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
The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, Seek simplicity and distrust it
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Simplicity
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Literature
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
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
Philosophy is the product of wonder.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Philosophy, Philosophers
Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Adventure
The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order. Life refuses to be embalmed alive. The more prolonged the halt in some unrelieved system of order, the greater the crash of the dead society.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Change, Order, Progress
“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
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
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: Confidence, Civilization
Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Speech, Conversation
It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Intelligence
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
Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Ideas
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: Regret, The Present, Past, Reflection
Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Life and Living
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
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 really new idea looks crazy at first.
—Alfred North Whitehead
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
Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Quotations
Ideas won’t keep; something must be done about them.
—Alfred North Whitehead
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
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
Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Philosophy
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
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
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
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
It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Truth
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
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