WHITEHEAD, ALFRED NORTH. — English mathematician, scientist, and philosopher, born at Ramsgate (Kent) on 15 February 1861, died 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 perspective in the works The Concept of Nature (1920, Italian trans. Turin 1948), Science and the Modern World (1926, Italian trans. Milan 1945), Process and Reality (1929), and, in a popular form, in two lectures gathered under the title Nature and Life (1934). A good number of his articles is collected in Essays in Science and Philosophy (1947). Among Anglo-American neorealists and philosopher-scientists, he is perhaps the most philosophically cultivated mind, though the speculative importance of his so-called “philosophy of organism” has been much exaggerated. W., even when engaged in philosophy, remains a scientist and, indeed, one of the foremost theoreticians of modern mathematical logic, especially for the Principia Mathematica (3 vols., 1910–13), written in collaboration with Russell. As a philosopher, W. builds his philosophy on the foundations and with the methods of science; he is not a metaphysician but a cosmologist. His influence on philosophy, especially American philosophy, has been and remains vast and profound. Certainly his critical stance toward the formalism of mathematical logic (and in this sense it is self-criticism) and toward materialism makes him the most conscious neorealist of the limits of neorealism and hence the most serious. Science is formal knowledge; philosophy, by contrast, gives an account of the concrete and explains certain experiences (aesthetic, ethical, religious) that lie outside science; in short, it integrates the results of science, which it nevertheless accepts. The concept of “event” (v.) enables W. to formulate an organic conception of matter. Modern physics has “replaced the Aristotelian notion of the process of forms with that of the form of process,” which 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 only spatial and temporal relations: space and time express certain relations among events. Space is not the “common container” of all events but their very ordering; time is the passage of matter from one state to another. Even the perceiving subject 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 no intuition or demonstration of God; yet existence must be posited to explain phenomena. God has two aspects: “primordial nature” (God immutable, intemporal, full actuality) and “consequent nature” or limited and becoming God, the “cosmic” conscious “prehension” that grows richer in the development of nature. God as primordial nature is eternal, infinite, but is dead; as consequent nature, God is limited and immanent to cosmic becoming; in other words, when God is, God is dead, and when God is alive, God is not God but the cosmic becoming itself. Against this Neoplatonizing pantheistic backdrop, speculatively naïve and uncritical, W. grafts a kind of Böhmean mysticism: God, principle of the good, is in struggle with evil, a positive principle; God suffers to free Godself from it along with all who live and suffer the vicissitudes of life.