process studies supplement...
Process Studies Supplement 17 (2011)
The Background and Historic Significance of Alfred North Whitehead’s Letter to his Personal Assistant Henry S. Leonard: The Relation between Science and Philosophy
by Ronald Preston PhippsThis article treats a rare and philosophically significant handwritten letter from Whitehead to Henry S. Leonard, his personal assistant at Harvard. The letter was Whitehead’s response to Leonard’s essay on metaphysics and logical positivism that appeared in a 1936 publication commemorating Whitehead’s 75th birthday. The letter reveals in a most explicit manner Whitehead’s attitude toward logical positivism and the work of Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose philosophic work was emerging as a brake upon traditional philosophy and its creative, constructive, and critical role in respect to other intellectual disciplines, including physics.
The article describes some of the ways in which the creative development, application, and modification of Whitehead’s philosophy hold the promise to transform Einstein’s relativity theory, the standard model of particle physics, big bang cosmology, and an understanding of the relationship between material and mental phenomena. The article offers a view of an organic and integrated universe in flux that is infinite in respect to both: (1) its temporal and spatial extensiveness; and (2) the qualitative diversity possible among its micro quantum constituents, viz., its atomic occasions. It offers alternatives to prevailing dogmas of theoretical physics by substituting the finite with the infinite inherent in Whitehead’s conception of a universe in perpetual process of becoming.