The physical cosmology of Alfred North Whitehead

Throughout the history of philosophy, cosmological theories have always deservedly enjoyed a position of special prominence. Of all recent cosmologies, or phi - losophies of Nature, perhaps the most comprehensive and satisfactory is that offered. by Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead, always both mathematician and philosopher, enjoyed a full career as mathematician at Cambridge and London Universities before answering an invitation from Harvard University to a chair in philosophy there. His interests invariably carried him to the forefront of the advance, and his more technical mathematical works bore the imprint of a philosopher. His philosophy carried the marks of its birth in mathematics and the physical sciences.Although his Treatise on Universal Algebra (1898) won him an enviable reputation, it was his collaboration with Bertrand Russell in the first decade of the twentieth century on Principia Nathematica which proved his pioneering genius. In the middle of this decade, Whitehead offered to the Royal Society of London a memoir entitled "On Mathematical Concepts of the Material World." This memoir, which fell into oblivion, employed the symbolic technique of Principia Nathematica in solving the fundamental problem of importance to cosmological theory. Given a set of entities and a relation between those entities, Whitehead attempted to show the whole of Euclidean geometry to be an expression of the properties of the field of that relation. Certain extraneous relations served to associate the axioms with the material world of the physicists, of which Whitehead offered seven alternative concepts.The first three volumes of Princiaá Mathematica had been published, and Whitehead had begun his work on the fourth, which was to have been concerned with the application of symbolic reasoning to the foundations of geometry and the problem of space. But by this time the scientific world had been captivated by the publication of the special and general theories of relativity by Einstein. These novelties naturally attracted Whitehead, who wrote several essays on the presuppositions of relativity. Whitehead was convinced that the principle and the method introduced by Einstein constituted a revolution in physical science, but found his explanation faulty.A series of three important "Nature" volumes introduced the philosophy of "Nature" as conceived by Whitehead, using his own interpretation of the meaning of the new relativity. A powerful method of analysis, called the Method of Extensive Abstraction and having as its purpose the definition of spatial and temporal entities so as to avoid a circularity of reasoning was born at this period. The third of the volumes was devoted entirely to the development of his own theory of relativity, to which the philosophically more satisfactory interpretation of relativity could be readily applied. From his original presuppositions Whitehead offered four alternative relativity theories, one of which coincided with Einstein's, and two of which were attempts at a unified field theory. The fourth, a theory of gravitation, used a physical element, the "impetus," instead of an infinitesimal metric element, as Einstein had done. This theory proved to be empirically less satisfactory than that of Einstein. But Professor George Temple generalized this fourth theory by using a space -time of positive uniform curvature, and results more satisfactory empirically than those of Einstein followed. The philosophical advantages of Whitehead's relativity were retained. This result seems to invite a more careful consideration of Temple's generalization of ;Whitehead's relativity than has been obtained at present.But by this time Whitehead's speculations, which took as their restricted field the area of nature in which mind was irrelevant, began to concentrate on the enlarged field of cosmological theory in its points of contact with metaphysics. The most important discovery he believed he had made was that in this enlarged area, all the more special physical and extensive properties of nature were dependent for their existence upon process.Now in his sixties, Whitehead accepted Harvard's invitation to a chair in philosophy. Within a very few years he returned to the United Kingdom to deliver the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, in which the implications of adopting process as the central principle in the universe were systematically presented.One outstanding; feature of these lectures has been unfortunately ignored; it is a major and original suggestion of this thesis that the categoreal scheme of Process and Reality is really the axiomatic scheme of "On Mathematical Concepts of the Material World" generalized on the metaphysical level. An attempt at the application of the symbolic method to the axioms (categories of explanation and obligation) is made here. Thus the generalized problem in Process and Reality becomes, "Given a set of onto - logical existents and the operation of creativity, what axioms regarding the operation of creativity will have as their result that the more specialized discoveries of the humanities and the sciences follow from the properties of those entities forming the field of creativity?"These lectures, although they offered a comprehensive metaphysical system justifying the operation of physical field theories, suffered under the misfa' tune that they were given at just the time when the quantum mechanics revolution was precipitated in the physical sciences. From the point of view of quantum mechanics, therefore, the philosophy of organism does not supply a satisfactory cosmology within which it can operate. This is especially unfortunate in view of his possibly superior physical theory of relativity; possible points of expansion to allow for quantum mechanics are indicated, although they do violence to the base of the philosophy of organism.As the chief exemplification of the metaphysical principles, Whitehead postulated a brilliantly conceived metaphysical God who was important in physical cosmology. It is suggested that this metaphysical God is, nevertheless, inadequate to satisfy the demands of the religious conscience.Despite the originality of most of the elements introduced by Whitehead, a full understanding of his meaning and an appreciation of his novelties is possible only by referring his writings to their proper settings. Thus, the philosophy of organism is explained against the background of the process philosophies of Bergson, Alexander, and Horgan. Because of its many similarities in respect to the setting of the cosmological problem and the essentials of the solution to the Timaeus, a special chapter is devoted to the correspondence between the two. Whitehead's relativity and philosophy of Nature requires an understanding of the development of the theory of relativity, the world- models of the relativistic cosmologies, and the attempts at a unified field theory. Similarly, the memoir of 1905 is described in a more general back ground setting forth a broad picture of the state of geometry, physical science, and philosophy at the turn of the century.As a final reflection, certain presuppositions at the base of Whitehead's philosophy of organism are investigated and evaluated. The points believed by the present writer to be especially vulnerable in the philosophy of organism are exposed. An experiment in suggesting the prospectus of an alternative system which might avoid the difficulties, and incorporate the advantages of, the philosophy of organism, is made with the warning that it is no more than a suggestion.Throughout the thesis, certain dominant strains of "Ihitehead's thinking can be detected: the importance in his mind of the axiomatic -deductive method in the sciences; the realization that prevalent habits of thinking need to be altered by new discoveries, but are resisted; the conviction that the sciences must be ontologically centered; the faith in field theories; and the conviction that cosmology must be the search for the forms in the facts; to designate the more outstanding convictions