ABSTRACT
Alfred North Whitehead occupies a remarkable position in twentieth century philosophy. Whitehead studied mathematics in Cambridge. In 1884 he submitted a dissertation on James Clerk Maxwell’s epochal Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, which earned him election as a fellow of Trinity College. Whitehead’s first book was A Treatise on Universal Algebra with Applications, a systematic compendium of the algebraic revolution of the nineteenth century, covering Hamilton’s quaternions, Grassmann’s geometric calculus of extensions, and Boole’s algebra of logic. Human beings and other enduring objects are obviously not events or even collections of events, so, as in his nature philosophy, Whitehead tries to explain what they are. Whitehead gave the clearest account of the systematic role of metaphysics of any philosopher in recent centuries. He wrote, “Speculative philosophy is the endeavour to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted.
