Volume 32, Number 19 · December 5, 1985
The Right Stuff
By Anthony Quinton
Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and His Work Volume I: 1861–1910
by Victor Lowe
Johns Hopkins University Press, 351 pp., $27.50
Alfred North Whitehead rumbles around in the intellectual history of the English-speaking world in the twentieth century like a loose bolt in a machine. He was made of the right stuff: a professional mathematician who turned into a professional philosopher who was also magnificently equipped with a general fund of humane learning in history (particularly church history) and in literature. He was in the right place: at Cambridge at the beginning of one of that great university's greatest periods, which was to run on until about 1950. He had the right connections: most of all in the form of his collaboration with his pupil Bertrand Russell in the ten years during which they worked on Principia Mathematica (1910–1913), the most influential work on formal logic since Aristotle's Organon. He was, particularly when he was between his late fifties and his mid-seventies, highly productive, publishing nine substantial books in that period.
Review, 3379 words
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