#alfred north whitehead

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“La característica general más segura de la tradición filosófica europea es que consiste en una serie de notas a pie de página sobre Platón”

Alfred North Whitehead

Fue un matemático y filósofo británico nacido en Ramsgate Inglaterra en febrero de 1861, conocido por su trabajo en el campo de la lógica matemática y la filosofía de la ciencia, y más tarde pionero en el enfoque de la metafísica que actualmente se conoce como filosofía de procesos.

Fue hijo de un clérigo anglicano y director de una escuela para niños dirigida anteriormente por el padre.

Estudió matemáticas en el Trinity College de Cambridge, donde más tarde se convirtió en profesor. 

Durante su tiempo allí, trabajó estrechamente con Bertrand Russell en el desarrollo de la lógica matemática y juntos escribieron el influyente libro “Principia Mathematica”, obra que sentó las bases para la formalización de la matemática con un impacto duradero en su campo.

La vida intelectual de Whitehead esta dividida en tres principales periodos; la primera corresponde en su estadía en Cambridge de 1884 a 1910 y fue durante ese tiempo que trabajo fundamentalmente en los campos de las matemáticas y la lógica, y es este tiempo en el que colabora juntoh con Bertrand Russell. 

El segundo periodo de 1910 a 1924 corresponde principalmente a su estadía en Londres en donde dedica su atención a temas relacionados con la física, y la filosofía de la ciencia y la filosofía de la educación,.

En el tercer periodo, en su regreso a Harvard de 1924 en adelante en donde trabajo principalmente en temas de metafísica.

No obstante lo anterior, Whitehead es mas conocido por su trabajo en filosofía, particularmente por su sistema filosófico conocido como “Filosofía del proceso”.

Según Whitehead, todo el universo está en constante cambio y evolución, y todo está interconectado. Propuso una visión más dinámica y procesal del mundo, en contraposición a la concepción estática y sustancialista tradicional.

La filosofía del proceso también aborda temas como la relación de la mente con la materia, la naturaleza del tiempo y la casualidad, así como la importancia de la experiencia en la construcción del conocimiento.

Whitehead sostuvo que la realidad es una combinación de eventos o “actualidades”, que son a su vez entidades autónomas y creativas. Estas actualidades interactúan entre si, formando procesos más amplios, como los organismos vivos y las sociedades humanas.

Escribió extensamente sobre el tema de Dios y la religión, su trabajo en teología procesual proporcionó una nueva forma de entender la relación entre Dios y el mundo.

Los Whitehead permanecieron en los Estados Unidos después de mudarse a Harvard en 1924, y al retirarse en 1937 permaneció en Cambridge Massachusetts hasta su muerte en diciembre de 1947 a la edad de 86 años.

Muchos detalles de la vida de Whitehead son oscuros pues no dejó ningún archivo personal, pues su familia cumplió su voluntad de destruir todos sus papeles después de su muerte. Whitehead era conocido por su creencia absoluta en el derecho a la privacidad lo cual dio muy poco para comprender mejor su vida.

Fuentes: Wikipedia, plato.standord.edu, herder.com.mx y bookey.app

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'It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties.' Alfred North Whitehead

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From Alfred North Whitehead’s The Organization of Thought

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Palter, Robert. “The Place of Mathematics in Whitehead’s Philosophy.” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 58, no. 19, 1961, pp. 565–76.

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While cogently arguing for a temporalistic view of personal identity, Whitehead is by no means oblivious to the arguments that endear a substantialistic view of the same. Further, he assents to the fact that the concept itself, with all of its substantialistic connotations, is dominant in human experience: "...the notions of civil law are based upon it. The same man is sent to prison who committed the robbery; and the same materials survive for centuries, and for millions of years. We cannot dismiss Personal Identity without dismissing the whole of human thought as expressed in language." [Whitehead, "Immortality," The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead] In spite of these concessions, however, Whitehead did not acquiesce into the temptation to view personal identity in substantialistic terms. In all probability, Whitehead avoided using the phrase "personal selfhood" when referring to the human person simply because it smacked too much of the classical concept of soul-substance and was better left alone. For Whitehead, the phrase "personal order" was much more congenial, pointing to the main element of process in his vision of reality.

Amos Yong, "Personal Selfhood(?) and Human Experience in Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism"

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“The mind is never passive; it is a perpetual activity, delicate, receptive, responsive to stimulus. You cannot postpone your life until you have sharpened it. Whatever interest attaches to your subject-matter must be evoked here and now; whatever powers you are strengthening in the pupil, must be exercised here and now; whatever possibilities of mental life your teaching should impart, must be exhibited here and now. That is the golden rule of education, and a very difficult rule to follow. […] The solution which I am urging, is to eradicate the fatal disconnection of subjects which kills the vitality of our modern curriculum. There is only one subject-matter for education, and that is Life in all its manifestations. Instead of this single unity, we offer children - Algebra, from which nothing follows; Geometry, from which nothing follows; Science, from which nothing follows; History, from which nothing follows; a Couple of Languages; never mastered; and lastly, most dreary of all, Literature, represented by plays of Shakespeare, with philological notes and short analyses of plot and character to be in substance committed to memory. Can such a list be said to represent Life, as it is known in the midst of the living of it? The best that can be said of it is, that it is a rapid table of contents which a deity might run over in his mind while he was thinking of creating a world, and has not yet determined how to put it together.” — Alfred North Whitehead, “The Aims of Eduction” (1929)

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No one ever says, Here I am, and I have brought my body with me.

Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of thought, p. 114.

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Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality.

Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing. The limitation, and the basis arising from what is already actual, are both of them necessary and interconnected.

– Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making

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What if all works of art were better understood as functioning apparatuses, entangling their human audiences in experiences of becoming? What if certain works of art were even able to throw the brakes on becoming altogether, making nothings rather than somethings? What would be the ethical value of making nothing, of stalling becoming; and how might such nothings even be made?Some Ways of Making Nothing: Apophatic Apparatuses in Contemporary Art borrows its understanding of apparatuses from quantum mechanics and the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, and its understanding of nothing from apophatic (negative) theology. It then proposes a new way of understanding art, applying this understanding to artworks by Arakawa and Gins, Robert Fludd, David Crawford, Joshua Citarella, William Pope.L, and Haim Steinbach. Philosophy, physics, theology, and media theory are traversed and involved in order to understand art differently so that it might be made to matter more.

Some Ways of Making Nothing: Apophatic Apparatuses in Contemporary Art : Curt Cloninger : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

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From Alfred North Whitehead’s The Aims of Education

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There are two main motivations [for Whitehead’s method of extensive abstraction] worth highlighting. One relates to Whitehead’s endorsement of the relational theory of space (and, eventually, time and spacetime), i.e., the view that geometric entities are not among the fundamental constituents of reality but rather emerge entirely from relations between concrete objects and events, which he took to be inconsistent with the simplicity of sizeless points. The other lies in Whitehead’s overall epistemology, and particularly his radical empiricist methodology in the philosophy of science. The first motivation is already present in the 1906 memoir, where the relational theory is identified generically with ‘Leibniz’s theory of the Relativity of Space’. … … … According to Whitehead, science is ‘the thought organization of experience’ (Whitehead, 1916c, p. 411). It is ‘founded upon observation’ and all scientific constructions are ‘merely expositions of the characters of things perceived’ (CN, pp. 57, 148). Since the points of Euclidean geometry appear to be ‘a metaphysical fairy tale by any comparison with our actual perceptual knowledge of nature’ (PNK, p. 6), it follows that geometry itself, for all its scientific usefulness, cannot be taken at face value. It must involve some sort of abstraction, a ‘fiction’ of sorts (Whitehead, 1917, p. 163), and a proper investigation into its foundations must fully expose the abstract character of this fiction. Here is where Whitehead’s philosophical stance may be seen as continuous with traditional anti-indivisibilist views. But, more importantly, here is where his account is meant to fill the holes left open by his predecessors. For Whitehead is not only rejecting the indivisibilist ontology of classical geometry; he is also giving us an actual method for recovering its truths on empirically acceptable grounds. His goal is to provide a fully-fledged point-free foundation of geometry. It is worth emphasizing that for Whitehead this is not a peculiar task, as if geometry were in some sense unique in delivering a misleading picture. On the contrary, it is an instance of what Whitehead considered the primary task of scientific philosophy at large: to exhibit the systematic connection between the neat and tidy ‘world of ideas’ with which science ends and the untidy, ill[1]adjusted field of ‘sensible experiences’ from which it begins (Whitehead, 1916c, p. 41). Whitehead discussed many examples of this task, and of the ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’ that arises whenever the ‘abstract logical constructions’ used in science and mathematics are mistaken for ‘concrete facts’ out of which they arise (Whitehead, 1926, p. 64). The abstractions involved in geometry are no exception, and the method of extensive abstraction is intended to provide the relevant connection in such a way as to avoid the fallacy.

Achille C. Varzi, “Points as Higher-Order Constructs: Whitehead’s Method of Extensive Abstraction,” The History of Continua: Philosophical and Mathematical Perspectives

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“Whenever a textbook is written of real educational worth, you may be quite certain that some reviewer will say that it will be difficult to teach from it. Of course it will be difficult to teach from it. If it were easy, the book ought to be burned; for it cannot be educational.”

-Alfred North Whitehead, in an article titled The Aims of Education from the April 17, 1929 issue of The New Republic