Whitehead, Alfred North(1861–1947)
Alfred North Whitehead, the philosopher and mathematician, made one of the outstanding attempts in his generation to produce a comprehensive metaphysical system that would take account of scientific cosmology.
Whitehead was born at Ramsgate on the Isle of Thanet and wrote of his boyhood in a country vicarage on the East Kent coast in the "Autobiographical Notes" (The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, pp. 3–14) and, more vividly, in some of the essays in Essays in Science and Philosophy (pp. 3–52). The religious (Anglican) background of his home and the experience of companionship with strong characters in a close-knit community made impressions that left their mark on his later philosophy. With these went a Wordsworthian sense of man's continuity with nature. In his education at Sherborne, an ancient public school in Dorset, he was taught the classics and history, less in a detached spirit of scholarship than as exercises in the study of what Michael Oakeshott has called "the practical past"—a living tradition illustrating general ideas and pointing to analogies in contemporary life. This approach to history remained with him and is apparent in his philosophical books, especially Science and the Modern World and Adventures of Ideas.
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