Whitehead

Among Analytic Philosophers who are familiar with Principia Mathematica, many are aware that Russell had a co-author, and of those, some seem to know that the co-author, Whitehead has first billing. While it is probably impossible to distinguish the contribution of each to that work, their other efforts in the period suggest that Principia is a combination of Whitehead's neo-Leibnizian 'Universal Algebra' and Russell's Logical Atomism. The marginalization of Whitehead regarding this effort is of a piece with that regarding his subsequent projects, some of which are dismissed as 'not Philosophy' by some Analytic Philosophers. But less insular thinkers recognize his later Process and Reality as one of the seminal works of the twentieth-century. Process and Reality reflects the influence on Whitehead of Leibniz, Bergson, and Alexander--just as Alexander introduces Bergsonian Flux into Spinoza's System, Whitehead similarly re-constructs Leibniz' Monadology, with a subsequent impact in Philosophy, Psychology, and Philosophy of Science that has been outside the purview of mainstream academic Philosophy. The notions here of the Formal Principle, in general, and of Propriation, in particular, are directly indebted to Whitehead's notion 'Concrescence'. Where Formaterialism most fundamentally diverges from Whitehead's System is in its recognition of the Material Principle, in general, and Exposition, in particular, the lack of which in Whitehead's System leaves no account of the initiation of Concrescence, hence, leaving an account of Human Experience which is entirely passive. Furthermore, his System includes, aside from Process, and the Reality that Process generates, a third fundamental element, 'Eternal Objects', which are his version of Platonic Forms--subsisting outside of Concrescences, but having 'ingress' into them. Among the Eternal Objects are Numbers, so Process and Reality continues the thesis of Principia that Numbers are fundamentally Cardinal and immutable. Formaterialism rejects wholesale the notion of Eternal Objects, and finds in Concrescence the grounds of an Ordinal Theory of Number that suffices for a general Theory of Number.