Alfred North Whitehead Quotes on Knowledge
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), Bertrand Russell's co-author on Principia Mathematica (1910–13), turned in his later Harvard career to the metaphysical project that reaches its mature statement in Process and Reality (1929). The framework treats the ultimate constituents of reality as actual occasions of experience whose interrelations constitute the temporal-spatial extensive continuum, and the corresponding theory of knowledge replaces the subject-object dualism inherited from Descartes with the doctrine that every act of cognition is a determinate prehension of the situation out of which the cognizing occasion itself arises. The Concept of Nature (1920) diagnosed the modern "bifurcation of nature" as the underlying epistemological error.
Quotes
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“The safest general characterisation of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”
Pt. II, ch. 1, sec. 1. -
“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”
ch. 5. -
“Seek simplicity, and distrust it.”
The Concept of Nature (1919), Chapter VII, p.143 . -
“It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.”
Ch. 1: "The Origins of Modern Science", p. 6 -
“Ideas won't keep; something must be done about them.”
p. 100; Ch. 12, April 28, 1938. -
“The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.”
ch. 1. -
“It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense.”
ch. 15. -
“Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality. Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing. The limitation, and the basis arising from what is already actual, are both of them necessary and interconnected.”
Religion in the Making (February 1926), Lecture IV: "Truth and Criticism" .