When I was in college, I was interested in logic. If you’re looking for an explanation of yesterday’s note on A.N. Whitehead, that’s the best I can do.
Of all the great thinkers of 20th century, he came the closest to an explanation of what a better system of thought would entail, given the revolution in physics that had occurred with Einstein, Bohr and that crowd.
Whitehead was clear on some conceptual problems that haunt us today. An account of the world must go beyond a definition of matter and a discussion of the forces that put billiard balls in motion. It will have to explain how some organisms are aware of events around them.
New work in physics had undermined Newton’s account of basic science, and Whitehead saw that the Enlightenment era’s philosophy was also untenable. One of the ideas that is no longer helpful, he said, was the notion that all of our ideas come from our sense perceptions.
Here’s Whitehead, outlining what a system of thought should do:
Speculative Philosophy is the endeavor to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted. By this notion of “interpretation” I mean that everything of which we are conscious, as enjoyed, perceived, willed or thought, shall have the character of a particular instance of the general scheme. Thus, the philosophical scheme should be coherent, logical, and, in respect to its interpretation, applicable and adequate. Here, “applicable” means that some ideas of experience are thus interpretable, and “adequate” means that there are no items incapable of such interpretation.
More than 40 years ago, that was a revelation: my first real grasp of what the notion of “logical adequacy” was about.
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