they are worthy of comparative study, for the sake of the light thereby thrown on the general theory of symbolic reasoning, and on algebraic symbolism in particular... The idea of a generalized conception of space has been made prominent, in the belief that the properties and operations involved in it can be made to form a uniform method of interpretation of the various algebras.[43]
Whitehead, however, had no results of a general nature.[38] His hope of "form[ing] a uniform method of interpretation of the various algebras" presumably would have been developed in Volume II, had Whitehead completed it. Further work on the subject was minimal until the early 1930s whenGarrett Birkhoff andØystein Ore began publishing on universal algebras.[44]
The title page of the shortened version of thePrincipia Mathematica to *56
Principia Mathematica (1910–1913) is Whitehead's most famous mathematical work. Written with former studentBertrand Russell,Principia Mathematica is considered one of the twentieth century's most important works in mathematics, and placed 23rd in a list of the top 100 English-language nonfiction books of the twentieth century byModern Library.[3]
Principia Mathematica's purpose was to describe a set ofaxioms andinference rules insymbolic logic from which all mathematical truths could in principle be proven. Whitehead and Russell were working on such a foundational level ofmathematics andlogic that it took them until page 86 of Volume II to prove that 1+1=2, aproof humorously accompanied by the comment, "The above proposition is occasionally useful."[45]
Whitehead and Russell had thought originally thatPrincipia Mathematica would take a year to complete; it ended up taking them ten years.[46] When it came time for publication, the three-volume work was so long (more than 2,000 pages) and its audience so narrow (professional mathematicians) that it was initially published at a loss of 600 pounds, 300 of which was paid byCambridge University Press, 200 by theRoyal Society of London, and 50 apiece by Whitehead and Russell themselves.[46] Despite the initial loss, today there is likely no majoracademic library in the world which does not hold a copy ofPrincipia Mathematica.[47]
The ultimate substantive legacy ofPrincipia Mathematica is mixed. It is generally accepted thatKurt Gödel'sincompleteness theorem of 1931 definitively demonstrated that for any set of axioms and inference rules proposed to encapsulate mathematics, there would in fact be some truths of mathematics which could not be deduced from them, and hence thatPrincipia Mathematica could never achieve its aims.[48] However, Gödel could not have come to this conclusion without Whitehead and Russell's book. In this way,Principia Mathematica's legacy might be described as its key role in disproving the possibility of achieving its own stated goals.[49] But beyond this somewhat ironic legacy, the book popularized modern mathematical logic and drew important connections between logic,epistemology, andmetaphysics.[50]
Unlike Whitehead's previous two books on mathematics,An Introduction to Mathematics (1911) was not aimed exclusively at professional mathematicians but was intended for a larger audience. The book covered the nature of mathematics, its unity and internal structure, and its applicability to nature.[36] Whitehead wrote in the opening chapter:
The object of the following Chapters is not to teach mathematics, but to enable students from the very beginning of their course to know what the science is about, and why it is necessarily the foundation of exact thought as applied to natural phenomena.[51]
The book can be seen as an attempt to understand the growth in unity and interconnection of mathematics as a whole, as well as an examination of the mutual influence of mathematics and philosophy, language, and physics.[52] Although the book is little-read, in some ways it prefigures certain points of Whitehead's later work in philosophy andmetaphysics.[53]
Whitehead showed a deep concern foreducational reform at all levels. In addition to his numerous individually written works on the subject, Whitehead was appointed by Britain'sPrime MinisterDavid Lloyd George as part of a 20-person committee to investigate the educational systems and practices of the UK in 1921 and recommend reform.[54]
Whitehead's most complete work on education is the 1929 bookThe Aims of Education and Other Essays, which collected numerous essays and addresses by Whitehead on the subject published between 1912 and 1927. The essay from whichAims of Education derived its name was delivered as an address in 1916 when Whitehead was president of the London Branch of theMathematical Association. In it, he cautioned against the teaching of what he called "inert ideas" – ideas that are disconnected scraps of information, with no application to real life or culture. He opined that "education with inert ideas is not only useless: it is, above all things, harmful."[55]
Rather than teach small parts of a large number of subjects, Whitehead advocated teaching a relatively few important concepts that the student could organically link to many different areas of knowledge, discovering their application in actual life.[56] For Whitehead, education should be the exact opposite of themultidisciplinary, value-free school model[55][57] – it should betransdisciplinary, and laden with values and general principles that provide students with a bedrock of wisdom and help them to make connections between areas of knowledge that are usually regarded as separate.
In order to make this sort of teaching a reality, however, Whitehead pointed to the need to minimize the importance of (or radically alter)standard examinations for school entrance. Whitehead writes:
Every school is bound on pain of extinction to train its boys for a small set of definite examinations. No headmaster has a free hand to develop his general education or his specialist studies in accordance with the opportunities of his school, which are created by its staff, its environment, its class of boys, and its endowments. I suggest that no system of external tests which aims primarily at examining individual scholars can result in anything but educational waste.[58]
Whitehead argued that curriculum should be developed specifically for its own students by its own staff, or else risk total stagnation, interrupted only by occasional movements from one group of inert ideas to another.
Above all else in his educational writings, Whitehead emphasized the importance ofimagination and the free play of ideas. In his essay "Universities and Their Function", Whitehead writes provocatively on imagination:
Imagination is not to be divorced from the facts: it is a way of illuminating the facts. It works by eliciting the general principles which apply to the facts, as they exist, and then by an intellectual survey of alternative possibilities which are consistent with those principles. It enables men to construct an intellectual vision of a new world.[59]
Whitehead's philosophy of education might adequately be summarized in his statement that "knowledge does not keep any better than fish".[60] In other words, bits of disconnected knowledge are meaningless; all knowledge must find some imaginative application to the students' own lives, or else it becomes useless trivia, and the students themselves become good at parroting facts but not thinking for themselves.
Richard Rummell's 1906 watercolor landscape view ofHarvard University, facing northeast.[61] Whitehead taught at Harvard from 1924 to 1937.
Whitehead did not begin his career as aphilosopher.[7] In fact, he never had any formal training in philosophy beyond hisundergraduate education. Early in his life, he showed great interest in and respect for philosophy andmetaphysics, but it is evident that he considered himself a rank amateur. In one letter to his friend and former studentBertrand Russell, after discussing whether science aimed to be explanatory or merely descriptive, he wrote: "This further question lands us in the ocean of metaphysic, onto which my profound ignorance of that science forbids me to enter."[62] Ironically, in later life, Whitehead would become one of the 20th century's foremostmetaphysicians.
However, interest in metaphysics – the philosophical investigation of the nature of the universe and existence – had become unfashionable by the time Whitehead began writing in earnest about it in the 1920s. The ever-more impressive accomplishments ofempirical science had led to a general consensus in academia that the development of comprehensive metaphysical systems was a waste of time because they were not subject toempirical testing.[63]
Whitehead was unimpressed by this objection. In the notes of one of his students for a 1927 class, Whitehead was quoted as saying: "Every scientific man in order to preserve his reputation has to say he dislikes metaphysics. What he means is he dislikes having his metaphysics criticized."[64] In Whitehead's view, scientists and philosophers make metaphysical assumptions about how the universe works all the time, but such assumptions are not easily seen precisely because they remain unexamined and unquestioned. While Whitehead acknowledged that "philosophers can never hope finally to formulate these metaphysicalfirst principles",[65] he argued that people need to continually reimagine their basic assumptions about how the universe works if philosophy and science are to make any real progress, even if that progress remains permanentlyasymptotic. For this reason, Whitehead regarded metaphysical investigations as essential to both good science and good philosophy.[66]
Perhaps foremost among what Whitehead considered faulty metaphysical assumptions was theCartesian idea that reality is fundamentally constructed of bits of matter that exist totally independently of one another, which he rejected in favour of anevent-based or "process"ontology in which events are primary and are fundamentally interrelated and dependent on one another.[67] He also argued that the most basic elements of reality can all be regarded as experiential, indeed that everything is constituted by itsexperience. He used the term "experience" very broadly so that even inanimate processes such as electron collisions are said to manifest some degree of experience. In this, he went against Descartes' separation of two different kinds of real existence, either exclusively material or else exclusively mental.[68] Whitehead referred to his metaphysical system as the "philosophy of organism," but it would become known more widely as "process philosophy."[68]
Whitehead's philosophy was highly original, and soon garnered interest in philosophical circles. After publishingThe Concept of Nature in 1920, he served as president of theAristotelian Society from 1922 to 1923, andHenri Bergson was quoted as saying that Whitehead was "the best philosopher writing in English."[69] So impressive and different was Whitehead's philosophy that in 1924 he was invited to join the faculty atHarvard University as a professor of philosophy at 63 years of age.[24]
This is not to say that Whitehead's thought was widely accepted or even well understood. His philosophical work is generally considered to be among the most difficult to understand in all of theWestern canon.[5] Even professional philosophers struggled to follow Whitehead's writings. One famous story illustrating the level of difficulty of Whitehead's philosophy centres around the delivery of Whitehead'sGifford lectures in 1927–28 – followingArthur Eddington's lectures of the year previous – which Whitehead would later publish asProcess and Reality:
Eddington was a marvellous popular lecturer who had enthralled an audience of 600 for his entire course. The same audience turned up to Whitehead's first lecture but it was completely unintelligible, not merely to the world at large but to the elect. My father remarked to me afterwards that if he had not known Whitehead well he would have suspected that it was an imposter making it up as he went along... The audience at subsequent lectures was only about half a dozen in all.[71]
It may not be inappropriate to speculate that some fair portion of the respect generally shown to Whitehead by his philosophical peers at the time arose from their sheer bafflement. The ChicagotheologianShailer Mathews once remarked of Whitehead's 1926 bookReligion in the Making: "It is infuriating, and I must say embarrassing as well, to read page after page of relatively familiar words without understanding a single sentence."[72]
However, Mathews' frustration with Whitehead's books did not negatively affect his interest. In fact, there were numerous philosophers and theologians at Chicago's Divinity School who perceived the importance of what Whitehead was doing without fully grasping all of the details and implications. In 1927, they invited one of America's only Whitehead experts,Henry Nelson Wieman, to Chicago to give a lecture explaining Whitehead's thoughts.[72] Wieman's lecture was so brilliant that he was promptly hired to the faculty and taught there for twenty years, and for at least thirty years afterwards Chicago's Divinity School was closely associated with Whitehead's thought.[70]
Shortly after Whitehead's bookProcess and Reality appeared in 1929, Wieman famously wrote in his 1930 review:
Not many people will read Whitehead's recent book in this generation; not many will read it in any generation. But its influence will radiate through concentric circles of popularization until the common man will think and work in the light of it, not knowing whence the light came. After a few decades of discussion and analysis, one will be able to understand it more readily than can now be done.[73]
Wieman's words proved prophetic. ThoughProcess and Reality has been called "arguably the most impressive single metaphysical text of the twentieth century,"[74] it has been little-read and little-understood, partly because it demands – as Isabelle Stengers puts it – "that its readers accept the adventure of the questions that will separate them from every consensus."[75] Whitehead questioned Western philosophy's most dearly held assumptions about how the universe works – but in doing so, he managed to anticipate a number of 21st century scientific and philosophical problems and provide novel solutions.[76]
Whitehead was convinced that the scientific notion ofmatter was misleading as a way of describing the ultimate nature of things. In his 1925 bookScience and the Modern World, he wrote that:
There persists ... [a] fixed scientificcosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brutematter, or material, spread through space in a flux of configurations. In itself, such a material is senseless, valueless, purposeless. It just does what it does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of its being. It is this assumption that I call "scientific materialism." Also, it is an assumption which I shall challenge as being entirely unsuited to the scientific situation at which we have now arrived.[67]
In Whitehead's view, there are a number of problems with this notion of "irreducible brute matter". First, it obscures and minimizes the importance of change. By thinking of any material thing (like a rock, or a person) as being fundamentally thesame thing throughout time, with any changes to it being secondary to its "nature", scientific materialism hides the fact that nothing ever stays the same. For Whitehead, change is fundamental and inescapable; he emphasizes that "all things flow".[77]
In Whitehead's view, then, concepts such as "quality", "matter", and "form" are problematic. These "classical" concepts fail to adequately account for change, and overlook the active and experiential nature of the most basic elements of the world. They are usefulabstractions but are not the world's basic building blocks.[78] What is ordinarily conceived of as a single person, for instance, is philosophically described as a continuum of overlappingevents.[79] After all, people change all the time, if only because they have aged by another second and had some further experience. These occasions of experience are logically distinct but are progressively connected in what Whitehead calls a "society" of events.[80] By assuming that enduring objects are the most real and fundamental things in the universe, materialists have mistaken the abstract for theconcrete (what Whitehead calls the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness").[68][81]
To put it another way, a thing or person is often seen as having a "definingessence" or a "coreidentity" that is unchanging, and describes what the thing or personreally is. In this way of thinking, things and people are seen as fundamentally the same through time, with any changes being qualitative and secondary to their core identity (e.g., "Mark's hair has turned grey as he has gotten older, but he is still the same person"). But in Whitehead's cosmology, the only fundamentally existent things are discrete "occasions of experience" that overlap one another in time and space, and jointly make up the enduring person or thing. On the other hand, what ordinary thinking often regards as "the essence of a thing" or "the identity/core of a person" is an abstract generalization of what is regarded as that person or thing's most important or salient features across time. Identities do not define people; people define identities. Everything changes from moment to moment and to think of anything as having an "enduring essence" misses the fact that "all things flow," though it is often a useful way of speaking.
Whitehead pointed to the limitations of language as one of the main culprits in maintaining a materialistic way of thinking and acknowledged that it may be difficult to ever wholly move past such ideas in everyday speech.[82] After all, every moment of each person's life can hardly be given a different proper name, and it is easy and convenient to think of people and objects as remaining fundamentally the same things, rather than constantly keeping in mind that each thing is a different thing from what it was a moment ago. Yet the limitations of everyday living and everyday speech should not prevent people from realizing that "material substances" or "essences" are a convenient generalized description of a continuum of particular, concrete processes. No one questions that a ten-year-old person is quite different by the time he or she turns thirty years old, and in many ways is not the same person at all; Whitehead points out that it is not philosophically orontologically sound to think that a person is the same from one second to the next.
A second problem with materialism is that it obscures the importance ofrelations. It sees every object as distinct and discrete from all other objects. Each object is simply an inert clump of matter that is onlyexternally related to other things. The idea of matter as primary makes people think of objects as being fundamentally separate in time and space, and not necessarily related to anything. But in Whitehead's view, relations take a primary role, perhaps even more important than the relata themselves.[84] A student taking notes in one of Whitehead's fall 1924 classes wrote that, "Reality applies toconnections, and only relatively to the things connected. (A) is real for (B), and (B) is real for (A), but [they are] not absolutely real independent of each other."[85] In fact, Whitehead describes any entity as in some sense nothing more and nothing less than the sum of its relations to other entities – itssynthesis of andreaction to the world around it.[86] A real thing is just that which forces the rest of theuniverse to in some way conform to it; that is to say, if theoretically, a thing made strictly no difference to any other entity (i.e., it was notrelated to any other entity), it could not be said to really exist.[87] Relations are not secondary to what a thing is; theyare what the thing is.
To Whitehead, an entity is notmerely a sum of its relations, but also a valuation of them and reaction to them.[88] For Whitehead,creativity is the absolute principle of existence, and every entity (whether it is a human being, a tree, or anelectron) has some degree of novelty in how it responds to other entities and is not fully determined bycausal ormechanistic laws.[89] Most entities do not haveconsciousness.[90] As a human being's actions cannot always be predicted, the same can be said of where a tree's roots will grow, or how an electron will move, or whether it will rain tomorrow. Moreover, the inability to predict an electron's movement (for instance) is not due to faulty understanding or inadequate technology; rather, the fundamental creativity/freedom of all entities means that there will always remain phenomena that are unpredictable.[91]
The other side of creativity/freedom as the absolute principle is that every entity is constrained by the social structure of existence (i.e., its relations); each actual entity must conform to the settled conditions of the world around it.[87] Freedom always exists within limits. But an entity's uniqueness and individuality arise from its own self-determination as to just how it will take account of the world within the limits that have been set for it.[92]
In summary, Whitehead rejects the idea of separate and unchanging bits of matter as the most basic building blocks of reality, in favour of the idea of reality as interrelated events in the process. He conceives of reality as composed of processes of dynamic "becoming" rather than static "being", emphasizing that all physical things change and evolve and that changeless "essences" such as matter are mere abstractions from the interrelated events that are the final real things that make up the world.[68]
Since Whitehead'smetaphysics described a universe in which all entitiesexperience, he needed a new way of describingperception that was not limited to living,self-conscious beings. The term he coined was "prehension," which comes from the Latinprehensio, meaning "to seize".[93] The term is meant to indicate a kind of perception that can be conscious or unconscious, applying to people as well aselectrons. It is also intended to make clear Whitehead's rejection of the theory ofrepresentative perception, in which themind only has private ideas about other entities.[93] For Whitehead, the term "prehension" indicates that the perceiver actually incorporates aspects of the perceived thing into itself.[93] In this way, entities are constituted by their perceptions and relations, rather than being independent of them. Further, Whitehead regards perception as occurring in two modes,causal efficacy (or "physical prehension") andpresentational immediacy (or "conceptual prehension").[90]
Whitehead describes causal efficacy as "the experience dominating the primitive living organisms, which have a sense for the fate from which they have emerged, and the fate towards which they go."[94] It is, in other words, the sense ofcausal relations between entities, a feeling of being influenced and affected by the surrounding environment, unmediated by thesenses. Presentational immediacy, on the other hand, is what is usually referred to as "pure sense perception", unmediated by any causal orsymbolicinterpretation, evenunconscious interpretation. In other words, it is pure appearance, which may or may not be delusive (e.g., mistaking an image in a mirror for "the real thing").[95]
In higher organisms (like people), these two modes of perception combine into what Whitehead terms "symbolic reference", which links appearance with causation in a process that is so automatic that both people and animals have difficulty refraining from it. By way of illustration, Whitehead uses the example of a person's encounter with a chair. An ordinary person looks up, sees a coloured shape, and immediately infers that it is a chair. However, an artist, Whitehead supposes, "might not have jumped to the notion of a chair", but instead "might have stopped at the mere contemplation of a beautiful colour and a beautiful shape."[96] This is not the normal human reaction; most people place objects in categories by habit and instinct, without even thinking about it. Moreover, animals do the same thing. Using the same example, Whitehead points out that a dog "would have acted immediately on the hypothesis of a chair and would have jumped onto it by way of using it as such."[97] In this way, symbolic reference is a fusion of pure sense perceptions on the one hand and causal relations on the other, and it is in fact the causal relationships that dominate the more basic mentality (as the dog illustrates), while it is the sense perceptions which indicate a higher grade mentality (as the artist illustrates).[98]
Whitehead believed that when asking questions about the basic facts of existence, questions aboutvalue and purpose can never be fully escaped. This is borne out in his thoughts onabiogenesis, or the hypothetical natural process by which life arises from simple organic compounds.
Whitehead makes the startling observation that "life is comparatively deficient in survival value."[99] If humans can only exist for about a hundred years, and rocks for eight hundred million, then one is forced to ask why complex organisms ever evolved in the first place; as Whitehead humorously notes, "they certainly did not appear because they were better at that game than the rocks around them."[100] He then observes that the mark of higher forms of life is that they are actively engaged in modifying their environment, an activity which he theorizes is directed toward the three-fold goal of living, living well, and living better.[101] In other words, Whitehead sees life as directed toward the purpose of increasing its own satisfaction. Without such a goal, he sees the rise of life as totally unintelligible.
For Whitehead, there is no such thing as wholly inertmatter. Instead, all things have some measure of freedom orcreativity, however small, which allows them to be at least partly self-directed. Theprocess philosopherDavid Ray Griffin coined the term "panexperientialism" (the idea that all entities experience) to describe Whitehead's view, and to distinguish it frompanpsychism (the idea that all matter hasconsciousness).[102]
Whitehead's idea ofGod differs from traditional monotheistic notions.[104] Perhaps his most famous and pointedcriticism of the Christian conception of God is that "the Church gave unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively toCaesar."[105] Here, Whitehead is criticizing Christianity for definingGod as primarily a divine king who imposes his will on the world, and whose most important attribute is power. As opposed to the most widely accepted forms of Christianity, Whitehead emphasized an idea of God that he called "the brief Galilean vision of humility":
It does not emphasize the ruling Caesar, or the ruthless moralist, or the unmoved mover. It dwells upon the tender elements in the world, which slowly and in quietness operates by love; and it finds purpose in the present immediacy of a kingdom not of this world. Love neither rules, nor is it unmoved; also it is a little oblivious as tomorals. It does not look to the future; for it finds its own reward in the immediate present.[106]
For Whitehead, God is not necessarily tied toreligion.[107] Rather than springing primarily from religiousfaith, Whitehead saw God as necessary for hismetaphysical system.[107] His system required that an order exist among possibilities, an order that allowed for novelty in the world and provided an aim to all entities. Whitehead posited that these ordered potentials exist in what he called theprimordial nature of God. However, Whitehead was also interested inreligious experience. This led him to reflect more intensively on what he saw as the second nature of God, theconsequent nature. Whitehead's conception of God as a "dipolar"[108] entity has called for freshtheological thinking.
The primordial nature he described as "the unlimited conceptual realization of the absolute wealth of potentiality"[106] – i.e., the unlimited possibility of the universe. This primordial nature iseternal andunchanging, providing entities in the universe with possibilities for realization. Whitehead also calls this primordial aspect "the lure forfeeling, the eternal urge of desire,"[109] pulling the entities in the universe toward as-yet unrealized possibilities.
God's consequent nature, on the other hand, is anything but unchanging; it is God's reception of the world's activity. As Whitehead puts it, "[God] saves the world as it passes into the immediacy of his own life. It is the judgment of a tenderness which loses nothing that can be saved."[110] In other words, God saves and cherishes all experiences forever, and those experiences go on to change the way God interacts with the world. In this way, God is really changed by what happens in the world and the wider universe, lending the actions of finite creatures an eternal significance.
Whitehead thus seesGod and the world as fulfilling one another. He sees entities in the world as fluent and changing things that yearn for a permanence which only God can provide by taking them into God's self, thereafter changing God and affecting the rest of the universe throughout time. On the other hand, he sees God as permanent but as deficient in actuality and change: alone, God is merely eternally unrealized possibilities and requires the world to actualize them. God gives creatures permanence, while the creatures give God actuality and change. Here it is worthwhile to quote Whitehead at length:
"In this way God is completed by the individual, fluent satisfactions of finite fact, and the temporal occasions are completed by their everlasting union with their transformed selves, purged into conformation with the eternal order which is the final absolute 'wisdom.' The final summary can only be expressed in terms of a group ofantitheses, whose apparent self-contradictions depend on neglect of the diverse categories of existence. In each antithesis there is a shift of meaning which converts the opposition into a contrast.
"It is as true to say that God is permanent and the World fluent, as that the World is permanent and God is fluent.
"It is as true to say that God is one and the World many, as that the World is one and God many.
"It is as true to say that, in comparison with the World, God is actual eminently, as that, in comparison with God, the World is actual eminently.
"It is as true to say that the World isimmanent in God, as that God is immanent in the World.
"It is as true to say that God transcends the World, as that the World transcends God.
"It is as true to say that God creates the World, as that the World creates God...
"What is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven, and the reality in heaven passes back into the world... In this sense, God is the great companion – the fellow-sufferer who understands."[111]
The above is some of Whitehead's most evocative writing about God, and was powerful enough to inspire the movement known asprocess theology, a vibrant theological school of thought that continues to thrive today.[112][113]
For Whitehead, the core of religion was individual. While he acknowledged that individuals cannot ever be fully separated from their society, he argued that life is an internal fact for its own sake before it is an external fact relating to others.[114] His most famous remark on religion is that "religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness ... and if you are never solitary, you are never religious."[115] Whitehead saw religion as a system of general truths that transformed a person'scharacter.[116] He took special care to note that while religion is often a good influence, it is notnecessarily good – an idea which he called a "dangerous delusion" (e.g., a religion might encourage the violent extermination of a rival religion's adherents).[117]
However, while Whitehead saw religion asbeginning in solitariness, he also saw religion as necessarily expanding beyond the individual. In keeping with hisprocess metaphysics in which relations are primary, he wrote that religion necessitates the realization of "the value of the objective world which is a community derivative from the interrelations of its component individuals."[118] In other words, the universe is a community which makes itself whole through the relatedness of each individual entity to all the others; meaning and value do not exist for the individual alone, but only in the context of the universal community. Whitehead writes further that each entity "can find no such value till it has merged its individual claim with that of the objective universe. Religion is world loyalty. The spirit at once surrenders itself to this universal claim and appropriates it for itself."[119] In this way, the individual and universal/social aspects of religion are mutually dependent. A connection between the works ofWilliam DeWitt Hyde and Whitehead further elucidates this necessary duality of social and individual roles in religious experience.[120]Whitehead also described religion more technically as "an ultimate craving to infuse into the insistent particularity ofemotion that non-temporal generality which primarily belongs to conceptual thought alone."[121] In other words, religion takes deeply felt emotions and contextualizes them within a system of general truths about the world, helping people to identify their wider meaning and significance. For Whitehead, religion served as a kind of bridge between philosophy and the emotions and purposes of a particular society.[122] It is the task of religion to make philosophy applicable to the everyday lives of ordinary people.
Isabelle Stengers wrote that "Whiteheadians are recruited among bothphilosophers and theologians, and the palette has been enriched by practitioners from the most diverse horizons, fromecology tofeminism, practices that unite political struggle andspirituality with thesciences of education."[75] In recent decades, attention to Whitehead's work has become more widespread, with interest extending to intellectuals in Europe and China, and coming from such diverse fields as ecology, physics, biology, education, economics, and psychology. One of the first theologians to attempt to interact with Whitehead's thought was the future Archbishop of Canterbury,William Temple. In Temple'sGifford Lectures of 1932–1934 (subsequently published as "Nature, Man and God"), Whitehead is one of a number of philosophers of theemergent evolution approach with which Temple interacts.[123] However, it was not until the 1970s and 1980s that Whitehead's thought drew much attention outside of a small group of philosophers and theologians, primarily Americans, and even today he is not considered especially influential outside of relatively specialized circles.
But while Claremont remains the most concentrated hub of Whiteheadian activity, the place where Whitehead's thought currently seems to be growing the most quickly is in China. In order to address the challenges ofmodernization andindustrialization, China has begun to blend traditions ofTaoism,Buddhism, andConfucianism with Whitehead's "constructive post-modern" philosophy in order to create an "ecological civilization".[57] To date, the Chinese government has encouraged the building of twenty-three university-based centres for the study of Whitehead's philosophy,[57][128] and books by process philosophers John Cobb and David Ray Griffin are becoming required reading for Chinese graduate students.[57] Cobb has attributed China's interest in process philosophy partly to Whitehead's stress on the mutual interdependence of humanity and nature, as well as his emphasis on an educational system that includes the teaching of values rather than simply bare facts.[57]
Overall, however, Whitehead's influence is very difficult to characterize. In English-speaking countries, his primary works are little-studied outside of Claremont and a select number of liberalgraduate-level theology and philosophy programs. Outside of these circles, his influence is relatively small and diffuse and has tended to come chiefly through the work of his students and admirers rather than Whitehead himself.[129] For instance, Whitehead was a teacher and long-time friend and collaborator ofBertrand Russell, and he also taught and supervised the dissertation ofWillard Van Orman Quine,[130] both of whom are important figures inanalytic philosophy – the dominant strain of philosophy in English-speaking countries in the 20th century.[131] Whitehead has also had high-profile admirers in thecontinental tradition, such as Frenchpost-structuralist philosopherGilles Deleuze, who once dryly remarked of Whitehead that "he stands provisionally as the last great Anglo-American philosopher beforeWittgenstein's disciples spread their misty confusion, sufficiency, and terror."[132] Frenchsociologist andanthropologistBruno Latour even went so far as to call Whitehead "the greatest philosopher of the 20th century."[133]
Deleuze's and Latour's opinions, however, are minority ones, as Whitehead has not been recognized as particularly influential within the most dominant philosophical schools.[134] It is impossible to say exactly why Whitehead's influence has not been more widespread, but it may be partly due to his metaphysical ideas seeming somewhat counterintuitive (such as his assertion thatmatter is anabstraction), or his inclusion oftheistic elements in his philosophy,[135] or the perception of metaphysics itself as passé, or simply the sheer difficulty and density of his prose.[5]
Process theology typically stresses God's relational nature. Rather than seeing God asimpassive or emotionless, process theologians view God as "the fellow sufferer who understands," and as the being who is supremely affected by temporal events.[137] Hartshorne points out that people would not praise a human ruler who was unaffected by either the joys or sorrows of his followers – so why would this be a praiseworthy quality in God?[138] Instead, as the being who is most affected by the world, God is the being who can most appropriately respond to the world. However, process theology has been formulated in a wide variety of ways. C. Robert Mesle, for instance, advocates a "processnaturalism" – i.e., a process theology without God.[139]
In fact, process theology is difficult to define because process theologians are so diverse andtransdisciplinary in their views and interests. John B. Cobb is a process theologian who has also written books on biology and economics. Roland Faber and Catherine Keller integrate Whitehead withpoststructuralist,postcolonialist, andfeminist theory.Charles Birch was both a theologian and ageneticist.Franklin I. Gamwell writes on theology and political theory. InSyntheism – Creating God in The Internet Age, futurologistsAlexander Bard andJan Söderqvist repeatedly credit Whitehead for the process theology they see rising out of theparticipatory culture expected to dominate the digital era.
Process philosophy is even more difficult to pin down than process theology. In practice, the two fields cannot be neatly separated. The 32-volumeState University of New York series in constructive postmodern thought edited by process philosopher and theologianDavid Ray Griffin displays the range of areas in which different process philosophers work, including physics, ecology, medicine, public policy, nonviolence, politics, and psychology.[140]
In physics,Whitehead's theory of gravitation articulated a view that might perhaps be regarded as dual toAlbert Einstein'sgeneral relativity. It has been severely criticized.[144][145] Yutaka Tanaka suggested that thegravitational constant disagrees with experimental findings, and proposed that Einstein's work does not actually refute Whitehead's formulation.[146] Whitehead's view has now been rendered obsolete, with the discovery ofgravitational waves, phenomena observed locally that largely violate the kind of local flatness of space that Whitehead assumes. Consequently, Whitehead's cosmology must be regarded as a local approximation, and his assumption of a uniform spatio-temporal geometry, Minkowskian in particular, as an often-locally-adequate approximation. An exact replacement of Whitehead's cosmology would need to admit a Riemannian geometry. Also, although Whitehead himself gave only secondary consideration toquantum theory, hismetaphysics of processes has proved attractive to some physicists in that field.Henry Stapp andDavid Bohm are among those whose work has been influenced by Whitehead.[142]
In the 21st century, Whiteheadian thought is still a stimulating influence:Timothy E. Eastman and Hank Keeton'sPhysics and Whitehead (2004)[147] and Michael Epperson'sQuantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (2004)[148] andFoundations of Relational Realism: A Topological Approach to Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Nature (2013),[149] aim to offer Whiteheadian approaches tophysics. Brian G. Henning, Adam Scarfe, andDorion Sagan'sBeyond Mechanism (2013) andRupert Sheldrake'sScience Set Free (2012) are examples of Whiteheadian approaches to biology.
"Because Whitehead's holisticmetaphysics of value lends itself so readily to an ecological point of view, many see his work as a promising alternative to the traditionalmechanistic worldview, providing a detailed metaphysical picture of a world constituted by a web of interdependent relations."[5]
This work has been pioneered byJohn B. Cobb, whose bookIs It Too Late? A Theology of Ecology (1971) was the first single-authored book on environmental ethics.[154] Cobb also co-authored a book with leadingecological economist andsteady-state theoristHerman Daly entitledFor the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future (1989), which applied Whitehead's thought toeconomics, and received theGrawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. Cobb followed this with a second book,Sustaining the Common Good: A Christian Perspective on the Global Economy (1994), which aimed to challenge "economists' zealous faith in the great god of growth."[155]
Whitehead is widely known for his influence ineducation theory. His philosophy inspired the formation of the Association for Process Philosophy of Education (APPE), which published eleven volumes of a journal titledProcess Papers onprocess philosophy and education from 1996 to 2008.[156] Whitehead's theories on education also led to the formation of new modes of learning and new models of teaching.
One such model is the ANISA model developed by Daniel C. Jordan, which sought to address a lack of understanding of the nature of people in current education systems. As Jordan and Raymond P. Shepard put it: "Because it has not defined the nature of man, education is in the untenable position of having to devote its energies to the development of curricula without any coherent ideas about the nature of the creature for whom they are intended."[157]
Another model is the FEELS model developed by Xie Bangxiu and deployed successfully in China. "FEELS" stands for five things in curriculum and education: Flexible-goals, Engaged-learner, Embodied-knowledge, Learning-through-interactions, and Supportive-teacher.[158] It is used for understanding and evaluating educational curriculum under the assumption that the purpose of education is to "help a person become whole." This work is in part the product of cooperation between Chinese government organizations and the Institute for the Postmodern Development of China.[57]
Whitehead's philosophy of education has also found institutional support in Canada, where theUniversity of Saskatchewan created a Process Philosophy Research Unit and sponsored several conferences on process philosophy and education.[159] Howard Woodhouse at the University of Saskatchewan remains a strong proponent of Whiteheadian education.[160]
Three recent books which further develop Whitehead's philosophy of education include:Modes of Learning: Whitehead's Metaphysics and the Stages of Education (2012) by George Allan;The Adventure of Education: Process Philosophers on Learning, Teaching, and Research (2009) by Adam Scarfe; and "Educating for an Ecological Civilization: Interdisciplinary, Experiential, and Relational Learning" (2017) edited by Marcus Ford and Stephen Rowe. "Beyond the Modern University: Toward a Constructive Postmodern University," (2002) is another text that explores the importance of Whitehead's metaphysics for thinking about higher education.
Whitehead has had some influence on the philosophy ofbusiness administration andorganizational theory. This has led in part to a focus on identifying and investigating the effect of temporal events (as opposed to static things) within organizations through an "organization studies" discourse that accommodates a variety of 'weak' and 'strong' process perspectives from a number of philosophers.[161] One of the leading figures having an explicitly Whiteheadian andpanexperientialist stance towardsmanagement is Mark Dibben,[162] who works in what he calls "applied process thought" to articulate a philosophy of management and business administration as part of a wider examination of thesocial sciences through the lens ofprocess metaphysics. For Dibben, this allows "a comprehensive exploration of life as perpetually active experiencing, as opposed to occasional – and thoroughly passive – happening."[163] Dibben has published two books on applied process thought,Applied Process Thought I: Initial Explorations in Theory and Research (2008), andApplied Process Thought II: Following a Trail Ablaze (2009), as well as other papers in this vein in the fields of philosophy of management andbusiness ethics.[164]
Margaret Stout and Carrie M. Staton have also written recently on the mutual influence of Whitehead andMary Parker Follett, a pioneer in the fields of organizational theory andorganizational behaviour. Stout and Staton see both Whitehead and Follett as sharing anontology that "understands becoming as a relational process; difference as being related, yet unique; and the purpose of becoming as harmonizing difference."[165] This connection is further analyzed by Stout and Jeannine M. Love inIntegrative Process: Follettian Thinking from Ontology to Administration[166]
Whitehead's political views sometimes appear to belibertarian 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.[167]
On the other hand, many Whitehead scholars read his work as providing a philosophical foundation for the social liberalism of theNew Liberal movement that was prominent throughout Whitehead's adult life. Morris wrote that "... there is good reason for claiming that Whitehead shared the social and political ideals of the new liberals.".[168] However, Whitehead's comment addresses means and methods, not "ideals" or pretexts or excuses.
Religion in the Making. New York: Macmillan Company, 1926. Based on the 1926Lowell Lectures.
Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect. New York: Macmillan Co., 1927. Based on the 1927 Barbour-Page Lectures delivered at the University of Virginia.
Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. New York: Macmillan Company, 1929. Based on the 1927–28Gifford Lectures delivered at the University of Edinburgh. The 1978 Free Press "corrected edition" edited byDavid Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne corrects many errors in both the British and American editions and also provides a comprehensive index.
The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: Macmillan Company, 1929.
The Function of Reason. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1929. Based on the March 1929 Louis Clark Vanuxem Foundation Lectures delivered at Princeton University.
Adventures of Ideas. New York: Macmillan Company, 1933. Also published by Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933.
Nature and Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934.
Modes of Thought. New York: MacMillan Company, 1938.
"Mathematics and the Good." InThe Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, edited byPaul Arthur Schilpp, 666–681. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1941.
"Immortality." InThe Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, edited byPaul Arthur Schilpp, 682–700. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1941.
Essays in Science and Philosophy. London: Philosophical Library, 1947.
with Allison Heartz Johnson, ed.The Wit and Wisdom of Whitehead. Boston: Beacon Press, 1948.
In addition, theWhitehead Research Project of theCenter for Process Studies is currently working on a critical edition of Whitehead's writings, which is set to include notes taken by Whitehead's students during his Harvard classes, correspondence, and corrected editions of his books.[34]
Paul A. Bogaard and Jason Bell, eds.The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead, 1924–1925: Philosophical Presuppositions of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
^Cobb, John B. Jr.; Schwartz, Wm. Andrew (2018).Putting Philosophy to Work: Toward an Ecological Civilization. Process Century Press.ISBN978-1-940447-33-9.
^abcVictor Lowe,Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and his Work, Vol I (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1985), 2.
^abLowe, Victor (1985).Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and his Work, Vol I Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 13.
^Victor Lowe,Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and his Work, Vol I (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1985), 54–60.
^abLowe, Victor (1985).Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and his Work, Vol I. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 63.
^Victor Lowe,Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and his Work, Vol I (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1985), 72.
^Victor Lowe,Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and his Work, Vol I (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1985), 103–109.
^On Whitehead the mathematician and logician, seeIvor Grattan-Guinness,The Search for Mathematical Roots 1870–1940: Logics, Set Theories, and the Foundations of Mathematics from Cantor through Russell to Gödel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), andQuine's chapter inPaul Schilpp,The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1941), 125–163.
^Victor Lowe,Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and his Work, Vol I (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1985), 112.
^Victor Lowe,Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and his Work, Vol II (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1990), 2.
^Victor Lowe,Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and his Work, Vol II (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1990), 6–8.
^abVictor Lowe,Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and his Work, Vol II (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1990), 26–27.
^Victor Lowe,Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and his Work, Vol II (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1990), 72–74.
^Victor Lowe,Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and his Work, Vol II (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1990), 127.
^abVictor Lowe,Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and his Work, Vol II (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1990), 132.
^Victor Lowe,Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and his Work, Vol I (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1985), 3–4.
^"Alfred North Whitehead".American Academy of Arts & Sciences. 9 February 2023. Retrieved11 August 2023.
^Committee To Inquire into the Position of Classics in the Educational System of the United Kingdom,Report of the Committee Appointed by the Prime Minister to Inquire into the Position of Classics in the Educational System of the United Kingdom (London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1921), 1, 282. Available online athttps://archive.org/details/reportofcommitt00grea.
^abAlfred North Whitehead,The Aims of Education and Other Essays (New York: The Free Press, 1967), 1–2.
^Alfred North Whitehead,The Aims of Education and Other Essays (New York: The Free Press, 1967), 2.
^Alfred North Whitehead to Bertrand Russell, 13 February 1895, Bertrand Russell Archives, Archives and Research Collections, McMaster Library, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
^A. J. Ayer,Language, Truth and Logic (New York: Penguin, 1971), 22.
^George P. Conger, "Whitehead lecture notes: Seminary in Logic: Logical and Metaphysical Problems", 1927, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.
^Alfred North Whitehead,Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 4.
^Alfred North Whitehead,Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 11.
^abAlfred North Whitehead,Science and the Modern World (New York: The Free Press, 1967), 17.
^abcdAlfred North Whitehead,Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 18.
^Victor Lowe,Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and his Work, Vol II (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1990), 127, 133.
^abcGary Dorrien,The Making of American Liberal Theology: Crisis, Irony, and Postmodernity, 1950–2005 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 123–124.
^Victor Lowe,Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and his Work, Vol II (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1990), 250.
^abGary Dorrien, "The Lure and Necessity of Process Theology",CrossCurrents 58 (2008): 320.
^Henry Nelson Wieman, "A Philosophy of Religion",The Journal of Religion 10 (1930): 137.
^Peter Simons, "Metaphysical systematics: A lesson from Whitehead",Erkenntnis 48 (1998), 378.
^abIsabelle Stengers,Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2011), 6.
^David Ray Griffin,Whitehead's Radically Different Postmodern Philosophy: An Argument for Its Contemporary Relevance (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), viii–ix.
^Alfred North Whitehead,Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 208.
^Alfred North Whitehead,Science and the Modern World (New York: The Free Press, 1967), 52–55.
^Alfred North Whitehead,Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 34–35.
^Alfred North Whitehead,Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 34.
^Alfred North Whitehead,Science and the Modern World (New York: The Free Press, 1967), 54–55.
^Alfred North Whitehead,Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 183.
^Alfred North Whitehead,Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978), xi.
^Alfred North Whitehead,Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (New York: Fordham University Press, 1985), 38–39.
^Louise R. Heath, "Notes on Whitehead's Philosophy 3b: Philosophical Presuppositions of Science", 27 September 1924, Whitehead Research Project, Center for Process Studies, Claremont, California.
^Alfred North Whitehead,Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (New York: Fordham University Press, 1985), 26.
^abAlfred North Whitehead,Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (New York: Fordham University Press, 1985), 39.
^Alfred North Whitehead,Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 19.
^Alfred North Whitehead,Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 21.
^abAlfred North Whitehead,Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 23.
^Charles Hartshorne, "Freedom Requires Indeterminism and Universal Causality",The Journal of Philosophy 55 (1958): 794.
^John B. Cobb,A Christian Natural Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1978), 52.
^abcDavid Ray Griffin,Reenchantment Without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 79.
^Alfred North Whitehead,Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (New York: Fordham University Press, 1985), 44.
^Alfred North Whitehead,Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (New York: Fordham University Press, 1985), 24.
^Alfred North Whitehead,Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (New York: Fordham University Press, 1985), 3.
^Alfred North Whitehead,Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (New York: Fordham University Press, 1985), 4.
^Alfred North Whitehead,Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (New York: Fordham University Press, 1985), 49.
^Alfred North Whitehead,The Function of Reason (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 4.
^Alfred North Whitehead,The Function of Reason (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 4–5.
^Alfred North Whitehead,The Function of Reason (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 8.
^David Ray Griffin,Reenchantment Without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 97.
^abAlfred North Whitehead,Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978), xii.
^Roland Faber,God as Poet of the World: Exploring Process Theologies (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), chapters 4–5.
^Alfred North Whitehead,Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 342.
^abAlfred North Whitehead,Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 343.
^abAlfred North Whitehead,Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 207.
^Alfred North Whitehead,Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 345.
^Alfred North Whitehead,Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 344.
^Alfred North Whitehead,Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 346.
^Alfred North Whitehead,Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 347–348, 351.
^abBruce G. Epperly,Process Theology: A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: T&T Clark, 2011), 12.
^Roland Faber,God as Poet of the World: Exploring Process Theologies (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), chapter 1.
^Alfred North Whitehead,Religion in the Making (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996), 15–16.
^Alfred North Whitehead,Religion in the Making (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996), 16–17.
^Alfred North Whitehead,Religion in the Making (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996), 15.
^Alfred North Whitehead,Religion in the Making (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996), 18.
^Alfred North Whitehead,Religion in the Making (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996), 59.
^Alfred North Whitehead,Religion in the Making (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996), 60.
^Alfred North Whitehead,Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 16.
^Alfred North Whitehead,Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 15.
^George Garin, "Theistic Evolution in a Sacramental Universe: The Theology of William Temple Against the Background of Process Thinkers (Whitehead, Alexander, Etc.)," (Protestant University Press, Kinshasa, The Congo, 1991).
^Gary Dorrien, "The Lure and Necessity of Process Theology",CrossCurrents 58 (2008): 321–322.
^David Ray Griffin, "John B. Cobb, Jr.: A Theological Biography", inTheology and the University: Essays in Honor of John B. Cobb, Jr., ed. David Ray Griffin and Joseph C. Hough, Jr. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 229.
^Gary Dorrien, "The Lure and Necessity of Process Theology",CrossCurrents 58 (2008): 334.
^abVictor Lowe,Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and his Work, Vol I (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1985), 5.
^"About Us".www.postmodernchina.org. The Institute for the Postmodern Development of China. Archived fromthe original on 2 December 2013. Retrieved21 November 2013.
^John Searle, "Contemporary Philosophy in the United States", in N. Bunnin and E.P. Tsui-James, eds.,The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 1.
^Gilles Deleuze,The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 76.
^Bruno Latour, preface toThinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts, byIsabelle Stengers, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2011), x.
^abSeeDavid Ray Griffin,Physics and the Ultimate Significance of Time (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986).
^Charles Birch, "Why Aren't We Zombies? Neo-Darwinism and Process Thought", inBack to Darwin: A Richer Account of Evolution, ed. John B. Cobb Jr. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008), 252.
^Chandrasekhar, S. (1979). Einstein and general relativity,Am. J. Phys.47: 212–217.
^Will, C.M. (1981/1993).Theory and Experiment in Gravitational Physics, revised edition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK,ISBN978-0-521-43973-2, p. 139.
^Yutaka Tanaka, "The Comparison between Whitehead's and Einstein's Theories of Relativity",Historia Scientiarum 32 (1987).
^Timothy E. Eastman and Hank Keeton, eds.,Physics and Whitehead: Quantum, Process, and Experience (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004).
^Michael Epperson,Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004).
^Michael Epperson & Elias Zafiris,Foundations of Relational Realism: A Topological Approach to Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Nature (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013).
^Roland Faber,God as Poet of the World: Exploring Process Theologies (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 35.
^C. Robert Mesle,Process Theology (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 1993), 126.
^Gary Dorrien, "The Lure and Necessity of Process Theology",CrossCurrents 58 (2008): 316.
^Monica Coleman,Nancy R. Howell, and Helene Tallon Russell,Creating Women's Theology: A Movement Engaging Process Thought (Wipf and Stock, 2011), 13.
^John B. Cobb Jr.,Sustaining the Common Good: A Christian Perspective on the Global Economy (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 1994), back cover.
^SeeProcess Papers, a publication of the Association for Process Philosophy of Education. Volume 1 published in 1996, Volume 11 (final volume) published in 2008.
^Daniel C. Jordan and Raymond P. Shepard, "The Philosophy of the ANISA Model",Process Papers 6, 38–39.
^Mark Dibben, "Exploring the Processual Nature of Trust and Cooperation in Organisations: A Whiteheadian Analysis," inPhilosophy of Management 4 (2004): 25–39; Mark Dibben, "Organisations and Organising: Understanding and Applying Whitehead's Processual Account," inPhilosophy of Management 7 (2009); Cristina Neesham and Mark Dibben, "The Social Value of Business: Lessons from Political Economy and Process Philosophy," inApplied Ethics: Remembering Patrick Primeaux (Research in Ethical Issues in Organizations, Volume 8), ed. Michael Schwartz and Howard Harris (Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2012): 63–83.
^Margaret Stout & Carrie M. Staton, "The Ontology of Process Philosophy in Follett's Administrative Theory"Administrative Theory & Praxis 33 (2011): 268.
^Margaret Stout & Jeannine M. Love,Integrative Process: Follettian Thinking from Ontology to Administration (Anoka, MN: Process Century Press 2015).
^Adventures of Ideas p. 105, 1933 edition; p. 83, 1967 ed.
^Morris, Randall C.,Journal of the History of Ideas 51: 75–92. p. 92.
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