Frasi di Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
Data di nascita: 15. Febbraio 1861
Data di morte: 30. Dicembre 1947
Alfred North Whitehead è stato un filosofo e matematico britannico.
Si occupò di logica, matematica, epistemologia, teologia e metafisica. Insieme a Bertrand Russell fu autore dei tre volumi di cui si compongono i Principia Mathematica.
In La scienza e il mondo moderno , Processo e realtà e Avventure di idee , Whitehead tentò una mediazione tra l'istanza filosofica e la visione scientifica del mondo e formulò una metafisica organicistica, basata sulle idee di Leibniz e di Bergson.
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Frasi Alfred North Whitehead
„Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality.“
— Alfred North Whitehead
Context: Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality.
Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing. The limitation, and the basis arising from what is already actual, are both of them necessary and interconnected.
Religion in the Making (February 1926), Lecture IV: "Truth and Criticism" http://www.mountainman.com.au/whiteh_4.htm.
„Some philosophers fail to distinguish propositions from judgments; … But in the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.“
— Alfred North Whitehead
Context: Some philosophers fail to distinguish propositions from judgments; … But in the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is that it adds to interest.
p. 259.
Variant: It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. This statement is almost a tautology. For the energy of operation of a proposition in an occasion of experience is its interest, and its importance. But of course a true proposition is more apt to be interesting than a false one.
As extended upon in Adventures of Ideas (1933), Pt. 4, Ch. 16.
„In all philosophic theory there is an ultimate which is actual in virtue of its accidents.“
— Alfred North Whitehead
Context: In all philosophic theory there is an ultimate which is actual in virtue of its accidents. It is only then capable of characterization through its accidental embodiments, and apart from these accidents is devoid of actuality. In the philosophy of organism this ultimate is termed creativity; and God] is its primordial, non-temporal accident. In [[monistic philosophies, Spinoza's or absolute idealism, this ultimate is God, who is also equivalently termed The Absolute. In such monistic schemes, the ultimate is illegitimately allowed a final, eminent reality, beyond that ascribed to any of its accidents. In this general position the philosophy of organism seems to approximate more to some strains of Indian, or Chinese, thought, than to western Asiatic, or European, thought. One side makes process ultimate; the other side makes fact ultimate.
Pt. I, ch. 1, sec. 2.
„Consciousness is only the last and greatest of such elements by which the selective character of the individual obscures the external totality from which it originates and which it embodies.“
— Alfred North Whitehead
Context: Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity. Each actual occasion contributes to the circumstances of its origin additional formative elements deepening its own peculiar individuality. Consciousness is only the last and greatest of such elements by which the selective character of the individual obscures the external totality from which it originates and which it embodies. An actual individual, of such higher grade, has truck with the totality of things by reason of its sheer actuality; but it has attained its individual depth of being by a selective emphasis limited to its own purposes. The task of philosophy is to recover the totality obscured by the selection.
Pt. I, ch. 1, sec. 6.
