Alfred North Whitehead - Life

Life

Whitehead was born in Ramsgate, Kent, England. Although his grandfather, Thomas Whitehead, was known for having founded Chatham House Academy, a fairly successful school for boys, Alfred North was educated at Sherborne School, Dorset, then considered the best public school in the country. His childhood was described as over-protected, but when at school he excelled in sports, mathematics and was head prefect of his class.

In 1880, Whitehead matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was fourth wrangler and gained his BA in 1884. Elected a fellow of Trinity in 1884, Whitehead would teach and write mathematics at the college until 1910, spending the 1890s writing his Treatise on Universal Algebra (1898), and the 1900s collaborating with his former pupil, Russell, on the first edition of Principia Mathematica.

In 1910, he resigned his position at Trinity College to protest the dismissal of a colleague because of an adulterous affair. He also ran afoul of a Cambridge by-law limiting the term of a Senior Lecturer to 25 years.

In 1890, Whitehead married Evelyn Wade, an Irish woman reared in France; they had a daughter and two sons. One son died in action while serving in the Royal Flying Corps during World War I. Meanwhile, Russell spent much of 1918 in prison because of his pacifist activities. Although Whitehead visited his co-author in prison, he did not take his pacifism seriously, while Russell sneered at Whitehead's later speculative Platonism and panpsychism. After the war, Russell and Whitehead seldom interacted, and Whitehead did not contribute to the 1925 second edition of Principia Mathematica.

Whitehead was always interested in theology, especially in the 1890s. His family was firmly anchored in the Church of England: his father and uncles were vicars, while his brother would become Bishop of Madras. Perhaps influenced by his wife and the writings of Cardinal Newman, Whitehead leaned towards Roman Catholicism. Prior to World War I, he considered himself an agnostic.http://www.philosophybasics.com/philosophers_whitehead.html Although his father was an Anglican vicar and he had been brought up as an Anglican, he began to move towards the Roman Catholic Church (perhaps due to his wife's influence), although in the end he chose neither and embraced Agnosticism around the mid-1890s Later he embraced Theism.

Concomitantly, Whitehead developed a keen interest in physics: his fellowship dissertation examined James Clerk Maxwell's views on electricity and magnetism. His outlook on mathematics and physics was more philosophical than purely scientific; he was more concerned about their scope and nature, rather than about particular tenets and theories.

He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1922 to 1923.

The period between 1910 and 1926 was mostly spent at University College London and Imperial College London, where he taught and wrote on physics, the philosophy of science, and the theory and practice of education. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society since 1903 and was elected to the British Academy in 1931. In physics, Whitehead articulated a rival doctrine to Einstein's general relativity. His theory of gravitation continues to be controversial. Even Tanaka, who suggests that G disagrees with experimental findings, admits that his work does not actually refute Whitehead's formulation. A more lasting work was his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919), a pioneering attempt to synthesize the philosophical underpinnings of physics. It has little influenced the course of modern physics, however.

Whitehead's Presidential address in 1916 to the Mathematical Association of England The Aims of Education in the book of the same title (1929a) pointedly criticized the formalistic approach of modern British teachers who do not care about culture and self-education of their disciples: "Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it."

In 1924, Henry Osborn Taylor invited Whitehead, who was then 63, to implement his ideas and teach philosophy at Harvard University. This was a subject that fascinated Whitehead but was also one that he had also not previously studied or taught. The Whiteheads spent the rest of their lives in the United States. He retired from teaching in 1937. When he died in 1947 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S., there was no funeral, and his body was cremated.

Whitehead had opinions about a vast range of human endeavors. These opinions pepper the many essays and speeches he gave on various topics between 1915 and his death (1917, 1925a, 1927, 1929a, 1929b, 1933, 1938). His Harvard lectures (1924–37) are studded with quotations from his favourite poets, Wordsworth and Shelley. Most Sunday afternoons when they were in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Whiteheads hosted an open house to which all Harvard students were welcome, and during which talk flowed freely. Some of the obiter dicta Whitehead spoke on these occasions were recorded by Lucien Price, a Boston journalist, who published them in 1954. That book also includes a remarkable picture of Whitehead as the aged sage holding court. It was at one of these open houses that the young Harvard student B.F. Skinner credits a discussion with Whitehead as providing the inspiration for his work Verbal Behavior in which language is analyzed from a behaviorist perspective. Another student influenced by Whitehead was Charles Malik, the drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights's preamble, and later president of the UN General Assembly. Malik wrote his PhD dissertation about Whitehead, in which Malik compared Whitehead's Metaphysics of Time to that of Martin Heidegger .

A two volume biography was written by Victor Lowe (1985) and Lowe and Schneewind (1990); Lowe studied under Whitehead at Harvard. A comprehensive appraisal of Whitehead's work is difficult because Whitehead left no Nachlass; his family carried out his instructions that all of his papers be destroyed after his death. There is also no critical edition of Whitehead's writings.