Alfred North Whitehead: biography and contributions of this philosopher

Alfred North Whitehead's professional career began as a mathematician, with the publication of the Mathematics Principle, the colossal three-volume work he wrote with his former student Bertrand Russell and which meant a milestone in the literature on this science.

However, his extraordinary intelligence and his restlessness soon led him towards philosophy, especially towards the field of metaphysics, where he also stood out as one of the most brilliant thinkers of the 20th century.

Today We will know the life of Alfred North Whitehead and the contributions he made to mathematics and philosophy.

Brief Biography of Alfred North Whitehead, Mathematician and Philosopher

He was born in England shaken by the Second Industrial Revolution and head of an empire that stretched as far as India. Whitehead came into the world in a family very interested in education, since his father was a teacher at the school that Thomas, Alfred's grandfather, had founded at the beginning of the 19th century. In short, little Whitehead had teaching in his veins.

And, indeed, he earned his living teaching at several of the most prestigious centers in the world: Trinity College of Cambridge, the University College London or Harvard University, in the United States, were the main venues where he presented his interesting and often difficult ideas.

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Passion for mathematics

Whitehead already stood out in his elementary school years as a child of extraordinary intelligence and talent. We have already commented that he came from a family of teachers; His father, Alfred Whitehead, taught the children who attended the school that Grandfather Thomas had founded, Chatham House Academy, in Kent, England. In his writings, and according to the main Whitehead biographer, Victor Lowe (see bibliography), the future mathematician he fondly remembers both his father and his grandfather, two people he said had been tremendously successful and educated.

He does not dedicate the same memories to his mother, Maria Sarah Whitehead (née Buckmaster). In fact, he does not mention her in any of her texts, which has led some scholars to believe that Alfred North had a bad relationship with her. However, it must be taken into account that, before he died, Whitehead ordered his relatives to destroy all his papers once he died, so many of his documents have not survived.

We do know that he studied in Sherborne, in Dorset, in one of the best public schools in the country, where he stood out especially for his skills in sports and mathematics. His passion for the pure sciences would accompany him throughout his life, since in 1880 he enrolled at Trinity He college to pursue a degree in mathematics, whose degree he obtained in 1884, in addition to standing out as room wrangler of the University.

The wranglers they were the Trinity students who had received special mentions in their third year, which gives us an idea of ​​the mathematical and logical abilities of the young Whitehead.

In 1910, together with a former student of his (no less than the mathematician Betrand Russell) he began an ambitious project: the Mathematics Principle, whose mission was to write down the set of axioms by which mathematics can be demonstrated. To illustrate the complexity of the work (which was finally composed of three volumes of more than 2,000 pages), we will say that Whitehead and Russell devoted the whole of the first volume and part of the second to proving by means of axioms and rules that, indeed, 1+1=2.

The Mathematics Principle it was too ambitious a work and its audience was excessively restricted, since it was only understandable to specialists in mathematics. As was to be expected, the book (or books, rather), whose writing they had spent no less than three years, brought sound losses to the authors. Either way, the Mathematics Principle Whitehead and Russell has become one of the essential monuments in the field of pure sciences, which marked the beginning of an unstoppable professional career.

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metaphysical issues

But Whitehead's restless mind was not going to dwell on mathematics, much as it was a perfect field for his razor-sharp intelligence. He had always felt deeply attracted to philosophy and metaphysical questions, but his poor training in this respect had made Whitehead leave these disciplines aside and bet on the pure sciences, his true his specialty.

But, despite his basic education in philosophical matters, Whitehead entered the first decades of the 20th century on the slippery terrain of metaphysics, which he was passionate about. In 1920 he published his first work on the subject, The concept of Nature (The concept of nature), whose enormous success facilitated his access to the presidency of the Aristotelian Society, a position he held between 1922 and 1923. Whitehead's philosophy is not only different, but also complicated and dark., which is not without curiosity in a man who considered himself an amateur in this field. Be that as it may, the success of his work led, in 1924, to Harvard University inviting him to give classes in philosophy in his faculty, a position he will hold until 1937, the year in which he will definitively retire from the teaching.

What is Whitehead's metaphysics? Why is it reputed to be so complex? In process and reality, published in 1929 and considered by some to be the “most impressive text on metaphysics of the 20th century”, Whitehead questions the bases on which the concept of the universe and its functioning.

According to Whitehead, the main problem with Western metaphysics is that he considers matter as something "irreducible"., as an entity that exists independently of the others, despite the fact that they have external contact between them. But for the philosopher, nothing is the same in time and everything is in constant flux, so change is something essential in the functioning of the universe.

Thus, Whitehead is against scientific materialism, that he sees things differentiated from each other, when in In reality, objects are only a set of interrelationships with other objects and with the world, which he calls "process". In other words, entities are fluid and constantly changing, and the only thing that can give them some permanence, Whitehead adds, is God.

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Education as a goal

In addition to the fields of mathematics and metaphysics, Alfred North Whitehead excelled in his efforts in improving the educational system in the United Kingdom, evidently infected by the vocation of his family. In 1929, parallel to his masterpiece on metaphysics, the prolific author publishes The Aim of Education and Other Essays, where he summarizes his ideas of what a good education should be: the most important thing is that students manage to establish connections between the various subjects that traditional education considers independent of each other.

Whitehead's effort to bring about reform in the education system earned him an appeal from the then Prime Minister British, David Lloyd George, to form part of a committee that intended to analyze the situation of education in the United Kingdom United.

Since he was called to Harvard in 1924, Whitehead and his wife, Evelyn, would no longer leave the United States. Some years earlier they had had the misfortune to lose one of their sons, Eric, who had died serving in the First World War at only nineteen. The marriage had two other children, Thomas North and Jessie, the only girl.

Whitehead passed away in 1947, but his legacy reaches our time.. Interest in the prolific work of this mathematician and philosopher has grown enormously in recent years, and been applied in multiple and varied fields, such as biology, theology, ecology, economics and psychology.