84-539: Contemporary Whitehead Studies (CWS) is an interdisciplinary book series that publishes manuscripts from scholars with contemporary and innovative approaches to the studies of Alfred North Whitehead . The book series was founded in 2009 with Rodopi as a special series in the Value Inquiry Book Series. In 2011 the series moved to Lexington Books , an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield . CWS especially seeks projects that: Contemporary Whitehead Studies
168-508: 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 was a Cambridge Apostle . In 1910, Whitehead resigned his senior lectureship in mathematics at Trinity and moved to London without first obtaining another job. After being unemployed for
252-457: A philosopher . In fact, he never had any formal training in philosophy beyond his undergraduate education . Early in his life, he showed great interest in and respect for philosophy and metaphysics , but it is evident that he considered himself a rank amateur. In one letter to his friend and former student Bertrand Russell , after discussing whether science aimed to be explanatory or merely descriptive, he wrote: "This further question lands us in
336-448: A bedrock of wisdom and help them to make connections between areas of knowledge that are usually regarded as separate. In order to make this sort of teaching a reality, however, Whitehead pointed to the need to minimize the importance of (or radically alter) standard examinations for school entrance. Whitehead writes: Every school is bound on pain of extinction to train its boys for a small set of definite examinations. No headmaster has
420-485: A comprehensive metaphysical system which radically departed from most of Western 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. Whitehead's philosophical works – particularly Process and Reality – are regarded as
504-487: A concept of complex states of mind whose worth as a whole was not proportionate to the sum of its parts. For both Moore and Bloomsbury, the greatest ethic goods were "the importance of personal relationships and the private life", as well as aesthetic appreciation: "art for art's sake". Bloomsbury reacted against current upper class English social rituals, "the bourgeois habits ... the conventions of Victorian life" with their emphasis on public achievement, in favour of
588-646: A copy of Principia Mathematica . The ultimate substantive legacy of Principia Mathematica is mixed. It is generally accepted that Kurt Gödel 's incompleteness theorem of 1931 definitively demonstrated that for any set of axioms and inference rules proposed to encapsulate mathematics, there would in fact be some truths of mathematics which could not be deduced from them, and hence that Principia Mathematica could never achieve its aims. However, Gödel could not have come to this conclusion without Whitehead and Russell's book. In this way, Principia Mathematica 's legacy might be described as its key role in disproving
672-593: A daughter, Jessie, and two sons, Thomas and Eric. Thomas followed his father to Harvard in 1931, to teach at the Business School . Eric died in action at the age of 19, while serving in the Royal Flying Corps during World War I. From 1910, the Whiteheads had a cottage in the village of Lockeridge , near Marlborough, Wiltshire ; from there he completed Principia Mathematica . The Whiteheads remained in
756-454: A formal group, it was a loose collective of friends and relatives closely associated with the University of Cambridge for the men and King's College London for the women, who at one point lived, worked or studied together near Bloomsbury , London. According to Ian Ousby , "although its members denied being a group in any formal sense, they were united by an abiding belief in the importance of
840-413: A foundational level of mathematics and logic that it took them until page 86 of Volume II to prove that 1+1=2, a proof humorously accompanied by the comment, "The above proposition is occasionally useful." Whitehead and Russell had thought originally that Principia Mathematica would take a year to complete; it ended up taking them ten years. When it came time for publication, the three-volume work
924-641: A free hand to develop his general education or his specialist studies in accordance with the opportunities of his school, which are created by its staff, its environment, its class of boys, and its endowments. I suggest that no system of external tests which aims primarily at examining individual scholars can result in anything but educational waste. Whitehead argued that curriculum should be developed specifically for its own students by its own staff, or else risk total stagnation, interrupted only by occasional movements from one group of inert ideas to another. Above all else in his educational writings, Whitehead emphasized
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#17330924605281008-406: A general consensus in academia that the development of comprehensive metaphysical systems was a waste of time because they were not subject to empirical testing . Whitehead was unimpressed by this objection. In the notes of one of his students for a 1927 class, Whitehead was quoted as saying: "Every scientific man in order to preserve his reputation has to say he dislikes metaphysics. What he means
1092-435: A large number of subjects, Whitehead advocated teaching a relatively few important concepts that the student could organically link to many different areas of knowledge, discovering their application in actual life. For Whitehead, education should be the exact opposite of the multidisciplinary , value-free school model – it should be trans disciplinary , and laden with values and general principles that provide students with
1176-422: A more informal and private focus on personal relationships and individual pleasure. E. M. Forster for example approved of "the decay of smartness and fashion as factors, and the growth of the idea of enjoyment", and asserted that "if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country". The Group "believed in pleasure ... They tried to get
1260-472: A new world. Whitehead's philosophy of education might adequately be summarized in his statement that "knowledge does not keep any better than fish". In other words, bits of disconnected knowledge are meaningless; all knowledge must find some imaginative application to the students' own lives, or else it becomes so much useless trivia, and the students themselves become good at parroting facts but not thinking for themselves. Whitehead did not begin his career as
1344-608: A number of high administrative positions within the University of London system, of which Imperial College London was a member at the time. He was elected dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of London in late 1918 (a post he held for four years), a member of the University of London's Senate in 1919, and chairman of the Senate's Academic (leadership) Council in 1920, a post which he held until he departed for America in 1924. Whitehead
1428-683: A number of ways the blooming of Bloomsbury. Virginia Woolf was writing and publishing her most widely read modernist novels and essays , and E. M. Forster completed A Passage to India , a highly regarded novel on British imperialism in India . Forster wrote no more novels but he became one of England's most influential essayists. Duncan Grant, and then Vanessa Bell, had single-artist exhibitions. Lytton Strachey wrote his biographies of two queens, Queen Victoria (1921) and Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History (1928). Desmond MacCarthy and Leonard Woolf engaged in friendly rivalry as literary editors, respectively of
1512-463: A spirit of agnosticism and were strongly influenced by G.E. Moore 's Principia Ethica (1903) and by A. N. Whitehead's and Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica (1910–13), in the light of which they searched for definitions of the good, the true, and the beautiful". Alfred's brother Henry became Bishop of Madras and wrote the closely observed ethnographic account Village Gods of South-India (Calcutta: Association Press, 1921). Whitehead
1596-538: A uniform method of interpretation of the various algebras" presumably would have been developed in Volume II, had Whitehead completed it. Further work on the subject was minimal until the early 1930s when Garrett Birkhoff and Øystein Ore began publishing on universal algebras. Principia Mathematica (1910–1913) is Whitehead's most famous mathematical work. Written with former student Bertrand Russell , Principia Mathematica
1680-640: A year, he accepted a position as lecturer in applied mathematics and mechanics at University College London but was passed over a year later for the Goldsmid Chair of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics, a position for which he had hoped to be seriously considered. In 1914, Whitehead accepted a position as professor of applied mathematics at the newly chartered Imperial College London , where his old friend Andrew Forsyth had recently been appointed chief professor of mathematics. In 1918, Whitehead's academic responsibilities began to seriously expand as he accepted
1764-630: Is affiliated with the Whitehead Research Project . Alfred North Whitehead Alfred North Whitehead OM FRS FBA (15 February 1861 – 30 December 1947) was an English mathematician and philosopher . He created the philosophical school known as process philosophy , which has been applied in a wide variety of disciplines, including ecology , theology , education , physics , biology , economics , and psychology . In his early career Whitehead wrote primarily on mathematics , logic , and physics . He wrote
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#17330924605281848-429: Is considered one of the twentieth century's most important works in mathematics, and placed 23rd in a list of the top 100 English-language nonfiction books of the twentieth century by Modern Library . Principia Mathematica ' s purpose was to describe a set of axioms and inference rules in symbolic logic from which all mathematical truths could in principle be proven. Whitehead and Russell were working on such
1932-572: Is currently working on a critical edition of Whitehead's published and unpublished works. The first volume of the Edinburgh Critical Edition of the Complete Works of Alfred North Whitehead was published in 2017 by Paul A. Bogaard and Jason Bell as The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead, 1924–1925: The Philosophical Presuppositions of Science . In addition to numerous articles on mathematics, Whitehead wrote three major books on
2016-484: Is he dislikes having his metaphysics criticized." In Whitehead's view, scientists and philosophers make metaphysical assumptions about how the universe works all the time, but such assumptions are not easily seen precisely because they remain unexamined and unquestioned. While Whitehead acknowledged that "philosophers can never hope finally to formulate these metaphysical first principles ", he argued that people need to continually reimagine their basic assumptions about how
2100-522: Is really remarkable, considering the variety of its themes." A Treatise on Universal Algebra sought to examine Hermann Grassmann 's theory of extension ("Ausdehnungslehre"), Boole 's algebra of logic, and Hamilton's quaternions (this last number system was to be taken up in Volume II, which was never finished due to Whitehead's work on Principia Mathematica ). Whitehead wrote in the preface: Such algebras have an intrinsic value for separate detailed study; also they are worthy of comparative study, for
2184-474: Is regarded as one of the most important works in mathematical logic of the 20th century. In addition to his legacy as a co-writer of Principia Mathematica , Whitehead's theory of "extensive abstraction" is considered foundational for the branch of ontology and computer science known as " mereotopology ," a theory describing spatial relations among wholes, parts, parts of parts, and the boundaries between parts. In A Treatise on Universal Algebra (1898),
2268-453: The New Statesman and The Nation and Athenaeum , thus fuelling animosities that saw Bloomsbury dominating the cultural scene. Roger Fry wrote and lectured widely on art; meanwhile, Clive Bell applied Bloomsbury values to his book Civilization (1928), which Leonard Woolf saw as limited and elitist, describing Bell as a "wonderful organiser of intellectual greyhound racing tracks". In
2352-587: The Aristotelian Society from 1922 to 1923. In 1924, Henry Osborn Taylor invited the 63-year-old Whitehead to join the faculty at Harvard University as a professor of philosophy. The Whiteheads would spend the rest of their lives in the United States. During his time at Harvard, Whitehead produced his most important philosophical contributions. In 1925, he wrote Science and the Modern World , which
2436-618: The Ceylon Civil Service to marry Virginia in 1912. Cambridge Apostle friendships brought into the group Desmond MacCarthy, his wife Molly, and E. M. Forster. The group met not only in their homes in Bloomsbury, central London , but also at countryside retreats. There are two significant ones near Lewes in Sussex: Charleston Farmhouse , where Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant moved in 1916, and Monk's House (now owned by
2520-567: The Clapham Sect ". It was an informal network of an influential group of artists, art critics, writers and an economist, many of whom lived in the West Central 1 district of London known as Bloomsbury . They were "spiritually" similar to the Clapham group who supported its members' careers: "The Bloomsberries promoted one another's work and careers just as the original Claphamites did, as well as
2604-561: The Munich Agreement . Virginia Woolf published her radical feminist polemic Three Guineas that shocked some of her fellow members, including Keynes who had enjoyed the gentler A Room of One's Own (1929). Keynes read his My Early Beliefs to The Memoir Club. Clive Bell published an appeasement pamphlet (he later supported the war), and E. M. Forster wrote an early version of his famous essay " What I Believe " with its choice of personal relations over patriotism: his quiet assertion in
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2688-564: The National Trust ), in Rodmell , owned by Virginia and Leonard Woolf from 1919. Much about Bloomsbury appears to be controversial, including its membership and name: indeed, some would maintain that "the three words 'the Bloomsbury group' have been so much used as to have become almost unusable". Close friends, brothers, sisters, and even sometimes partners of the friends were not necessarily members of Bloomsbury: Keynes's wife Lydia Lopokova
2772-703: The "Friday Club" and Thoby ran "Thursday Evenings", which became the basis for the Bloomsbury Group, which to some was really "Cambridge in London". Thoby's premature death in 1906 brought them more firmly together and they became what is now known as the "Old Bloomsbury" group who met in earnest beginning in 1912. In the 1920s and 1930s the group shifted when the original members died and the next generation had reached adulthood. The Bloomsbury Group, mostly from upper middle-class professional families, formed part of "an intellectual aristocracy which could trace itself back to
2856-611: The "philosophy of organism," but it would become known more widely as " process philosophy ." Bloomsbury Group The Bloomsbury Group was a group of associated British writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists in the early 20th century. Among the people involved in the group were Virginia Woolf , John Maynard Keynes , E. M. Forster , Vanessa Bell , and Lytton Strachey . Their works and outlook deeply influenced literature , aesthetics , criticism , and economics , as well as modern attitudes towards feminism , pacifism , and sexuality . Although popularly thought of as
2940-453: The 1930s brought new criticism from younger writers of "what the last lot had done (Bloomsbury, Modernism, Eliot) in favour of what they thought of as urgent hard-hitting realism"; while " Wyndham Lewis 's The Apes of God , which called Bloomsbury élitist, corrupt and talentless, caused a stir" of its own. The most telling criticism, however, came perhaps from within the Group's own ranks, when on
3024-497: The Apostles they also encountered the analytic philosophers G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell who were revolutionizing British philosophy at the start of the 20th century. Distinguishing between ends and means was a commonplace of ethics, but what made Moore's Principia Ethica (1903) so important for the philosophical basis of Bloomsbury thought was Moore's conception of intrinsic worth as distinct from instrumental value . As with
3108-445: The BBC. John Maynard Keynes's The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936) made him one of the century's most influential economists. He died in 1946 after being much involved in monetary negotiations with the United States. The diversity yet collectivity of Later Bloomsbury's ideas and achievements can be summed up in a series of credos that were made in 1938, the year of
3192-479: The English Census of 1891 as living with Alfred's mother and father. Lowe notes that there appears to have been mutual dislike between Whitehead's wife, Evelyn, and his mother, Maria. Griffin relates how Bertrand Russell, a colleague and collaborator of Whitehead, was a very close friend of Whitehead and of his wife, Evelyn. Griffin retells Russell's story of how, one evening in 1901, "they found Evelyn Whitehead in
3276-461: The Stephen brothers, were members of "the exclusive Cambridge society, the ' Apostles '". At Trinity in 1899 Lytton Strachey , Leonard Woolf , Saxon Sydney-Turner and Clive Bell became good friends with Thoby Stephen , and it was through Thoby and Adrian Stephen 's sisters Vanessa and Virginia that the men met the women of Bloomsbury when they came down to London. In 1905 Vanessa began
3360-564: The United States after moving to Harvard in 1924. Alfred retired from Harvard in 1937 and remained in Cambridge, Massachusetts , until his death on 30 December 1947. The two-volume biography of Whitehead by Victor Lowe is the most definitive presentation of the life of Whitehead. However, many details of Whitehead's life remain obscure because he left no Nachlass (personal archive); his family carried out his instructions that all of his papers be destroyed after his death. Additionally, Whitehead
3444-534: The Woolfs founded their Hogarth Press , which would publish T. S. Eliot , Katherine Mansfield , and many others including Virginia herself along with the standard English translations of Freud . Then in 1918 Lytton Strachey published his critique of Victorianism in the shape of four ironic biographies in Eminent Victorians , which added to the arguments about Bloomsbury that continue to this day, and "brought him
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3528-458: The arts." The historian C. J. Coventry , resurrecting an older argument by Raymond Williams , disputes the existence of the group and the extent of its impact, describing it as "curio" for those interested in Keynes and Woolf. All male members of the Bloomsbury Group, except Duncan Grant , were educated at Cambridge (either at Trinity or King's College ). Most of them, except Clive Bell and
3612-425: The background of the Cambridge spies , Andrew Sinclair wrote about the Bloomsbury group: "rarely in the field of human endeavour has so much been written about so few who achieved so little". American philosopher Martha Nussbaum was quoted in 1999 as saying "I don't like anything that sets itself up as an in-group or an elite, whether it is the Bloomsbury group or Derrida ". Raymond Williams saw Bloomsbury as
3696-564: The coming of war again her mental instability recurred, and she drowned herself in 1941. In the previous decade she had become one of the century's most famous feminist writers with three more novels, and a series of essays including the moving late memoir " A Sketch of the Past ". It was also in the 1930s that Desmond MacCarthy became perhaps the most widely read—and heard—literary critic with his columns in The Sunday Times and his broadcasts for
3780-532: The concept of form above content in works of art": it has been suggested that, with their "focus on form ...Bell's ideas have come to stand in for, perhaps too much so, the aesthetic principles of the Bloomsbury Group". The establishment's hostility to post-impressionism made Bloomsbury controversial, and controversial they have remained. Clive Bell polemicized post-impressionism in his widely read book Art (1914), basing his aesthetics partly on Roger Fry's art criticism and G. E. Moore's moral philosophy; and as
3864-535: The darkening 1930s, Bloomsbury began to die: "Bloomsbury itself was hardly any longer a focus". A year after publishing a collection of brief lives, Portraits in Miniature (1931), Lytton Strachey died; shortly afterwards Carrington shot herself. Roger Fry died in 1934. Vanessa and Clive's eldest son, Julian Bell , was killed in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War . Virginia Woolf wrote Fry's biography , but with
3948-457: The distinction between love (an intrinsic state) and monogamy (a behavior, i.e. instrumental), Moore's differentiation between intrinsic and instrumental value allowed the Bloomsburies to maintain an ethical high-ground based on intrinsic merit, independent of, and without reference to, the consequences of their actions. For Moore, intrinsic value depended on an indeterminable intuition of good and
4032-481: The eve of war Keynes gave a "nostalgic and disillusioned account of the pure sweet air of G. E. Moore, that belief in undisturbed individualism, that Utopianism based on a belief in human reasonableness and decency, that refusal to accept the idea of civilisation as 'a thin and precarious crust' ... Keynes's fond, elegiac repudiation of his "early beliefs", in the light of current affairs ("We completely misunderstood human nature, including our own")". In his book on
4116-544: The face of the increasingly totalitarian claims of both left and right that "personal relations ... love and loyalty to an individual can run counter to the claims of the State". In March 1920 Molly MacCarthy began the Memoir Club to help Desmond and herself write their memoirs; and also "for their friends to regroup after the war (with the proviso that they should always tell the truth)". It met until 1956 or 1964. The club
4200-518: The foundational texts of process philosophy. 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 the 21st century has been in the area of ecological civilization and environmental ethics pioneered by John B. Cobb . Alfred North Whitehead
4284-417: The group members show an overlapping, interconnected similarity of ideas and attitudes that helped to keep the friends and relatives together, reflecting in large part the influence of G. E. Moore : "the essence of what Bloomsbury drew from Moore is contained in his statement that 'one's prime objects in life were love, the creation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience and the pursuit of knowledge'". Through
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#17330924605284368-439: The growth in unity and interconnection of mathematics as a whole, as well as an examination of the mutual influence of mathematics and philosophy, language, and physics. Although the book is little-read, in some ways it prefigures certain points of Whitehead's later work in philosophy and metaphysics . Whitehead showed a deep concern for educational reform at all levels. In addition to his numerous individually written works on
4452-511: The highly successful Howards End in 1910, the group were late developers. There were stable marriages and varied and complicated affairs among the individual members. Lytton Strachey and his cousin and lover Duncan Grant became close friends of the Stephen sisters, Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. Duncan Grant had affairs with siblings Vanessa Bell and Adrian Stephen, as well as David Garnett, Maynard Keynes, and James Strachey. Clive Bell married Vanessa in 1907, and Leonard Woolf returned from
4536-495: The importance of imagination and the free play of ideas. In his essay "Universities and Their Function", Whitehead writes provocatively on imagination: Imagination is not to be divorced from the facts: it is a way of illuminating the facts. It works by eliciting the general principles which apply to the facts, as they exist, and then by an intellectual survey of alternative possibilities which are consistent with those principles. It enables men to construct an intellectual vision of
4620-413: The incredulous, weirdly emphasised Strachey voice". After World War I, as the members of the Group "began to be famous, the execration increased, and the caricature of an idle, snobbish and self-congratulatory rentier class , promoting its own brand of high culture began to take shape": as Forster self-mockingly put it, "In came the nice fat dividends, up rose the lofty thoughts". The growing threats of
4704-611: The intervening generations of their grandparents and parents." A historical feature of these friends and relations is that their close relationships all pre-dated their fame as writers, artists, and thinkers. The group had ten core members: In addition to these ten, Leonard Woolf , in the 1960s, listed as "Old Bloomsbury" Adrian and Karin Stephen , Saxon Sydney-Turner , and Molly MacCarthy , with Julian Bell , Quentin Bell and Angelica Bell , and David Garnett as "later additions". Except for Forster, who published three novels before
4788-691: The maximum of pleasure out of their personal relations. If this meant triangles or more complicated geometric figures, well then, one accepted that too". Yet at the same time, they shared a sophisticated, civilized, and highly articulated ideal of pleasure. As Virginia Woolf put it, their "triumph is in having worked out a view of life which was not by any means corrupt or sinister or merely intellectual; rather ascetic and austere indeed; which still holds, and keeps them dining together, and staying together, after 20 years". Politically, Bloomsbury held mainly left-liberal stances (opposed to militarism , for example); but its "clubs and meetings were not activist, like
4872-481: The middle of what appeared to be a dangerous and acutely painful angina attack. ... [but] It seems that she suffered from a psychosomatic disorder ... [and] the danger was illusory." Griffin posits that Russell exaggerated the drama of her illness, and that both Evelyn and Russell were habitually given to melodrama. Intensity of emotion was encouraged by their avant-garde associates in the turbulent Bloomsbury Group which "discussed aesthetic and philosophical questions in
4956-477: The most basic elements of reality can all be regarded as experiential, indeed that everything is constituted by its experience . He used the term "experience" very broadly so that even inanimate processes such as electron collisions are said to manifest some degree of experience. In this, he went against Descartes' separation of two different kinds of real existence, either exclusively material or else exclusively mental. Whitehead referred to his metaphysical system as
5040-442: The nature of mathematics, its unity and internal structure, and its applicability to nature. Whitehead wrote in the opening chapter: The object of the following Chapters is not to teach mathematics, but to enable students from the very beginning of their course to know what the science is about, and why it is necessarily the foundation of exact thought as applied to natural phenomena. The book can be seen as an attempt to understand
5124-412: The need to expand algebraic structures beyond the associatively multiplicative class. In a review Alexander Macfarlane wrote: "The main idea of the work is not unification of the several methods, nor generalization of ordinary algebra so as to include them, but rather the comparative study of their several structures." In a separate review, G. B. Mathews wrote, "It possesses a unity of design which
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#17330924605285208-484: The ocean of metaphysic, onto which my profound ignorance of that science forbids me to enter." Ironically, in later life, Whitehead would become one of the 20th century's foremost metaphysicians . However, interest in metaphysics – the philosophical investigation of the nature of the universe and existence – had become unfashionable by the time Whitehead began writing in earnest about it in the 1920s. The ever-more impressive accomplishments of empirical science had led to
5292-421: The political organisations to which many of Bloomsbury's members also belonged", and they would be criticised for that by their 1930s successors, who by contrast were "heavily touched by the politics which Bloomsbury had rejected". The campaign for women's suffrage added to the controversial nature of Bloomsbury, as Virginia Woolf represented the group in the fictional The Years and Night and Day works about
5376-430: The possibility of achieving its own stated goals. But beyond this somewhat ironic legacy, the book popularized modern mathematical logic and drew important connections between logic, epistemology , and metaphysics . Unlike Whitehead's previous two books on mathematics, An Introduction to Mathematics (1911) was not aimed exclusively at professional mathematicians but was intended for a larger audience. The book covered
5460-422: The sake of the light thereby thrown on the general theory of symbolic reasoning, and on algebraic symbolism in particular... The idea of a generalized conception of space has been made prominent, in the belief that the properties and operations involved in it can be made to form a uniform method of interpretation of the various algebras. Whitehead, however, had no results of a general nature. His hope of "form[ing]
5544-529: The subject, Whitehead was appointed by Britain's Prime Minister David Lloyd George as part of a 20-person committee to investigate the educational systems and practices of the UK in 1921 and recommend reform. Whitehead's most complete work on education is the 1929 book The Aims of Education and Other Essays , which collected numerous essays and addresses by Whitehead on the subject published between 1912 and 1927. The essay from which Aims of Education derived its name
5628-468: The subject: A Treatise on Universal Algebra (1898), Principia Mathematica (co-written with Bertrand Russell and published in three volumes between 1910 and 1913), and An Introduction to Mathematics (1911). The former two books were aimed exclusively at professional mathematicians , while the latter book was intended for a larger audience, covering the history of mathematics and its philosophical foundations . Principia Mathematica in particular
5712-650: The suffrage movement. Roger Fry joined the group in 1910. His Post-Impressionist exhibitions of 1910 and 1912 involved Bloomsbury in a second revolution following on the Cambridge philosophical one. This time the Bloomsbury painters were much involved and influenced. Fry and other Bloomsbury artists rejected the traditional distinction between fine and decorative art. These "Bloomsbury assumptions" are reflected in members' criticisms of materialistic realism in painting and fiction, influenced above all by Clive Bell's "concept of 'Significant Form', which separated and elevated
5796-451: The term universal algebra had essentially the same meaning that it has today: the study of algebraic structures themselves, rather than examples ("models") of algebraic structures. Whitehead credits William Rowan Hamilton and Augustus De Morgan as originators of the subject matter, and James Joseph Sylvester with coining the term itself. At the time, structures such as Lie algebras and hyperbolic quaternions drew attention to
5880-512: The three-volume Principia Mathematica (1910–1913), with his former student Bertrand Russell . 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 . Beginning in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Whitehead gradually turned his attention from mathematics to philosophy of science , and finally to metaphysics . He developed
5964-610: The triumph he had always longed for ... The book was a sensation". The following year came J. M. Keynes's influential attack on the Versailles Peace Treaty : The Economic Consequences of the Peace established Maynard as a Neo-Classical economist and political economist of international eminence. Bloomsbury members became known for distinctive garments; Woolf in particular was opposed to conventions surrounding formal attire, such as "dressing for dinner". The 1920s were in
6048-706: The universe works if philosophy and science are to make any real progress, even if that progress remains permanently asymptotic . For this reason, Whitehead regarded metaphysical investigations as essential to both good science and good philosophy. Perhaps foremost among what Whitehead considered faulty metaphysical assumptions was the Cartesian idea that reality is fundamentally constructed of bits of matter that exist totally independently of one another, which he rejected in favour of an event -based or "process" ontology in which events are primary and are fundamentally interrelated and dependent on one another. He also argued that
6132-532: The upheavals and dislocations of war, in many ways were even strengthened by them". Most but not all of them were conscientious objectors. Politically, the members of Bloomsbury had liberal and socialist leanings. Though the war dispersed Old Bloomsbury, the individuals continued to develop their careers. E. M. Forster followed his successful novels with Maurice which he could not publish because it treated homosexuality untragically. In 1915, Virginia Woolf brought out her first novel, The Voyage Out ; and in 1917
6216-502: The war came he argued that "in these days of storm and darkness, it seemed right that at the shrine of civilization - in Bloomsbury, I mean - the lamp should be tended assiduously". Old Bloomsbury's development was affected, along with much of modernist culture, by the First World War : "the small world of Bloomsbury was later said by some on its outskirts to have been irretrievably shattered", though in fact its friendships "survived
6300-562: Was Jane North (1776–1847), whose maiden surname was given to Whitehead, and several other members of his family over time. His mother, Maria Buckmaster had eleven siblings. The son of her brother Thomas, Walter Selby Buckmaster , was twice an Olympics silver medal winner for Polo (1900, 1908) for Britain, and is said to be "one of the finest polo players England has ever produced". Whitehead does not appear to have been close to his mother, although he and Evelyn (full name: Evelyn Ada Maud Rice Willoughby Wade), whom he married in 1890, are recorded in
6384-591: Was able to exert his newfound influence to successfully lobby for a new history of science department, help establish a Bachelor of Science degree (previously only Bachelor of Arts degrees had been offered), and make the school more accessible to less wealthy students. Toward the end of his time in England, Whitehead turned his attention to philosophy . Though he had no advanced training in philosophy, his philosophical work soon became highly regarded. After publishing The Concept of Nature in 1920, he served as president of
6468-499: Was born in Ramsgate , Kent , England, in 1861. His father, Alfred Whitehead, became an Anglican minister after being headmaster of Chatham House Academy , a school for boys previously headed by Alfred's father, Thomas Whitehead. Whitehead himself recalled both of them as being very successful schoolmasters, with his grandfather being the more "remarkable" man. Whitehead's mother was Maria Sarah Buckmaster. Her maternal great-grandmother
6552-550: Was delivered as an address in 1916 when Whitehead was president of the London Branch of the Mathematical Association . In it, he cautioned against the teaching of what he called " inert ideas " – ideas that are disconnected scraps of information, with no application to real life or culture. He opined that "education with inert ideas is not only useless: it is, above all things, harmful." Rather than teach small parts of
6636-463: Was educated at Sherborne , a prominent English public school , where he excelled in sports and mathematics and was head prefect of his class. In 1880, he began attending Trinity College, Cambridge , and studied mathematics. His academic advisor was Edward Routh . He earned his B.A. from Trinity in 1884, writing his dissertation on James Clerk Maxwell 's A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism , and graduated as fourth wrangler . Elected
6720-678: Was immediately hailed as an alternative to the Cartesian dualism then prevalent in popular science. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences that same year. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1926. Lectures from 1927 to 1928, were published in 1929 as a book named Process and Reality , which has been compared to Immanuel Kant 's Critique of Pure Reason . In 1890, Whitehead married Evelyn Wade, an Irishwoman raised in France; they had
6804-459: Was known for his "almost fanatical belief in the right to privacy," and for writing very few personal letters of the kind that would help to gain insight on his life. Wrote Lowe in his preface, "No professional biographer in his right mind would touch him." Led by Executive Editor Brian G. Henning and General Editor George R. Lucas Jr., the Whitehead Research Project of the Center for Process Studies
6888-508: Was made up of members of the Bloomsbury Group, a loose collective of artists, writers, intellectuals, and philosophers. Some of the core members of the Bloomsbury Group included Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, John Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Sir Desmond MacCarthy, and Duncan Grant. Early complaints focused on a perceived cliquiness: "on personal mannerisms—the favourite phrases ('ex-quisitely civilized', and 'How simply too extraordinary!'),
6972-465: Was only reluctantly accepted into the group, and there were certainly "writers who were at some time close friends of Virginia Woolf, but who were distinctly not 'Bloomsbury': T. S. Eliot , Katherine Mansfield , Hugh Walpole ". Another is Vita Sackville-West , who became " Hogarth Press 's best-selling author". Members cited in "other lists might include Ottoline Morrell , or Dora Carrington , or James and Alix Strachey ". The lives and works of
7056-458: Was so long (more than 2,000 pages) and its audience so narrow (professional mathematicians) that it was initially published at a loss of 600 pounds, 300 of which was paid by Cambridge University Press , 200 by the Royal Society of London , and 50 apiece by Whitehead and Russell themselves. Despite the initial loss, today there is likely no major academic library in the world which does not hold
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