Alfred North Whitehead, born Feb. 15, 1861, was one of the most influential mathematician-philosophers of the 20th century. Known for his work with Bertrand Russell on the three-volume masterpiece Principia Mathematica, as well as for his metaphysics, Whitehead devoted his career to comprehending the nature of mathematics, science, and logic.
Whitehead spent the early part of his career studying algebra and associated systems of symbolic reasoning. But in 1900, after attending a meeting in Paris where mathematician Giuseppe Peano described how the foundations of arithmetic could be explained through symbolic logic, Whitehead and Russell set to work on understanding mathematics through logic. In 1903 Russell published Principles of Mathematics (1903), which presented a reformed formal logic, from which all pure mathematics could be derived. Whitehead then worked with Russell to derive the foundations of mathematics from symbolic logic, which led to Principia Mathematica (published between 1910 and 1913).
For the next decade and a half, Whitehead attempted to build a philosophical foundation for physics and to understand the principles of nature and perceptual basis for scientific knowledge. He also tackled scientific materialism, criticizing this worldview for its excessive rationalization of nature, removing from it its inherent, abstract value. These pursuits were each explained in a series of writings by Whitehead, which served to popularize philosophy and earned him a reputation as a distinguished writer on the subject.
In the late 1920s, Whitehead developed his metaphysics, “the philosophy of the organism.” In his metaphysics, he sought to achieve an understanding of reality and to unify mind and nature in philosophical thought, thereby overcoming the dualism that he felt had fundamentally unhinged modern philosophy. He saw humans as living in the abstract world of nature and concluded that there was no basis for the separation of mind from nature. His unity was a process, dependent on interconnected parts, continuous through time, unlimited, and hence incomplete.
Whitehead described his notion of the ultimate structure of existence in Process and Reality (1929), a work considered to be one of the greatest 20th-century contributions to metaphysics. Process and Reality was followed by the more accessible Adventures of Ideas (1933), which summarized for the lay reader his metaphysics and discussed the pursuit of adventure and newness as fundamental for understanding and appreciating the nature of truth and beauty.