Word: whitehead
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Every nail in the surrealistic set has been driven home by 'Cliffe freshmen, and the actresses are all from the Class of 1951: Joan Rice, Henrietta Broyles, Martha Webb, and Gail Whitehead...
Twin Sisters. The first of Whitehead's 22 books (A Treatise on Universal Algebra) was published in 1898; his final volume (Essays in Science and Philosophy) appeared last year (TIME, May 12). After a nine-year collaboration with his famous pupil, Bertrand Russell, Whitehead wrote the monumental Principia Mathematica (1910). This book approached mathematics not as a science of magnitude but as a science of deduction; it undertook to replace two existing sciences-logic and mathematics-by one new science, mathematical logic. Because Whitehead felt that "conventional English is the twin sister to barren thought" and that words...
After unifying mathematics and logic, Whitehead moved out into bigger playgrounds. "Philosophy," he remarked, "asks the simple question, 'What is it all about?' " Modern science had introduced new, disturbing concepts like relativity and the quantum theory that never bothered 19th Century thinkers. One of the first and ablest philosophers of modern science, Whitehead in Science and the Modern World (1925) sought to catch up with these experimental and theoretical advances, and organize them. Whitehead deplored the current tendency to overemphasize observation and experiment ("Can we elucidate the turmoil of Europe by weighing its dictators, its prime ministers...
...Poet. Whitehead's metaphysical speculations culminated in Process and Reality (1929). Philosopher John Dewey once wrote that he was not sure he understood the book, but that it was undoubtedly the most significant work in systematic philosophy since Leibnitz. Whitehead had no use for philosophic systems that split reality between mind & matter, or between physical objects and man's ideas of them. (When someone asked him "What's more important, ideas or things'?" Whitehead replied: "Why, I should imagine ideas about things.") For Whitehead, all reality was a pattern of becomings and perishings...
...Whitehead was saturated with the sense of a divine influence, which organizes the universe so that what is worth saving is never wholly lost. For Whitehead, God was not an awesome tyrant but "the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty and goodness." It is a long, hard road. In the Odyssey of the human spirit, said Whitehead, "every generation must carry the cross up the hill and there suffer for the next generation." Last week in Cambridge, Mass., 86-year-old Philosopher Whitehead went over his hill...