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.

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) was a British mathematician and philosopher whose career divided sharply into two parts. Until 1924, he was a Cambridge mathematician, co-author with Bertrand Russell of Principia Mathematica (1910–1913), and a contributor to mathematical logic and the foundations of geometry. From 1924, when he accepted a philosophy chair at Harvard at sixty-three, he produced the speculative metaphysics for which he is now best known.

Process and Reality (1929), Whitehead's masterpiece, presents an alternative to substance metaphysics. The fundamental units of reality are not enduring substances but actual occasions — momentary events of becoming that prehend their pasts and contribute to their futures. Reality is a continuous process of creative advance. Whitehead's philosophy of organism rejects the bifurcation of nature into primary and secondary qualities that Locke had inherited from Galileo and replaces it with a view of nature as continuous with experience.

Whitehead's other major works include Science and the Modern World (1925), Religion in the Making (1926), and Adventures of Ideas (1933). His process philosophy has been most influential in process theology and in the niche tradition of process philosophy that runs through Hartshorne and Cobb. His earlier mathematical work and his collaboration with Russell remain central to the analytic tradition.