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Whitehead's Method of Extensive Abstraction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Nathaniel Lawrence
Nathaniel Lawrence*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois
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Extract

The death of Alfred North Whitehead late in 1947 was a double loss. Those who knew Whitehead, even slightly, feel keenly the loss of a warm and stimulating personality, which in the last years of his retirement had mellowed to a benign radiance. The wider circle of students and teachers of philosophy who knew him through his writing alone regret the passing of the man who, many thought, was the most capable cosmologist of our time.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , April 1950 , pp. 142 - 163
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1950

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References

1 Cambridge University Press, Second Edition, 1925.

2 Cambridge University Press, 1920.

3 Macmillan, 1929.

4 For instance, PR, pp. 454, 455.

5 PNK, p. 61.

6 CN, p. 78.

7 PNK, p. 59.

8 Op. cit., p. 62.

9 Op. cit., p. 104; CN, p. 76.

10 CN, p. 33; PNK, p. 80.

11 CN, pp. 143–144; PNK, pp. 62–63.

12 CN, p. 144.

13 PNK, p. 63.

14 CN, loc. cit.

15 Ibid. For apparent assertions to the contrary, however, see CN, p. 78. and PNK, p. 64.

16 CN, pp. 143–144, 149–150, 170–171, and throughout chapter VII.

17 Op. cit., p. 145.

18 Op. cit., pp. 146–147.

19 Op. cit., p. 147.

20 Op. cit., p. 148.

21 PNK, p. 91.

22 CN, p. 160.

23 PNK, p. 5.

24 PNK, p. 104; cf. CN, p. 79.

25 CN, pp. 79–80.

26 PNK, p. 105.

27 CN, pp. 80, 84; PNK, p. 104.

28 CN, p. 80.

29 Op. cit., p. 81.

30 Ibid.

31 PNK, p. 105.

32 Ibid.

33 CN, p. 82.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid.

36 Op. cit., p. 83.

37 Op. cit., p. 81.

38 Op. cit., p. 83.

39 The diagram follows a suggestion in PNK, p. 105. However, throughout the present exposition I follow the approach used in CN in order to avoid the troublesome devices of “primes” and “antiprimes.” Incidentally, what is named “equal in abstractive force” in CN is called in PNK “K-equal,” K standing for “extends over.”

40 CN, p. 84.

41 PNK, p. 112.

42 CN, p. 61; italics mine. “ideal” and “abstract” are thus plainly equated.

43 Op. cit., p. 85.

44 PNK, p. 112.

45 CN, p. 84.

46 The doctrine is consistent throughout CN. Thus also Whitehead speaks of a moment as being “the class of all abstractive sets of durations with the same convergence.” (CN, p. 62; italics mine).

47 Op. cit., p. 57; italics mine.

48 Op. cit., pp. 57–58.

49 Op. cit., pp. 56–57; italics mine.

50 Op. cit., p. 61; italics mine.

51 Ibid. Thus there are concepts whose status is ideal but which receive their meaning from the actual.

52 Op. cit., pp. 56–57.

53 Page 144. of this essay.

54 CN, p. 160.

55 For instance, the treatment of motion in terms of analytic geometry; see Chapter XIII. These applications themselves constitute the basis for a possible separate study of Whitehead, but they are outside the immediate scope of the present essay.

56 CN, p. 85.

57 Op. cit., p. 83.

58 Op. cit., pp. 85–86; italics mine.

59 Op. cit., p. 91.

60 Op. cit., p. 86.

61 Op. cit., p. 172.

62 Op. cit., p. 177.

63 Op. cit., p. 173.

64 Op. cit., p. 117.

65 Op. cit., p. 86; cf. PNK, p. 121: “An event-particle is the route of approximation to an atomic event, which is an ideal satisfied by no actual event.”

66 CN, p. 191.

67 Op. cit., p. 148.

68 Nowhere in the early works is there a sustained defense of the notion of time as regular and continuous, except insofar as this character is derivative from the continuity of the inclusion of events, one within another. It seems likely that Whitehead's recognition of the logically primitive aspect of this character of time is coupled with his gradual passage from the cosmological primacy of extension and cogredience to that of “becomingness” or “proccess.” See PNK, note II, p. 202.

69 Further support of this interpretation in terms of the conceptual and abstract status of instantaneous space is to be found in CN, pp. 89–90.

70 Page 152 of this essay.

71 I bypass the technical rigors of the notion of a “station,” whose inclusion would not facilitate our discussion and whose omission does no damage to it.

72 CN, pp. 113–114.

73 Op. cit., pp. 86, 135.

74 Op. cit., p. 86.

75 Op. cit., p. 114.

76 Op. cit., p. 177.

77 Op. cit., p. 106.

78 Ibid; italics mine.

79 P. 173; italics mine.

80 Op. cit., pp. 82–83, 89–90.

81 Op. cit., p. 96.

82 Op. cit., p. 191.

83 Op. cit., p. 173.

84 Indeed he indicates that the terms are interchangeable, CN, p. 94. Also Whitehead uses “punct” for an “instantaneous point,” CN, pp. 91–92, and elsewhere says of event-particles that they are the points of instantaneous space, CN, pp. 86, 173.

85 Op. cit., p. 92.

86 Op. cit., pp. 90–91.

87 There is a qualification which should nevertheless be included. It is this: since a “moment” is all nature at an instant, what we are fastening our attention upon are the extensive features of a moment, neglecting the natural properties which are the limiting characters of nature in space at that instant.

88 Op. cit., p. 94.

89 Op. cit., pp. 92–93; italics mine.

90 Op. cit., p. 93.

91 Op. cit., pp. 83–84.

92 Op. cit., p. 92.

93 Op. cit., p. 94.

94 Op. cit., p. 186; italics mine.

95 Op. cit., p. 80; italics mine.

96 Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Trans. by Norman Kemp Smith, Macmillan, 1933, p. 396.

97 Ibid.

98 Op. cit., p. 402.

99 CN, p. 93. Whitehead seems quite clearly to mean here by “recognition” not his own use of the term which we have already discussed, but simply that ordinary treatments of a point as related to a scheme of nature do not acknowledge the two characters of a point.

100 Op. cit., p. 94.

101 Op. cit., p. 193.

102 Op. cit., pp. 171–172.

103 Op. cit., p. 171.

104 PNK, p. 95.

105 CN, p. 126.

106 Op. cit., p. 125.

107 PNK, p. 98.

108 CN, p. 23; italics mine.

109 PNK, p. 99.

110 CAT, p. 162.

111 Op. cit., p. 40.

112 Op. cit., p. 28.

113 PR, p. 366.

114 Op. cit., pp. 376–377.