Philosophy

Alfred North Whitehead’s Natural Theology

Another brilliant philosopher suppressed by academia

Whitehead started off his academic life as a professor of mathematics. With Bertrand Russell, he wrote Principia Mathematica, perhaps the most dense book ever written. But like Ludwig Wittgenstein, Whitehead abandoned Russell’s analytical, reductionist view of the world and became a philosophy professor. In a series of books beginning with The Concept of Nature (1920), Whitehead developed the method of process philosophy. Central to his philosophy is that reality needs to be understood as a series of states within constant processes. Whitehead thus called into question the basic assumptions of science, and even of all of Western civilization. He planted seeds of thought that have transformed science and society, but his ideas are now unfairly ignored.

Whitehead’s career switch to philosophy, was, he said, inspired by his wife’s vivid appreciation of beauty and capacity for love. From her vital force, he realized that there was more to appreciate beyond the confines of logic and science. Whitehead’s dramatic transformation from mathematician to philosopher, from a professor teaching mathematics and logic to a professor sharply critical of logical and scientific reductionism, is unparalleled in academia. The themes and direction of Whitehead’s philosophy are similar to those of Henri Bergson, but there’s no evidence of any interactions between the two.