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
In the conditions of modern life the rule is absolute, the race which does not value trained intelligence is doomed. Not all your heroism, not all your social charm, not all your wit, not all your victories on land or at sea, can move back the finger of fate. To-day we maintain ourselves. To-morrow science will have moved forward yet one more step, and there will be no appeal from the judgment which will then be pronounced on the uneducated.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Ignorance
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: Common Sense, Familiarity, Science
Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Life and Living
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
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Thought, Thinking, Thoughts
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
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
The worth of men consists in their liability to persuasion… . Civilisation is the maintenance of social order, by its own inherent persuasiveness as embodying the nobler alternative. The recourse to force, however unavoidable, is a disclosure of the failure of civilisation, either in the general society or in a remnant of individuals. Thus in a live civilisation there is always an element of unrest. For sensitiveness to ideas means curiosity, adventure, change. Civilised order survives on its merits, and is transformed by its power of Recognizing its imperfections.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Civilization
Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Religion
Every really new idea looks crazy at first.
—Alfred North Whitehead
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
The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Youth
Philosophy is the product of wonder.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Philosophers, Philosophy
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
Seek simplicity but distrust it.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Simplicity
Inventive genius requires pleasurable mental activity as a condition for its vigorous exercise
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Genius
An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Experience
“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
Human nature loses its most precious quality when it is robbed of its sense of things beyond, unexplored and yet insistent.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Humanity
Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Adventure
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
Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Ideas
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
How the past perishes is how the future becomes.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Past, Reflection
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
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: Habit, Habits
In all education the main cause of failure is staleness
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Failure
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
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