At 63, a mathematician with no philosophy training became a Harvard philosopher
Alfred North Whitehead spent decades on algebra and co-wrote Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell. Then, with no formal grounding in philosophy, he accepted a Harvard philosophy chair at 63 and produced a metaphysics claiming the world is made of interlocking processes rather than separate lumps of matter.
Whitehead was born in Ramsgate, Kent, on 15 February 1861, into a family of schoolmasters and clergy; his father ran a boys' academy before taking Anglican orders, and his brother Henry became Bishop of Madras. After Sherborne, where he shone at sport and mathematics, he read mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating in 1884 as fourth wrangler with a dissertation on Maxwell's electromagnetism. Trinity made him a fellow that year, and he stayed until 1910.
His 1898 Treatise on Universal Algebra studied algebraic structures in their own right, comparing Grassmann's extension theory, Boole's logic and Hamilton's quaternions. A planned second volume was abandoned when collaboration with his former pupil Russell took over. Their three-volume Principia Mathematica, published between 1910 and 1913, is ranked among the century's key works of mathematical logic, and Modern Library placed it 23rd among the best English-language nonfiction books of the 1900s.
In 1910 he quit Cambridge for London with no job lined up, spent a year unemployed, taught at University College, and in 1914 became professor of applied mathematics at the new Imperial College. As a dean and senate leader in the University of London he pushed through a history of science department, a Bachelor of Science degree and wider access for poorer students. Philosophy crept in around 1920 with The Concept of Nature, and he presided over the Aristotelian Society in 1922 and 1923.
Henry Osborn Taylor brought him to Harvard in 1924. Science and the Modern World in 1925 was greeted as an alternative to the mind-body split of Cartesian thinking, and his 1927 to 1928 lectures became Process and Reality, sometimes compared to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. That book founded process philosophy, which defines things by their relations to other processes; John B. Cobb has applied it to environmental ethics, and his idea of extensive abstraction underpins mereotopology, the study of parts, wholes and boundaries. He retired in 1937 and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 30 December 1947.
Source: Alfred North Whitehead
