Quotes About Whitehead

So comfortable would Plato feel seated at philosophy's seminar table that Alfred North Whitehead could famously write, "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

Whitehead reacted strongly against the idea of God as a cosmic tyrant, one who brings about everything.

It must be admitted that there is a degree of instability which is inconsistent with civilization. But, on the whole, the great ages have been unstable ages.

Necessity is the mother of invention" is a silly proverb. "Necessity is the mother of futile dodges" is much nearer the truth.

My criticism of Hegel procedure is that when in his discussion he arrives at a contradiction, he construes it as a crisis in the universe.

Change' is the description of the adventures of eternal objects in the evolving universe of actual things.

Christianity is the mother of science.

Religion increasingly is tending to degenerate into a decent formula wherewith to embellish a comfortable life.

It is the business of the future to be dangerous and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties.

Symbolism is no mere idle fancy or corrupt degeneration: it is inherent in the very texture of human life.

'HIM' is much more of a British, coming-of-age series, while 'Stranger Things' is very obviously a sci-fi drama.

So Whitehead's metaphysics doesn't fit very well on to physics as we understand the process of the world.

Teilhard shared with Whitehead, for example, the conviction that our own mental activity is an aspect of nature, not something that occurs outside of nature.

The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.

The silly question is the first intimation of some totally new development.

The cooperatives seem to have ended with the advent of Europeans along the coast, Europeans who on occasion killed the cooperative dolphins. There

Frege's work it followed that arithmetic, and pure mathematics generally, is nothing but a prolongation of deductive logic. This disproved Kant's theory that arithmetical propositions are 'synthetic' and involve a reference to time. The development of pure mathematics from logic was set forth in detail in Principia Mathematica, by Whitehead and myself.

Well it was not exactly a dissertation in logic, at least not the kind of logic you would find in Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica for instance. It looked more like mathematics; no formalized language was used.

Zombies are a great rhetorical prop to talk about people and paranoia, and they are a good vehicle for my misanthropy.

The total absence of humour from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.

The total absence of humour in the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.

In the Principia Mathematica, Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead attempted to give a rigorous foundation to mathematics using formal logic as their basis. They began with what they considered to be axioms, and used those to derive theorems of increasing complexity. By page 362, they had established enough to prove "1 + 1 = 2.

Pain could be killed. Sadness could not, but the drugs did shut its mouth for a time.

Sometimes such an experience bound one person to another; just as often the shame of one's powerlessness made all witnesses into enemies.