In memory of Alfred North Whitehead, who ironically spent the second half of his career demolishing the work of the first, and who, after teaching Russell to justify his lack of belief in teapots, became the modern Spinoza, a quantum mechanical philosopher of pantheism. Most careers would have been capped by writing, at 54 with his former student Russell, the Principia Mathematica, a set of axioms and inference rules in symbolic logic from which all mathematical truths could in principle be proven. Ironically, the ultimate substantive legacy of Principia Mathematica is mixed. It is generally accepted that Kurt Gödels 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 Russells book. In this way, Principia Mathematicas legacy might be described as its key role in disproving the possibility of achieving its own stated goals. But even before Godel refuted his work, Whitehead set to work demolishing the philosophical foundations of the cartesian world view. Shortly after Whiteheads book Process and Reality appeared in 1929, a famous 1930 review said: Not many people will read Whiteheads recent book in this generation; not many will read it in any generation. But its influence will radiate through concentric circles of popularization until the common man will think and work in the light of it, not knowing whence the light came. After a few decades of discussion and analysis one will be able to understand it more readily than can now be done. That goes a long way to explaining why I am so unfamiliar with Whitehead, yet so familiar with his ideas. He argued that people need to continually re-imagine their basic assumptions about how 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. Every scientific man in order to preserve his reputation has to say he dislikes metaphysics. What he means is he dislikes having his metaphysics criticized. In Whiteheads 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, Perhaps foremost among what Whitehead considered faulty metaphysical assumptions was the idea of substance materialism, which he rejected in favor of an event-based or process ontology in which transient events are primary and material substances/beings are abstractions. He also argued that the most basic elements of reality have experiential features, that in fact everything is constituted by its experience (i.e., even things like electrons experience). Whitehead referred to his metaphysical system as philosophy of organism, but it would become known more widely as process philosophy. Whitehead was convinced that the whole idea of material substances was misleading as a way of describing the ultimate nature of things. In his 1925 book Science and the Modern World, he wrote that There persists ... [a] fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter, or material, spread through space in a flux of configurations. In itself such a material is senseless, valueless, purposeless. It just does what it does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of its being. It is this assumption that I call scientific materialism. Also it is an assumption which I shall challenge as being entirely unsuited to the scientific situation at which we have now arrived. In Whiteheads view, there are a number of problems with substance materialism. First, by posing the idea of simple and enduring substances, substance materialism obscures and minimizes the importance of change. By thinking of any material thing (like a rock, or a person) as being fundamentally the same thing throughout time, with any changes to it being secondary to its nature, substance materialists fail to see that nothing ever stays the same. For Whitehead, change is fundamental and inescapable; he emphasizes that all things flow In Whiteheads view, then, concepts such as substance, matter, and form are problematic. These classical concepts fail to adequately account for change, and overlook the active and experiential nature of the most basic elements of the world. They are useful abstractions, but are not the worlds basic building blocks. What is ordinarily conceived of as a single person, for instance, is philosophically described as a continuum of overlapping events. After all, people change all the time, if only because they have aged by another second and have another seconds worth of experiences, and each of these seconds may be regarded as a distinct event. While these moments are clearly connected in what Whitehead calls a society of events (i.e. a temporally ordered series of events), they may be regarded as logically distinct from one another. By assuming that enduring substances are the most real and fundamental things in the universe, substance materialists have mistaken the abstract for the concrete (what Whitehead calls the fallacy of misplaced concreteness). I observe, most thinking antitheists still use the logic of Principia Mathematica. I prefer the multi valued and dialectical philosophy, which utterly rejects treating abstractions as objects, much less events. https://youtube/watch?v=6kGRhNBjfS0
Posted on: Tue, 30 Dec 2014 17:14:59 +0000
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