The Concept of Nature: The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919
The Concept of Nature: The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919
In November 1919, mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead stood before an audience at Trinity College, Cambridge, and delivered a lecture series that would reshape how we think about nature, science, and reality itself. The result is "The Concept of Nature," a bracing attack on the mechanistic worldview that had dominated Western thought since Newton. Whitehead argues that we have fundamentally misunderstood what nature is: not a static collection of objects and substances, but a flowing complex of events, processes, and interconnected relations. He challenges the Cartesian split between mind and matter, proposing instead that nature is constituted by what happens, not by what simply exists. Through careful analysis of perception, sense-data, and scientific methodology, Whitehead demonstrates that the traditional distinction between the knowing subject and the known object collapses under scrutiny. This book is the seed of what would become process philosophy, a tradition that has influenced everything from ecology to quantum physics to theology. It remains essential reading for anyone who wonders whether the Newtonian universe of dead matter is the final word on what reality is.
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“The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, 'Seek simplicity and distrust it.””
— Alfred North Whitehead
“A duration is a concrete slab of nature limited by simultaneity which is an essential factor disclosed in sense-awareness.””
— Alfred North Whitehead
“These are the events which share the immediacy of the immediately present discerned events. These are the events whose characters together with those of the discerned events comprise all nature present for discernment. They form the complete general fact which is all nature now present as disclosed in that sense-awareness. It is in this second classification of events that the differentiation of space from time takes its origin. The germ of space is to be found in the mutual relations of events within the immediate general fact which is all nature now discernible, namely within the one event which is the totality of present nature. The relations of other events to this totality of nature form the texture of time.””
— Alfred North Whitehead
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Whitehead, Alfred North. The Concept of Nature: The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-concept-of-nature-the-tarner-lectures-delivered-in-trinity-college-november--812af5a3-84fc-4067-9a46-1416339168c3.Whitehead, A. N. (n.d.). The Concept of Nature: The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-concept-of-nature-the-tarner-lectures-delivered-in-trinity-college-november--812af5a3-84fc-4067-9a46-1416339168c3Whitehead, Alfred North. The Concept of Nature: The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-concept-of-nature-the-tarner-lectures-delivered-in-trinity-college-november--812af5a3-84fc-4067-9a46-1416339168c3.
