Alfred North Whitehead 1861 – 1947

Alfred North Whitehead was a British mathematician, logician, and philosopher of the late 19th and 20th centuries. With his student Bertrand Russell he co-authored the monumental Principia Mathematica, a foundational work in modern mathematical logic published in three volumes between 1910 and 1913. In his later philosophical career at Harvard University, he developed the system of process philosophy set out in Process and Reality, his 1929 Gifford Lectures, which proposed an ontology of dynamic events or actual occasions rather than static substances. His thought was foundational for the school of process theology and process metaphysics that bears his name. He held that the European philosophical tradition consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.