Process philosophy, mathematics
Alfred North Whitehead
1861 – 1947
Whitehead makes the river argument systematic: what is real is the event, not the thing. An organisation, on that reading, is a rate rather than a structure.
Read alongside: Stay
- Start with
- Process and Reality (1929)
- Where they resist the book
- The metaphysics is demanding and abstract. Whitehead never intended it as a description of institutions, and the transfer is the book's, not his.
Works worth the time
Process and Reality · 1929
The systematic version of the river argument. Demanding; the opening and closing parts carry most of what a reader here needs.
Read further
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Alfred North Whitehead ↗
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Where Whitehead appears
Process before substance.
Heraclitus is quoted more often than he is taken seriously. Read as process philosophy rather than aphorism, the river says that things are patterns of change rather than objects that happen to move. Whitehead extends the same claim: what is real is the event, not the thing. An organisation, on this reading, is a rate rather than a structure.