Thinker · TH-0026
A. N. Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead was an English mathematician and philosopher who taught at Cambridge and London before moving to Harvard in 1924. With Bertrand Russell…
Also known as Alfred North Whitehead
1861 – 1947 · Ramsgate, Cambridge, London, Cambridge (Massachusetts)
Traditions: Modern European
Schools: Process philosophy
Alfred North Whitehead was an English mathematician and philosopher who taught at Cambridge and London before moving to Harvard in 1924. With Bertrand Russell he wrote Principia Mathematica, a landmark of modern logic. In his later work he built a systematic process metaphysics in which the basic units of reality are not enduring objects or substances but momentary events of becoming, which he called actual occasions.
Key ideas
- Reality is fundamentally process: what exists are events of becoming, not static substances.
- Actual occasions are the final real things, each taking up its past and passing into the future.
- Treating abstractions as if they were concrete things is a basic error, which he called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.
- God and the world are related within the process rather than standing outside it.
Major works
- Principia Mathematica (with Bertrand Russell, 1910–1913)
- Science and the Modern World (1925)
- Process and Reality (1929)
In the conversation
- Question Is the flame on my burner a thing, or something that keeps happening?
- Debate The deepest split in metaphysics is substance versus process, not matter versus mind
On the map
The questions in The Coordinates of Thought where A. N. Whitehead takes a place.
- 1.1.1 Substance Theory Is a river a thing, or an event?