During this period, while active in assisting to frame new educational programs, he turned his reflective efforts toward formulating a philosophy of science to replace the prevailing materialistic mechanism, which in his view was unable to account for the revolutionary developments taking place in science. In 1910 Whitehead moved to London, where he held a variety of posts at University College and was professor at the Imperial College of Science and Technology. Three children were born to them between 18: Thomas North, Jessie Marie, and Eric Alfred, who was killed in action with the Royal Flying Corps in 1918. In 1890 he married Evelyn Willoughby Wade, whose sense of beauty and adventure fundamentally influenced Whitehead’s philosophical thought. During the latter part of this period he used to give political speeches in the locality these favored the Liberal party and often entailed his being struck by rotten eggs and oranges. His residence at Cambridge, first as scholar, then as fellow, and finally as senior lecturer in mathematics, lasted from 1880 to 1910.

Although during his whole undergraduate study all his courses were on pure or applied mathematics, he nevertheless developed a considerable knowledge of history, literature, and philosophy. In the autumn of 1880 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge. Whitehead excelled in mathematics, grew to love the poetry of Wordsworth and Shelley, and in his last year acted as head of the school and captain of games. The school to which he was sent in1875, Sherborne in Dorset, traced its origin to the eighth century. As a child Whitehead developed a strong sense of the enduring presence of the past, surrounded as the was by relics of England’s history. Mathematics, mathematical logic, theoretical physics, philosophy.Įducation, religion, and local government were the traditional interests of the family into with Whitehead was born, the son of a southern English schoolteacher turned Anglican clergyman. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 30 December 1947) Ramsgate, Kent, England, 15 February 1861 d. His true destiny as co-creator in the universe is his dignity and his grandeur.( b. This creative process is everywhere … In so far as man partakes of this creative process does he partake of the divine, of God, and that participation is his immortality, reducing the question of whether his individuality survives death of the body to the estate of an irrelevancy. For Whitehead, ‘God is in the world, or nowhere, creating continually in us and around us. However, Whitehead defended his theory by arguing that God and mankind may, one day, come together when man’s moral and intellectual qualities lead him to his ultimate apotheosis.

Such an unfinished Creation has been criticized for implying the fundamental limitations of an imperfect deity. Greatly influenced by the revolution introduced by Einstein’s theory of relativity, Whitehead came to support an interpretation of physical reality based on the idea that ‘change is constant, whether we measure it by minute or by millennia we ourselves are a part it we have been brought into existence in a certain quarter of the universe in consequence of its processes, and there is no reason to suppose that other types of existence, unimaginable to us, have not been produced elsewhere in the universe.’Īpplying his scientific belief to the realm of theology, Whitehead conceived an ever-changing and constantly evolving universe, created by a God who, himself, is in a constant process of self-transformation while sharing the joys and tragedies of his creatures. Paradoxically, his philosophical legacy does not lie in the field of physics or mathematics (Russell, himself, suffered from a nervous breakdown when he realised the few unavoidable inconsistencies of the Principia logic) but in the realm of Theology. Whitehead had a distinguished career at both Cambridge and London Universities but his many interests, as an academic polymath, took him to the other side of the Atlantic as he was invited, aged 63, to teach Philosophy at Harvard University. This work alone expanded the previous logical systems of Aristotle and Leibniz and paved the way to the logic developed by Alan Turing in his post-war computing machines. Who knows about Alfred North Whitehead, these days, when the academic world seems to have moved from the days of the truly Renaissance man to the more mundane recognition of the philosophical specialist? Yet, Whitehead deserves to be better known and, more importantly, better appreciated as he was not only Russell’s Mathematics tutor at Cambridge but collaborated with the latter on the extraordinarily ambitious Principia Mathematica, published in the early 1910’s.

Alfred north whitehead intrest in math