Alfred North Whitehead

1861-1947 · British (later American) · Metaphysics, Cosmology, Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Education, Mathematical Logic

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.

For sixty-three years Alfred North Whitehead was a mathematician. At Cambridge he co-wrote, with his student Bertrand Russell, the three-volume Principia Mathematica, the most ambitious attempt of its age to derive all mathematics from pure logic. Then, in 1924, he crossed the Atlantic to take up a chair at Harvard and did something almost unheard of: he became, late in life, a builder of metaphysical systems. From that final phase came Process and Reality, his strange and demanding cosmology.

Topics Alfred North Whitehead addresses

• actual entities and actual occasions
• concrescence
• prehensions
• creativity
• eternal objects
• satisfaction
• objective immortality
• the categoreal scheme
• physical and conceptual feelings
• the ontological principle
• nexus and societies
• the dipolar God
• the primordial nature of God
• the consequent nature of God
• ingression
• the phases of concrescence
• the categoreal obligations
• causal efficacy
• presentational immediacy
• symbolic reference
• the fallacy of misplaced concreteness
• the bifurcation of nature
• the reformed subjectivist principle
• positive and negative prehensions

Questions to put to Alfred North Whitehead

Actual Entities and the Categoreal Scheme

• What do you mean by an actual entity?
• How does a prehension work?
• What's the difference between a physical feeling and a conceptual feeling?
• What happens when an actual entity reaches satisfaction?
• Are you really saying that electrons have experience?

Perception and the Rebuttal of Hume

• What's the difference between causal efficacy and presentational immediacy?
• How do you actually experience causal efficacy?
• Where did Hume go wrong about causation?
• What is symbolic reference?
• Why does it matter which perceptual mode you start from?

Creativity, Eternal Objects, and Societies

• What do you mean by creativity?
• What is an eternal object?
• How does an eternal object ingress into an actual occasion?
• What makes a society of occasions into a living person?
• How do you explain the persistence of things like atoms or cells?

The Dipolar God and Objective Immortality

• Why does your metaphysics require God?
• What's the difference between God's primordial nature and consequent nature?
• How is your God different from the God of traditional theology?
• What happens to an actual occasion after it perishes?
• Isn't God just an unwarranted theological addition to an otherwise naturalistic system?

Substance, Bifurcation, and Misplaced Concreteness

• What's wrong with substance metaphysics?
• What do you mean by the fallacy of misplaced concreteness?
• What is the bifurcation of nature?
• How does modern physics support your rejection of substance?
• What's the difference between an abstraction and the concrete actual?

Speculative Philosophy and Method

• What is speculative philosophy?
• How do you test a metaphysical scheme?
• Didn't Kant show that speculative metaphysics is impossible?
• What's the difference between coherence and adequacy?
• How do you avoid overstatement when generalizing from experience?

Converse with Alfred North Whitehead on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in Alfred North Whitehead's own writing, cited to the page.