![]() Eric Whitehead died in action at the age of 19, while serving in the Royal Flying Corps during World War I. In 1890, Whitehead married Evelyn Wade, an Irish woman raised in France they had a daughter, Jessie Whitehead, and two sons, Thomas North Whitehead and Eric Whitehead. Career Įlected a fellow of Trinity in 1884, Whitehead would teach and write on mathematics and physics at the college until 1910, spending the 1890s writing his Treatise on Universal Algebra (1898), and the 1900s collaborating with his former pupil, Bertrand Russell, on the first edition of Principia Mathematica. He earned his BA from Trinity in 1884, and graduated as fourth wrangler. His academic advisor was Edward John Routh. In 1880, Whitehead began attending Trinity College, Cambridge, and studied mathematics. His childhood was described as over-protected, but when at school he excelled in sports and mathematics and was head prefect of his class. Whitehead was educated at Sherborne School, Dorset, then considered one of the best public schools in the country. Whitehead was apparently not particularly close with his mother, as he never mentioned her in any of his writings, and there is evidence that Whitehead's wife, Evelyn, had a low opinion of her. Whitehead's mother was Maria Sarah Whitehead, formerly Maria Sarah Buckmaster. Whitehead himself recalled both of them as being very successful schools, but that his grandfather was the more extraordinary man. His father, Alfred Whitehead, was a minister and schoolmaster of Chatham House Academy, a school for boys established by Thomas Whitehead, Alfred North's grandfather. Whitehead spent thirty years at Trinity, five as a student and twenty-five as a senior lecturer.Īlfred North Whitehead was born in Ramsgate, Kent, England, in 1861. Whewell's Court north range at Trinity College, Cambridge. Whitehead's process philosophy argues that "there is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have consequences for the world around us." For this reason, one of the most promising applications of Whitehead's thought in recent years has been in the area of ecological civilization and environmental ethics pioneered by John B. Today Whitehead's philosophical works – particularly Process and Reality – are regarded as the foundational texts of process philosophy. Whitehead argued that reality consists of processes rather than material objects, and that processes are best defined by their relations with other processes, thus rejecting the theory that reality is fundamentally constructed by bits of matter that exist independently of one another. He developed a comprehensive metaphysical system which radically departed from most of western philosophy. īeginning in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Whitehead gradually turned his attention from mathematics to philosophy of science, and finally to metaphysics. Principia Mathematica is considered one of the twentieth century's most important works in mathematical logic, and placed 23rd in a list of the top 100 English-language nonfiction books of the twentieth century by Modern Library. ![]() His most notable work in these fields is the three-volume Principia Mathematica (1910–1913), which he wrote with former student Bertrand Russell. In his early career Whitehead wrote primarily on mathematics, logic, and physics. He is best known as the defining figure of the philosophical school known as process philosophy, which today has found application to a wide variety of disciplines, including ecology, theology, education, physics, biology, economics, and psychology, among other areas. Alfred North Whitehead OM FRS FBA (15 February 1861 – 30 December 1947) was an English mathematician and philosopher.
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