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. Every reply is grounded in Alfred North Whitehead's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.