Alfred North Whitehead

Dzieła

• 1910Principia mathematica

  Matematyka wyprowadzona z logiki – twierdzenie, z którego wynika 1+1=2, pojawia się dopiero w *54.43, na stronie 379 pierwszego tomu.

• 1925Science and the Modern World (Nauka i świat nowoczesny)

  Wykłady Lowella o tym, jak nowoczesna nauka wzięła swoje abstrakcje za konkretną rzeczywistość – „błąd błędnie umiejscowionej konkretności”.

• 1929Proces i rzeczywistość

  Wykłady Gifforda z lat 1927–28: spekulatywna kosmologia, w której świat jest procesem wzajemnie powiązanych okazji doświadczenia.

Stanowisko

Whitehead’s first philosophy was logic: Principia Mathematica tried to derive mathematics from logic. In London he worked on the concepts of physics and attacked the “bifurcation of nature”, the split between a world of colourless particles and a world of perceived colours and sounds. Science and the Modern World (1925) diagnosed the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”: modern science mistook its abstractions, such as bits of matter at points in time, for concrete reality. Process and Reality (1929), based on his Gifford Lectures of 1927–28, offered a speculative cosmology. The final constituents of the world are not substances but “actual occasions”, momentary events of experience that take up (“prehend”) earlier occasions and pass into later ones; enduring things are societies of such occasions, and God is both the ground of possibilities and affected by the world. In the preface he named his debt to Bergson, William James and Dewey, and in the book he remarked that European philosophy is “a series of footnotes to Plato”. At Harvard he supervised Quine’s doctorate. His metaphysics has been carried on in process theology, especially by Charles Hartshorne, and was taken up by Deleuze, Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour.

Życie i kontekst

Alfred North Whitehead was born in 1861 in Ramsgate, Kent, the son of an Anglican clergyman. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1880 and taught mathematics there for some twenty-five years; among his students was Bertrand Russell. A Treatise on Universal Algebra (1898) led to his election to the Royal Society. With Russell he wrote Principia Mathematica (1910–1913). In 1910 he moved to London, where he became professor at Imperial College and turned to the philosophy of science and education; his younger son Eric was killed as a pilot in 1918. In 1924, at the age of 63, he accepted a chair of philosophy at Harvard, where he taught until 1937. He received the Order of Merit in 1945 and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1947.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• A Treatise on Universal Algebra (1898)
• The Concept of Nature (1920)
• Process and Reality (1929)
• Adventures of Ideas (1933)

Pojawia się w

• Debata „Czym jest świadomość?”