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, fisica, epistemologia, teologia e metafisica. Insieme a Bertrand Russell fu autore dei tre volumi di cui si compongono i Principia Mathematica, opera che si proponeva l'ambizioso programma di fondare la matematica sulla logica.
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.
— Alfred North Whitehead
Source: Citato in Gino Ditadi, Introduzione: L'animale buono da pensare, in I filosofi e gli animali, vol. 1, Isonomia editrice, Este, 1994, p. 51. ISBN 88-85944-12-4
— Alfred North Whitehead
Source: Da Una introduzione alla Matematica.
— Alfred North Whitehead
Source: Da Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead.
— Alfred North Whitehead
Source: Citato in Focus n. 108, p. 204.
— Alfred North Whitehead
Science and the modern world
— Alfred North Whitehead
1920s, The Aims of Education (1929), Context: For successful education there must always be a certain freshness in the knowledge dealt with. It must be either new in itself or invested with some novelty of application to the new world of new times. Knowledge does not keep any better than fish. You may be dealing with knowledge of the old species, with some old truth; but somehow it must come to the students, as it were, just drawn out of the sea and with the freshness of its immediate importance.
— Alfred North Whitehead
Attributed from posthumous publications, Context: The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervor, live for it, and, if need be, die for it.
p. 100; Ch. 12, April 28, 1938.
— Alfred North Whitehead
1920s, The Aims of Education (1929), Context: The essence of education is that it be religious. Pray, what is religious education? A religious education is an education which inculcates duty and reverence. Duty arises from our potential control over the course of events. Where attainable knowledge could have changed the issue, ignorance has the guilt of vice. And the foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity.
