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Two thinkers, side by side

Life

Portrait of A.N. Whitehead
A.N. Whitehead

1861 CE – 1947 CE

LogicianProcess PhilosophyBritish

Born Ramsgate

He spent one career trying to derive all of mathematics from pure logic, and a second insisting that reality itself is made of events and relations rather than fixed, static things.

Portrait of Plato
Plato

c. 428 BCE – c. 348 BCE

ClassicalPlatonist

Born Athens

He saw a world behind the world. The Forms are real; what we see are shadows.

Connection

Plato the whole tradition as footnotes A.N. Whitehead — Whitehead's own famous summary of Western philosophy as 'a series of footnotes to Plato' reflects how directly his process metaphysics engaged with Plato's forms and cosmology, reworking rather than rejecting them.

Shared Ideas

BeingChange

Ideas

BeingChange
JusticeBeingVirtueReasonLogosChangeThe RepublicThe Virtuous City

Words

“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”

— A.N. Whitehead

“It is the business of the future to be dangerous.”

— A.N. Whitehead

“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.”

— Plato

“The measure of a man is what he does with power.”

— Plato

Key Moments

1913

Completes Principia Mathematica with Russell

1924

Begins a second career at Harvard

c. 428 BCE

Born in Athens

c. 408 BCE

Meeting Socrates

399 BCE

Death of Socrates

c. 388 BCE

First Voyage to Syracuse

Works

Process and Reality

Apology

Crito

Euthyphro

Protagoras

Symposium

Meno

Phaedo

Gorgias

Republic

Phaedrus

Theaetetus

Atlas of Thinkers

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Volume I · Ancient Greece · 624-262 BCE