Audiobook · read by volunteers
Concept of Nature
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947)
Read by Leon Mire, mb, jude kaider, Esther, Julian Jamison, Psuke Bariah · 10 chapters · 6 h 56
About the book
What is nature, and how do we come to know it? In these lectures, the mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead takes on a question that science tends to assume it has already answered. Starting from what we actually perceive, he asks whether it makes sense to split the world into a nature of colour, warmth and sound that exists only in our minds, and a hidden nature of particles that exists out there.
Whitehead argues against that split, which he calls the bifurcation of nature, and builds in its place a picture in which events, rather than lifeless matter, are the basic stuff of experience. Time, space and the things we notice in them are examined with the care of a thinker who knew both mathematics and physics, and who was writing in the years when Einstein’s ideas were reshaping both.
Ten chapters, nearly seven hours: a rewarding listen for the curious.
Introduction
Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) was born in England and trained as a mathematician. With Bertrand Russell he wrote the Principia Mathematica, a landmark in the foundations of logic. In the 1920s he moved to Harvard and turned increasingly to philosophy, developing the system now known as process philosophy, in which reality is made of events and relations rather than fixed substances.
The Concept of Nature, published in 1920, grew out of lectures given at Trinity College, Cambridge. It is an early and relatively accessible statement of his mature thinking. Its central target is what he calls the bifurcation of nature: the habit of dividing the world into the nature we perceive and the nature that science describes, as though only the second were real. Whitehead insists that scientific description must remain faithful to what we immediately experience, and he proposes concepts of events, objects and duration to make that possible. The discussion engages with the new physics of the period, including the theory of relativity.
This recording has ten chapters, starting with a preface and moving through headings such as nature and thought, the theories of the bifurcation of nature, and time. It runs for just under seven hours and is read by LibriVox volunteers.
It is not light reading, but it is a clear and rewarding one. Anyone interested in the philosophy of science, or in how a mathematician thinks about experience, will find a patient and original guide here. Whitehead’s prose is careful, and the lecture format keeps it moving.
Public domain
Alfred North Whitehead died in 1947: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text