Alfred North Whitehead – Against dualism

Abstract

English-language philosophical debate about the relation of mind (or soul) and body, and in parallel, cultural debate about the relation of the humanities and the natural sciences in education, drew in the twentieth century, and draws again now, on the writings of Al­fred North Whitehead (1861‒1947). The paper explains this. To do so, it describes White­head’s project in systematic metaphysics (or speculative cosmology), best known from Science and the Modern World (1926). Whitehead required metaphysics to be self-consis­tent, to be informed by and in turn to inform modern scientific knowledge (evolutionary theory, the theory of relativity), and to conform to the intuitions of everyday percep­tion. Trained in mathematics, his style of precise expression requires special comment; the conclusion was a “philosophy of organism” or “process philosophy”. He was a philo­sophical realist. His understanding of what this entailed led to a radical critique of “scien­tific materialism”, with all its philosophical failings, which, in his judgment, had been dominant in Western culture since the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. In four brief sections, the paper provides a background, describes the project in meta­physics, picks out the themes of causal efficacy in perception and of function for special discussion, and concludes with a summary of the importance of Whitehead to public de­bate about the direction of educated culture.