Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) was an English mathematician, Idealist philosopher, and metaphysician. A pioneer in mathematical logic, he demonstrated that all mathematics could be derived from a few logical axioms. He also produced a wide-ranging philosophical system in accord with modern science.
Born the son of a clergyman in Ramsgate, Isle of Thanet, Kent, Whitehead was educated at Cambridge’s Trinity College, where he was a senior lecturer in mathematics until 1911. He became a professor of applied mathematics at London’s Imperial College 1914–24, and professor of philosophy at Harvard 1924–37.
Extending the Boolean symbolic logic in the inventive Treatise on Universal Algebra (1898,) Whitehead contributed the essay “Mathematical Concepts of the Material World” (1905) to the Royal Society.
Influenced by the Italian mathematician Giuseppe Peano, Whitehead worked together with Bertrand A. Russell, a prior pupil at Trinity, in the Principia Mathematica (3 vols., 1910–13,) the most significant single contribution to logic since Aristotle.
At Harvard, Whitehead developed a far-reaching metaphysical theory. In his Edinburgh Gilford Lectures, “Process and Reality” (1929,) he explained a metaphysics embracing both psychological and physical experiences, with life-events as the decisive elements of reality.
Whitehead’s other notable works include Adventures of Ideas (1933,) Modes of Thought (1938,) and Essays in Science and Philosophy (1947.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Alfred North Whitehead
It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Intelligence
True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Bravery, Courage, Heroes
Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Ideas
In every age of well-marked transition, there is the pattern of habitual dumb practice and emotion which is passing and there is oncoming a new complex of habit.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Habits, Habit
The vigour of civilised societies is preserved by the widespread sense that high aims are worth while. Vigorous societies harbour a certain extravagance of objectives, so that men wander beyond the safe provision of personal gratifications. All strong interests easily become impersonal, the love of a good job well done. There is a sense of harmony about such an accomplishment, the Peace brought by something worth while. Such personal gratification arises from aim beyond personality.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Civilization
It is not paradox to say that in our most theoretical moods we may be nearest to our most practical applications.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Usefullness
An open mind is all very well in its way, but it ought not to be so open that there is no keeping anything in or out of it. It should be capable of shutting its doors sometimes, or it may be found a little draughty.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Mind
We cannot think first and act afterward. From the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Action
I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren’t
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Religion
We think in generalities, but we live in detail.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Thought, Optimism, Positive Attitudes, Mindsets, One Step at a Time, Thinking, Thoughts
Philosophy is the product of wonder.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Philosophers, Philosophy
Common sense is genius in homespun.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Common Sense, Genius
The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, Seek simplicity and distrust it
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Simplicity
Seek simplicity but distrust it.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Simplicity
Nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent, the nightingale for its song; and the sun for its radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves and should turn them into odes of self congratulation on the excellence of the human mind.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Nature
Every organism requires an environment of friends, partly to shield it from violent changes, and partly to supply it with its wants.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Friendship
Other nations of different habits are not enemies: they are godsends. Men require of their neighbours something sufficiently akin to be understood, something sufficiently different to provoke attention, and something great enough to command admiration. We must not expect, however, all the virtues.
—Alfred North Whitehead
It is the business of the future to be dangerous…. The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Risk, Danger, Future
Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Action
Wisdom alone is true ambition’s aim, wisdom is the source of virtue and of fame; obtained with labour, for mankind employed, and then, when most you share it, best enjoyed.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Ambition
The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Youth
Inventive genius requires pleasurable mental activity as a condition for its vigorous exercise
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Genius
Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Religion
No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Ideals
The task of a university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought and civilized modes of appreciation can affect the issue.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Ideas won’t keep; something must be done about them.
—Alfred North Whitehead
The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground; for it is the past, and it is the future.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: The Present, Past, Reflection, Regret
There are two principles inherent in the very nature of things, recurring in some particular embodiments whatever field we explore – the spirit of change, and the spirit of conservation. There can be nothing real without both. Mere change without conservation is a passage from nothing to nothing… . Mere conservation without change cannot conserve. For after all, there is a flux of circumstance, and the freshness of being evaporates under mere repetition.
—Alfred North Whitehead
A civilized society is one that exhibits the five qualities of truth, beauty, adventure, art and peace.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Civilization
The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won’t keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervor, live for it, and if need be, die for it.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Ideas
If a dog jumps in your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Dogs
But you can catch yourself entertaining habitually certain ideas and setting others aside; and that, I think, is where our personal destinies are largely decided.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Destiny
It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Literature
Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Philosophers, Philosophy
Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Life and Living
Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Enjoyment, Arts, Art, Artists
All practical teachers know that education is a patient process of mastery of details, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Teachers
It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to recognize that the major advances in civilisation are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur: like unto an arrow in the hand of a child. The art of free society consists first in the maintenance of the symbolic code; and secondly in fearlessness of revision, to secure that the code serves those purposes which satisfy an enlightened reason. Those societies which cannot combine reverence to their symbols with freedom of revision, must ultimately decay either from anarchy, or from the slow atrophy of a life stifled by useless shadows.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Society
A race preserves its vigor so long as it harbors a real contrast between what has been and what may be; and so long as it is nerved by the vigor to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure civilization is in full decay.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Adventure, Action
“Necessity is the mother of invention” is a silly proverb. “Necessity is the mother of futile dodges” is much closer to the truth. The basis of growth of modern invention is science, and science is almost wholly the outgrowth of pleasurable intellectual curiosity.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Curiosity, Necessity
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