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But in the prevalent discussion of classes, there are illegitimate transitions to the notions of a 'nexus' and of a 'proposition'. The appeal to a class to perform the services of a proper entity is exactly analogous to an appeal to an imaginary terrier to kill a real rat. Process and Reality

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
Real
Discussion
Entity
Transitions
Proper
Appeal
Illegitimate
Notion
Services
Analogous
Exactly
Classes
Prevalent
Kill
Imaginary
Proposition
Class
Transition
Notions
Terrier
Process
Appeals
Propositions
Terriers
Reality
Perform
Rats
Nexus

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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Imagination is not to be divorced from the facts. It is a way of illuminating the facts.
Alfred North Whitehead
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A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost.
Alfred North Whitehead
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It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Great people plant trees they'll never sit under.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The difference between ancients and moderns is that the ancients asked what have we experienced, and moderns asked what can we experience.
Alfred North Whitehead
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It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Without adventure civilization is in full decay. ... The great fact [is] that in their day the great achievements of the past were the adventures of the past.
Alfred North Whitehead
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It is this union of passionate interest in the detailed facts with equal devotion to abstract generalisation which forms the novelty in our present society .
Alfred North Whitehead
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A culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyze itself.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.
Alfred North Whitehead
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You cannot evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music, and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The foundations of the world are to be found, not in the cognitive experience of conscious thought, but in the aesthetic experience of everyday life.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Common sense is genius in homespun.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.
Alfred North Whitehead
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No Roman ever died in contemplation over a geometrical diagram.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Other nations of different habits are not enemies: they are godsends. Men require of their neighbours something sufficiently akin to be understood, something sufficiently different to provoke attention, and something great enough to command admiration. We must not expect, however, all the virtues.
Alfred North Whitehead
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On the ostensible exactitude of certain branches of human knowledge, including mathematics. The exactness is a fake.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The ultimate metaphysical ground is the creative advance into novelty.
Alfred North Whitehead