Whitehead taught mathematics at Cambridge for a quiet quarter-century before a brilliant student named Bertrand Russell drew him into the most ambitious project either of them ever attempted: Principia Mathematica, a three-volume attempt to show that all of mathematics could be derived from a small set of logical axioms. It took over a decade, required six hundred pages to prove that one plus one equals two, and remains one of the great feats of sustained intellectual labor in the twentieth century even though Gödel later showed the larger goal was unreachable in principle. In his sixties, uprooted from England by the aftermath of the First World War and a faculty dispute at London, Whitehead accepted a position at Harvard and, remarkably, began an entirely new career as a metaphysician. Process and Reality argued that the universe is not built from static substances that merely sit there having properties, but from events, 'actual occasions' that come into being, relate to everything around them, and pass into the past, which then becomes a permanent ingredient in everything that follows. On this view, a rock or a person is not a fixed thing enduring through time but a society of interrelated events achieving a temporary and remarkable stability, and even God, in his account, is not exempt from process but develops alongside the world rather than standing changelessly outside it. He was famous among his students for treating philosophy as fundamentally like poetry — an attempt to say the unsayable and salvage some sense of connectedness in a universe that could otherwise look like disconnected fragments. His own summary of the entire European philosophical tradition, that it is 'a series of footnotes to Plato,' has outlived nearly everything else he wrote, an irony he likely would have appreciated.
After more than a decade of collaboration, Whitehead and Russell completed their three-volume attempt to derive all of mathematics from a small set of logical axioms — six hundred pages were required just to prove that one plus one equals two.
Words
“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”