(D) Alfred North Whitehead was a controversial figure among academics in the early 20th century. (C) Empirical science is a more respected field than is metaphysics. (B) Alfred North Whitehead was successful as a challenger of conventional wisdom. (A) Metaphysics is a field worthy of considerably more attention and respect. The author of the passage would most likely agree with which of the following statements? After publishing The Concept of Nature in 1920, he served as president of the Aristotelian Society from 1922 to 1923, and Henri Bergson was quoted as saying that Whitehead was "the best philosopher writing in English." So impressive and different was Whitehead's philosophy that in 1924 he was invited to join the faculty at Harvard University as a professor of philosophy at 63 years of age, even though his educational background was in a very different field.ĥ. This philosophy of Whitehead was highly original, and soon garnered interest in philosophical circles. Whitehead referred to his metaphysical system as "philosophy of organism," but it would become known more widely as "process philosophy." He also argued that the most basic elements of reality have experiential features, that in fact everything is constituted by its experience (i.e., even things like electrons experience). Perhaps foremost among what Whitehead considered faulty metaphysical assumptions was the idea of substance materialism, which he rejected in favor of an opposite, event-based “process" ontology in which transient events are primary and material substances/beings are abstractions. In Whitehead's view, scientists and philosophers make metaphysical assumptions about how the universe works all the time, but such assumptions are not easily seen precisely because they remain unexamined and unquestioned. Whitehead was unimpressed by this objection. The ever-more impressive accomplishments of empirical science had led to a general consensus in academia that the development of comprehensive metaphysical systems was a waste of time because they were not subject to empirical testing. Metaphysics – the philosophical investigation of the nature of the universe and existence – had become unfashionable by the time Alfred North Whitehead began writing in earnest about it in the 1920s.
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