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
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
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
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
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
In all education the main cause of failure is staleness
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Failure
Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: 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
Every really new idea looks crazy at first.
—Alfred North Whitehead
It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Intelligence
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
Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Ignorance
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: Danger, Future, Risk
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
Seek simplicity but distrust it.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Simplicity
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
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
It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Truth
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 is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Literature
Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Artists, Art
It is not paradox to say that in our most theoretical moods we may be nearest to our most practical applications.
—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
The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Youth
Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Religion
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
Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Ideas
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
Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Quotations
Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Conversation, Speech
Ideas won’t keep; something must be done about them.
—Alfred North Whitehead
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
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
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
“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
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