Alfred North Whitehead

British mathematician and philosopher (1861–1947), co-author with Russell of Principia Mathematica and founder of process philosophy.

After his work in logic, Whitehead turned to metaphysics, arguing in Process and Reality that the world is made of events and processes — becoming rather than being — and that mind, organism, and nature form one continuous, relational whole.

Relationship to Fuller

Relationship: influence-on-fuller. Whitehead's process philosophy sits behind the comprehensive, motion-first cast of R. Buckminster Fuller's thinking. Fuller's insistence that the universe is a verb — a scenario of continuous transformation rather than a collection of static things — and his drive toward a single, organism-like comprehension of nature run parallel to Whitehead's account of reality as interrelated process. In the corpus's portrait of Fuller as "the comprehensive man," Whitehead is the philosophical predecessor whose organic, relational metaphysics prepared the ground Fuller built on.

See Also

• The Comprehensive Man (The Comprehensive Man) — the corpus's portrait of Fuller's comprehensivist habit of mind
• Lewis Mumford (Lewis Mumford) — contemporaneous synthesizer of technology, organism, and civilization
• Immanuel Kant (Immanuel Kant) — the earlier philosopher of experience and mind in Fuller's lineage

Sources

• The Comprehensive Man (source reference) — situates Whitehead in Fuller's comprehensivist intellectual lineage