Word: whitehead
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...more than 50 books penned over 74 years, Bertrand Russell set the terms of the debate in logic and philosophy in the first part of the century--most notably with Principia Mathematica (1910-13), written with philosopher Alfred North Whitehead...
...young engineering student in England, Wittgenstein saw the hope of the new mathematical logic, and rushed to Cambridge to become the protege of Bertrand Russell, whose monumental Principia Mathematica (1913), written with Alfred North Whitehead, was an attempt to reduce all mathematics to logic. Wittgenstein's first book, published in England in 1922, the even more grandly titled Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, went even further, and was thought by him, and by some of his admirers, to have brought philosophy to an end, its key problems definitively solved once and for all. Some "philosophical" propositions could be readily expressed and evaluated...
Lila Mae Watson, Whitehead's hero, is an aging black elevator inspector in an unnamed eastern metropolis that resembles a Kafkaesque New York City. The bureaucracy of the elevator workers dominates the city government. That bureaucracy is divided between two main factions that vie with each other for political influence: the so-called Empiricists, a dry, hard-headed bunch who do their jobs with scientific precision; and the Intuitionists like Watson, who work by instinct, by feel. James Fulton, the Intuitionists' patron saint, is a deceased pioneer of "verticality" whose books contain cryptic, Masonic meditations that seem to address...
...recent past, still refers to black people as coloreds and maintains a subtle quota system whose goal is not human equality but the appearance of social justice. The elevator bosses take their leisure at riotous banquets where the entertainment consists of humiliating minstrel shows. The civil rights movement, in Whitehead's parallel universe, either never happened or has been reversed. Either way the effect is eerie, suggesting that the path to freedom is not inevitable and never has been...
...Whitehead's fable is swift and pointed and by no means solely about race. Watson's tenaciousness, faith and curiosity are universal virtues, allowing her to maneuver in a society petrified by caste and class. What saves her, and ultimately brings her peace, is literature, the wisdom of the masters. The deeper she digs for knowledge and understanding, the higher she rises. A book is her black...