On Modern Platonist Alfred North Whitehead, Part 1: The Mathematician Philosopher

In this episode, James Myers and Michael Fitzpatrick continue to discuss modern Platonists with an introduction to Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), a mathematician who ended up as a professor of philosophy at Harvard University even though he didn’t hold a degree in philosophy. Whitehead hadn’t formally trained as a philosopher but came to be highly regarded for his mathematically-informed process philosophy that relates the oneness of all things to the continual becoming of many things. Whitehead viewed the universe as an organism of unending interconnections, and mathematics as describing the transformations of the particular connections that shape the physical world. The transformations Whitehead called “process,” and his book Process and Reality is discussed in this introductory episode where we begin to look at the current relevance of Whitehead’s thinking and how it connects to the thinking that Plato introduced to the world 2,400 years ago.