A. N. Whitehead

Alfred North Whitehead
Born	(1861-02-15)15 February 1861 Ramsgate, Kent, United Kingdom
Died	30 December 1947(1947-12-30) (aged 86) Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Alma mater	Trinity College, Cambridge (BA, 1884)
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Process philosophy Process theology
Institutions	Imperial College London (University of London) Harvard University
Main interests	Metaphysics, mathematics
Notable ideas	Process philosophy Process theology
Influences Aristotle,Henri Bergson,Francis Herbert BradleyJohn Dewey,David Hume,William James,Immanuel Kant,Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz,John Locke,Isaac Newton,Plato,George Santayana
Influenced Wilfred Eade Agar,David Bohm,C. D. Broad,Milič Čapek,Gilles Deleuze,Susanne Langer,Ervin László,Maurice Merleau-Ponty,F. S. C. Northrop,Talcott Parsons,Ilya Prigogine,W. V. O. Quine,Bertrand Russell,B. F. Skinner,Wolfgang Smith,John Lighton Synge,Jules Vuillemin,Conrad Hal Waddington,Michel Weber,Sewall Wright

Alfred North Whitehead OM FRS (15 February 1861 – 30 December 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 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 processes rather than material objects, and that processes are best defined by their relations with other processes, 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.