Alfred North Whitehead, Part 2: The Mathematician Who Added Plato to Modern Science

About this episode

The episode explores Alfred North Whitehead's integration of Plato's philosophy with modern scientific concepts.

In their second episode featuring the works of modern Platonist Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), James Myers and Michael Fitzpatrick brought Plato into the 21st century through Whitehead’s perspectives as a mathematician and philosopher. The discussion relates Whitehead’s perspectives to many of Plato’s dialogues, including The Sophist , The Timaeus , The Republic , The Parmenides , and The Philebus . Writing his landmark work Process and Reality during the years when quantum mechanics and general relativity were discovered, Whitehead’s philosophy of organism treats the universe as a web of interconnected processes and changes. Whitehead applied the logic of Plato’s writing from 2,400 years ago to identify crucial connections in the web and, by following their paths, he related concepts in general relativity and quantum mechanics to the universe as an organism. From Whitehead’s perspective, there was clear logic for an eternal co-dependency of the infinite universe and the finite connections within its web. The mathematician had much to say about the nature of time, which was a prominent in the episode’s discussion. To Whitehead, time was not linear but circular, and likewise…

People in this episode

Host: James Myers

Guest: Michael Fitzpatrick

Topics covered

• Plato
• Alfred North Whitehead
• philosophy
• mathematics
• quantum mechanics
• general relativity
• time

Keywords

• Alfred North Whitehead
• Plato
• philosophy of organism
• quantum mechanics
• general relativity
• time
• spherical universe

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Process and Reality, The Sophist, The Timaeus, The Republic, The Parmenides, The Philebus