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
Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Speech, Conversation
Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Intellectuals, Intelligence
It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Truth
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
Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: 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: Necessity, Curiosity
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
Some of the finest moral intuitions come to quite humble people. The visiting of lofty ideas doesn’t depend on formal schooling. Think of those Galilean peasants.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Instincts
What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Morality, Truth
True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Heroes, Bravery, Courage
I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning , or destroyed it altogether.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Quotations
Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Ideas
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
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
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
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: Past, Reflection, Regret, The Present
We think in generalities, but we live in detail.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Mindsets, One Step at a Time, Optimism, Thinking, Positive Attitudes, Thoughts, Thought
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
In all education the main cause of failure is staleness
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Failure
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
Ideas won’t keep; something must be done about them.
—Alfred North Whitehead
How the past perishes is how the future becomes.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Reflection, Past
It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Literature
Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Adventure
It must be admitted that there is a degree of instability which is inconsistent with civilization. But, on the whole, the great ages have been unstable ages.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Civilization, Confidence
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
Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Life and Living
Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Science, Familiarity, Common Sense
It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Intelligence
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: Philosophy, Philosophers
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