ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Whitehead was a mathematician to the core, and makes us to understand his philosophy to understand the particular natures of his modes of thought—and very deliberately pluralize both. It provides the idea that an insufficient amount of attention has been paid to Whitehead the algebraist, leading to a frequent failure to appreciate some important functional characteristics of his philosophy. The chapter emphasizes the unity of Whitehead's thought as against the prominent interpretations that see a fundamental disruption between the natural philosophy of the triptych and the later metaphysical works. It contends here that no small part of the reason for this failure to take proper account of the unity of Whitehead's thought is the absence of a sufficiently nuanced appreciation of the nature of algebraic thinking. The chapter also provides evidence for a claim that is already present in Whitehead's first major publication, his Treatise on Universal Algebra.
