Conceptul de natură la Whitehead

Abstract

The present paper deals with Whitehead’s conception from his early works, including non-philosophical ones, like On Mathematical Concepts of the Material World and La theorie relationniste de l’espace. We trace in this paper a history of Whitehead’s preoccupation for the establishing of a concept of nature that avoids its bifurcation, preoccupation identical with a program of research in the foundations of geometry. By exposing Whitehead’s main mathematical metaphors and his famous method of abstractive extension and by analizing the conditions of possibility for their application, we reveal a characteristic of nature not overtly stated by Whitehead, namely its structure similarity to the structure of the set of real numbers. We conclude that there is a direct continuity between the memoir from 1905 and the book from 1920. Thus, in the light of the memoir, the concept of nature can be understood as a concept of a material world which contains in the class of the ultimate existents only natural entities, namely events and has for a primitive relationship a part-whole relationship which implies the nondenumerability of its field or domain.