Process Philosophy - Whitehead's Process and Reality

Whitehead's Process and Reality

Whitehead's background was an unusual one for a speculative metaphysician. Educated as a mathematician, he became, through his coauthorship and 1913 publication of Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell, a major logician. Later he wrote extensively on physics and its philosophy, proposing a theory of gravity in Minkowski space as a logically possible alternative to Einstein's general theory of relativity. He was conversant with the quantum mechanics that emerged in the 1920s. Whitehead did not begin teaching and writing on process and metaphysics until he joined Harvard at 63 years of age.

In Whitehead's Science and the Modern World (1925), he noted that the human intuitions and experiences of science, aesthetics, ethics, and religion influence the worldview of a community, but that in the last several centuries science dominates Western culture. Whitehead sought a holistic, comprehensive cosmology that provides a systematic descriptive theory of the world which can be used for the diverse human intuitions gained through ethical, aesthetic, religious, and scientific experiences, and not just the scientific.

Whitehead's influences were not restricted to philosophers or physicists or mathematicians. He was influenced by the French philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson (1859–1941), who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927. Process philosophy is also believed to have influenced some 20th-century modernists, such as D. H. Lawrence, William Faulkner and Charles Olson.