ABSTRACT

Whitehead's theory of extension is intimately and consciously connected with both the basic structures of spatial reasoning and fundamental ideas of formal logic itself. This chapter emphasizes that the theory of extension is not a subject Whitehead casually tacked onto his metaphysics; rather, it is an ineliminable part of the very structure of reasoning internal to that metaphysics. The developed results of Whitehead's work on the problem of space display a fundamental connection to basic principles of logic itself, relations which Whitehead was aware of from the earliest stages of his professional career. The chapter concerns structural features, and the attention must be drawn to the "quantum of explanation". Extensive relatedness was something that Whitehead argued was of immediate relevance to the issue of the quantum; indeed, the quantum is at the center of his opening discussion of the technicalities relating to the coordinate division.