WHITEHEAD, ALFRED NORTH. — English mathematician, scientist, and philosopher, b. at Ramsgate (Kent) on 15 February 1861 and d. at Cambridge, Mass. (U.S.A.), on 30 December 1947.
He first taught geometry and applied mathematics in London and then, until 1937, philosophy at Harvard University. He set forth his philosophical outlook in the works The concept of nature (1920, Italian version Turin 1948), Science and the modern world (1926, Italian version Milan 1945), Process and reality (1929), and, in popular form, in two lectures brought together under the title Natura e vita (1934). A considerable number of articles is collected in Saggi di scienza e filosofia (1947). Among the Anglo-American neo-realists and philosopher-scientists, he is perhaps the most philosophically cultivated mind, but the speculative importance of his so-called «philosophy of organism» has been greatly exaggerated. W., even when he does philosophy, remains a scientist and, more precisely, one of the foremost theoreticians of modern mathematical logic, especially on account of the Principia mathematica (3 vols., 1910-13), written in collaboration with Russell. W. the philosopher constructs his philosophy upon the foundations and by the methods of science; he is not a metaphysician, but a cosmologist. His influence on philosophy, especially American philosophy, has been and remains broad and profound. Certainly, his critical position with regard to the formalism of mathematical logic (and, in this sense, it is self-critical) and materialism makes him the neo-realist most aware of the limits of neo-realism and therefore the most serious. Science is formal knowledge; philosophy, on the other hand, accounts for the concrete and explains certain experiences (aesthetic, ethical, religious) that remain outside science; in short, it integrates the results of science, which it nevertheless accepts. The concept of «event» (v.) gives W. the possibility of formulating an organic conception of matter. The new physics «has substituted for the Aristotelian notion of a process of forms that of a form of process»; it does not admit the isolation and instantaneousness of classical science, but studies the forms of coexistence and succession of events. For W., there are no absolute space and time, but spatial and temporal relations: space and time express certain relations among events. Space is not the common «receptacle» of all events, but their very ordering; time is the passage of matter from one state to another. The perceiving subject too is a «perceiving event» higher than the others: the ego is «an object among objects», «emergent» from the objective world of events.
W. also constructed a theology of his own. There is neither intuition nor demonstration of God; but it is necessary to postulate his existence in order to explain phenomena. God has two aspects: «the primordial nature» (the immutable, timeless God, full actuality) and the «consequent nature», or God limited and in becoming, the universal conscious «prehension», which is enriched in the development of nature. God as primordial nature is eternal and infinite, but dead; as consequent nature, he is limited and immanent in cosmic becoming; which is to say that, when he is God, he is dead, and when he is alive, he is not God but cosmic becoming itself. Against this Neoplatonizing, pantheistic background, speculative in its naivety and uncritical, W. grafts a kind of Böhmian mysticism: God, the principle of good, is in struggle with evil, a positive principle; he suffers in order to free himself from it together with all those who live and suffer through the vicissitudes of life.