A Study On The Philosophical Views Of A.N. Whitehead's Event

A.N.Whitehead's philosophy is not only from his reflection of the physics revolution in 20th century, but also from his exploration to science and the universe for a long time. When the theory of relativity revealed the limitations of traditional space-time view and use event to replace the substance in the traditional physics, Whitehead found that the universe in traditional physics was stationary, but the really one we living in was obviously changing all the time. Some viewpoints of Whitehead's was influenced by Bergson's philosophy of life. In Whitehead's opinion, event is the ultimate entity in the universe, and has the same qualities to the universe. Since the universe is changing all the time, event must be energetic and extensive. New events comes from old, but there is not a one to one correspondence between them, old events like the soil affording abundant nutrient to new. This relationship is definitely not simple and mechanistic, but organic and unified.This paper using the theory of event to introduce Whitehead's philosophy is designed to provide a clue of the development of Whitehead's philosophy. His thoughts about his confusions of science and the universe are discussed by the theory of event at the beginning of his philosophy. Event is a starting point which can express the origin of Whitehead's theory and the scientific background at the time. This paper mainly includes these four parts as following:Chapter 1 mainly introduces the development of science at Whitehead's time and his attitudes to science. Whitehead had a good knowledge background of mathematics and science. He was a professor of mathematics in UK before he went to Harvard University to teach philosophy. He was quite familiar with the achievements in both mathematics and science. He thought that although science was effective to deal with some things, it did not match people's intuition to the world. The modern physics did not take the world as an organic one, but described it as a machine which was made up by many parts. Whitehead believed that there were three things (mathematics, instinctive belief to natural orders and rationalism) which can help people to establish a rational, intuitive and organic philosophical view.Chapter 2 discusses Whitehead's view of nature. He thought that his philosophy is a kind of philosophical thinking to the science of nature. The nature in daily life, in scientific study and in philosophical study is the same one. The nature is not bifurcate and there are not the causal nature and the consequent nature, all these judgments are false. The only nature which we are living in and we can be directly aware of was the real nature. Things existing in nature can not be divided into substance and attributes. They are all events. The universe is composed by the strings of events. Whitehead described a rudiment of the theory of event at that time, and tried to use event to realize the unification of real nature and the nature in science.The theory of event is critical. In Chapter 3 the author discusses this theory from two aspects: one aspect is the object what this theory criticizes; another aspect is what this theory wants to construct. In Whitehead's view of science, he criticized Newtonian mechanics which described the universe as an isolated and stationary universe and constructed a four-dimensional universe in which event was the only real entity. In his view of philosophy, he criticized the concept of substance. He thought that the substance caused the separation of things and their attributes and made the things losing their original figure. The concept of substance is irrational which let an abstract concept to replace the real world and causes the isolation of things. Whitehead wanted his theory to reveal the real connections among things. He did not think there was a distinction from things to their attributes. He recognized those events have their characters and proposed that the events which were aware of by people must have kinds of characters.Chapter 4 discusses the development of the theory of event. This theory constructs an organic universe and Whitehead developed a process-relational philosophy on this basis. He thought that the organic form should be presented as a process. No matter events or universe is a developing process. In this process every event has multiple relationships. Finally he used process-relational philosophy to express his philosophical views and established a new philosophical school which became the ideological origin of constructive post-modern philosophy. Compare to the other philosophers in 20th century, Whitehead insisted to develop the speculative philosophy from the tradition of ancient Greece which was very unvalued at the time when Phenomenology and Analytic Philosophy were popular. He used special ideological dimension attracted many scientists'attention. Philosophers, scientists and sociologists all developed their ideas on the basis of Whitehead's theory.