WHITEHEAD, ALFRED NORTH. - English mathematician, scientist and philosopher, b. at Ramsgate (Kent) on 15 Feb. 1861 and d. at Cambridge, Mass. (U.S.A.) on 30 Dec. 1947.
He first taught geometry and applied mathematics in London and then, until 1937, philosophy at Harvard University. He set out 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 popular form, in two lectures gathered under the title Natura e vita (1934). A good number of articles is collected in the Saggi di scienza e filosofia (1947). Among the Anglo-American neorealists and the philosopher-scientists he is perhaps the most philosophically educated mind, but the speculative importance of his so-called "philosophy of organism" has been rather exaggerated. W., even when he does philosophy, remains a scientist and precisely one of the major theorists of modern mathematical logic, above all for the Principia mathematica (3 vols., 1910-13), written in collaboration with Russell. W. as philosopher builds his philosophy on the foundations and with the methods of science; he is not a metaphysician, he is a cosmologist. His influence on philosophy, especially American philosophy, has been and still is vast and profound. Certainly his critical position with regard to the formalism of mathematical logic (and, in this sense, it is self-criticism) and to materialism makes him the neorealist most aware of the limits of neorealism and therefore the most serious. Science is formal knowledge; philosophy, on the other hand, gives an account of the concrete and explains certain experiences (aesthetic, ethical, religious) that remain outside science, in short it integrates the results of science, which however it accepts. The concept of "event" (v.) gives W. the possibility of formulating an organic conception of matter. The new physics "has replaced the Aristotelian notion of a process of forms with that of a form of process," which does not admit the isolation and instantaneity 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. Even the perceiving subject is a "perceiving event" higher than the others: the I is an "object among objects," "emerging" from the objective world of events.
W. also constructed a theology of his own. Of God there is neither intuition nor demonstration; but it is necessary to postulate his existence in order to explain phenomena. God has two aspects: "primordial nature" (God immutable, timeless, full actuality) and "consequent nature," or God limited and in becoming, universal conscious "prehension," which is enriched in the development of nature. God as primordial nature is eternal, infinite, but is dead; as consequent nature he is limited and is immanent in the cosmic becoming; which is to say that, when he is God, he is dead, and when he is alive, he is not God, but the cosmic becoming itself. On this pantheistic, Neoplatonizing background, speculatively naive 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 the vicissitudes of life.