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. Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity.Alfred North Whitehead, OM FRS (15 February 1861 – 30 December 1947) was an English mathematician and philosopher. And yet all occasions proclaim themselves as actualities within the flux of a solid world, demanding a unity of interpretation. Elements which shine with immediate distinctness, in some circumstances, retire into penumbral shadow in other circumstances, and into black darkness on other occasions. The methodology of rational interpretation is the product of the fitful vagueness of consciousness. Every scientific memoir in its record of the ‘facts’ is shot through and through with interpretation. If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography. Our habitual experience is a complex of failure and success in the enterprise of interpretation. Its search for a rationalistic scheme is the search for more adequate criticism, and for more adequate justification, of the interpretations which we perforce employ. Philosophy does not initiate interpretations. When thought comes upon the scene, it finds the interpretations as matters of practice. Thus the understanding of the immediate brute fact requires its metaphysical interpretation as an item in a world with some systematic relation to it. But such universals, by their very character of universality, embody the potentiality of other facts with variant types of definiteness. “Whenever we attempt to express the matter of immediate experience, we find that its understanding leads us beyond itself, to its contemporaries, to its past, to its future, and to the universals in terms of which its definiteness is exhibited. Philosophy never reverts to its old position after the shock of a great philosopher.” A new idea introduces a new alternative and we are not less indebted to a thinker when we adopt the alternative which he discarded. The depositions of Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz,† Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel, merely mean that ideas which these men introduced into the philosophic tradition must be construed with limitations, adaptations, and inversions, either unknown to them, or even explicitly repudiated by them. This misapprehension of philosophic method has veiled the very considerable success of philosophy in providing generic notions which add lucidity to our apprehension of the facts of experience. Under the influence of mathematics, deduction has been foisted onto philosophy as its standard method, instead of taking its true place as an essential auxiliary mode of verification whereby to test the scope of generalities. “The primary method of mathematics is deduction the primary method of philosophy is descrip- tive generalization. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, "Seek simplicity and distrust it." We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity. It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. The importance of truth is that it adds to interest.Ĭreativity is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. In the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. Permanence can be snatched only out of flux and the passing moment can find its adequate intensity only by its submission to permanence. In the inescapable flux, there is something that abides in the overwhelming permanence, there is an element that escapes into flux.
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