Alfred North Whitehead
Process Thought · Europe · 1861 to 1947
English mathematician who held that the world is made of events in process. He wrote a great work on logic with Russell.
What it is
Alfred North Whitehead (1861 to 1947) was an English mathematician and philosopher. With his former student Bertrand Russell he wrote the three-volume Principia Mathematica, a landmark of mathematical logic. In later life he built a philosophy of his own, process philosophy, in which the basic facts of the world are events and relations, not fixed things.
He was born in Ramsgate, studied and taught at Trinity College, Cambridge, then worked in London, where he took a close interest in education. Facing compulsory retirement, he moved to Harvard in 1924 and, as Bertrand Russell put it, England had regarded him as only a mathematician and it was left to America to discover him as a philosopher. He retired in 1937 and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1947.
The main ideas
- A world of processes. He saw the world as made of events and the relations between them, not of lifeless pieces. This view came to be called process philosophy.
- Internal relatedness. Each occasion of experience is bound up with others in its very nature, not just placed beside them.
- Against splitting nature. He objected to dividing nature into a real world of measurable properties and a secondary world of colours and feelings.
- One vision. In his mature work he aimed at a "synoptic vision" that takes in science, art, morals and religion, with values as the key.
- Education as growth. A pupil's mind, he said, is a growing organism, not a box to be packed. Learning moves in cycles of romance, precision and generalization.
- Religion is not always good. He thought religion may be very evil as well as good, and that it should not be assumed to be necessarily good.
What it looks like in practice
Think of a river. We name it as if it were one thing, though the water in it is never the same twice. Whitehead would say that this is how reality works in general: what we call things are patterns that hold for a while in a flow of events. This is an illustration of his line of questioning, not a passage from his writing.
Books and moments
- Principia Mathematica (1910, 1912, 1913), with Bertrand Russell, is a founding work of modern logic.
- The Aims of Education (1929) collects his essays on teaching and learning.
- Science and the Modern World (1926) grew out of his Lowell Lectures at Harvard.
- Process and Reality (1929) is his most comprehensive and most difficult work.
- Adventures of Ideas (1933) completes his mature metaphysical system.
Questions and criticism
- Hard to read. His main metaphysical book is described as comprehensive but difficult to penetrate.
- Estranged from the analysts. Logical positivists and analytic philosophers who first admired him grew dissatisfied as his thought moved toward metaphysics and religion.
- Saved by theologians. His process philosophy might have been forgotten had theologians not taken it up, and it is fair to ask what that says about its place in philosophy.
Close neighbours
Bertrand Russell was his student and collaborator, and Henri Bergson and William James are named as thinkers close to him. The pages on Gilles Deleuze and Maurice Merleau-Ponty show two philosophers who took an interest in his work.
Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.
Who they connect to
Influenced
- Bertrand Russell · He taught Russell at Cambridge and wrote Principia Mathematica with him.
Influenced by
- Henri Bergson · Whitehead shared his view that change and process are basic, though he built his own system. (scholars disagree about this link)
Sources we used
- Alfred North Whitehead · Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, read on 29 October 2026
- Alfred North Whitehead · Wikipedia, read on 29 October 2026