Whitehead's broad interests

 One more note on A.N. Whitehead, and I’ll leave him alone for a while.

I was fascinated by his thinking on logic. But his intellect was broad, not just deep. He thought about the basic problems of physics and he also wondered how a sense of beauty develops within an individual and within a culture.

Among the famous philosophers, he was like Leibnitz: interested in everything, with a sense of confidence that human beings can inquire — productively — into anything.

Here’s one odd example: He didn’t see religion as necessarily a good thing. He defined religion as “what the individual does with his own solitariness.” 

It’s hard to image anyone else starting with that sort of working definition.

In my notebook there’s a page headed: “People I wish I could have had a conversation with.”

My idea of paradise is a coffee shop. Each day, I get to spend an hour over a cup of coffee with an interesting thinker, turning over an interesting question.

Whitehead would be there often.