Quote

On the ostensible exactitude of certain branches of human knowledge, including mathematics. The exactness is a fake.

Alfred North Whitehead

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Alfred North Whitehead
Age: 86 †
Born: 1861
Born: February 15
Died: 1947
Died: December 30
Mathematician
Philosopher
Physicist
Theologian
Writer
Ramsgate
Kent
Mathematics
Including
Knowledge
Certain
Ostensible
Human
Exactitude
Humans
Exactness
Branches
Fake

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.
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Above all things we must be aware of what I will call 'inert ideas' - that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilized, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations.
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The paradox is now fully established that the utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact.
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What we perceive as the present is the vivid fringe of memory tinged with anticipation.
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Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science.
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Error itself may be happy chance.
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A clash of doctrine is not a disaster, it is an opportunity.
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There is only one subject matter for education, and that is Life in all its manifestations
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I consider Christianity to be one of the great disasters of the human race... It would be impossible to imagine anything more un - Christianlike than theology.
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With the sense of sight, the idea communicates the emotion, whereas, with sound, the emotion communicates the idea, which is more direct and therefore more powerful.
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The progress of Science consists in observing interconnections and in showing with a patient ingenuity that the events of this ever-shifting world are but examples of a few general relations, called laws. To see what is general in what is particular, and what is permanent in what is transitory, is the aim of scientific thought.
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There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays to the devil.
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Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into greatness has been a passionate protest against inert ideas. Then, alas, with pathetic ignorance of human psychology, it has proceeded by some educational scheme to bind humanity afresh with inert ideas of its own fashioning.
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The theme of Cosmology, which is the basis of all religions, is the story of the dynamic effort of the World passing into everlasting unity, and of the static majesty of God's vision, accomplishing its purpose of completion by absorption of the World's multiplicity of effort.
Alfred North Whitehead
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There is a tradition of opposition between adherents of induction and of deduction. In my view it would be just as sensible for the two ends of a worm to quarrel.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operations of daily life. No one goes out to buy zero fish. It is in a way the most civilised of all the cardinals, and its use is only forced on us by the needs of cultivated modes of thought.
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Philosophy is the product of wonder. The effort after the general characterization of the world around us is the romance of human thought.
Alfred North Whitehead
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A race preserves its vigor so long as it harbors a real contrast between what has been and what may be and so long as it is nerved by the vigor to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure civilization is in full decay.
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The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.
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No science can be more secure than the unconscious metaphysics which tacitly it presupposes.
Alfred North Whitehead