The Concept of Nature: the Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College November 1919

Publisher Marketing: This book from 1920 consists of the Tarner Lectures in the philosophy of science and features Whitehead's assessment of the impact of Einstein's theories on nature. He argues for taking events and the process of becoming as the starting points for analyzing reality. Whitehead criticizes the idea of nature as a mere aggregate of independent entities, each capable of isolation. According to this idea, by their accidental relations entities form the system of nature. In this theory space might exist without time, and time without space. The relational theory of space is an admission that space without matter or matter without space cannot exist. Our knowledge of nature is an experience of activity or passage. Events are active entities; their relations with one another differentiate into space-relations and time-relations. But this differentiation is comparatively superficial, since time and space are each partial expressions of one fundamental relation between events, which is neither spatial not temporal. Whitehead calls this relation Extension: it is the relation of including and does not require spatio-temporal differentiation. An integral addition to any New Thought library and a great insight into the theories of nature and the universe. Cover photography by Paul Spremulli. Review Citations: Scitech Book News 12/01/2004 pg. 14 (EAN 9781591022145, Paperback) Contributor Bio:  Whitehead, Alfred North Alfred North Whitehead, (1861 - 1947) was an English mathematician and philosopher. He is best known as the defining figure of the philosophical school known as process philosophy, which today has found application to a wide variety of disciplines, including ecology, theology, education, physics, biology, economics, and psychology, among other areas. In his early career Whitehead wrote primarily on mathematics, logic, and physics. His most notable work in these fields is the three-volume Principia Mathematica (1910-13), which he co-wrote with former student Bertrand Russell. Principia Mathematica is considered one of the twentieth century's most important works in mathematical logic, and placed 23rd in a list of the top 100 English-language nonfiction books of the twentieth century by Modern Library. Beginning in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Whitehead gradually turned his attention from mathematics to philosophy of science, and finally to metaphysics. He developed a comprehensive metaphysical system which radically departed from most of western philosophy. Whitehead argued that reality consists of events rather than matter, and that these events cannot be defined apart from their relations to other events, thus rejecting the theory that reality is fundamentally constructed by bits of matter that exist independently of one another. Today Whitehead's philosophical works - particularly Process and Reality - are regarded as the foundational texts of process philosophy. Whitehead's process philosophy argues that "there is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have consequences for the world around us." For this reason, one of the most promising applications of Whitehead's thought in recent years has been in the area of ecological civilization and environmental ethics pioneered by John B. Cobb, Jr. A Treatise on Universal Algebra: In A Treatise on Universal Algebra (1898) the term "universal algebra" had essentially the same meaning that it has today: the study of algebraic structures themselves, rather than examples ("models") of algebraic structures. Whitehead credits William Rowan Hamilton and Augustus De Morgan as originators of the subject matter, and James Joseph Sylvester with coining the term itself.