Alfred North Whitehead

Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) was a British mathematician and philosopher whose career divided into three principal phases: mathematical logic (the period of Principia Mathematica, 1910-1913, with Bertrand Russell), philosophy of science (1919-1924, including The Concept of Nature and The Principles of Natural Knowledge), and the metaphysics of organism (from his 1924 move to Harvard, culminating in Process and Reality, 1929). Process philosophy, the lineage Whitehead founded, treats becoming as more fundamental than being and the actual occasion of experience as the irreducible unit of reality.

¶Core ideas

• Actual occasion. The concrete, momentary unit of reality — a “drop of experience” that constitutes itself through prehending (taking-in) prior occasions and adding its own subjective form. Actual occasions are not substances persisting through time; they are events of becoming.
• Prehension. The mode by which an actual occasion takes account of other occasions. A non-cognitive relation that is the condition for the cognitive forms relation can take. Causal efficacy and presentational immediacy are the two principal modes.
• Process over substance. Reality is fundamentally process — the becoming of occasions — not a set of enduring things with properties. Substance-language is an analytical convenience that mislocates the basic unit.
• The fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Treating an abstraction as if it were the concrete reality. The classical example: treating space-time points or material particles as the basic furniture of the world, when they are abstractions from the more concrete actual occasions.
• Eternal objects. Pure potentialities that can be ingressed into actual occasions but are not themselves actual. Roughly: qualities, relations, and patterns considered apart from any specific instantiation.

¶Key works

• Principia Mathematica (with Bertrand Russell, 3 vols., 1910-1913)
• An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919)
• The Concept of Nature (1920)
• Science and the Modern World (1925)
• Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)
• Adventures of Ideas (1933)
• Modes of Thought (1938)

¶Where his work figures in this library

Whitehead is foundational for process-philosophy and relational-ontology, and his prehension-based account is upstream of the relationality work in this corpus.