Footnotes to Plato

Aljoscha Berve examines Whitehead’s relationship to Plato’s philosophy in the Harvard lectures, arguing that the lectures clarify Plato’s influence on Whitehead as one half of an idealised contrast with Aristotle, the mathematician as opposed to the biologist. In his published writings, Plato’s influence on Whitehead could already be seen in his adoption of Plato’s chorá, his discussion of seven general notions in Adventures of Ideas, his juxtaposition of Plato and Ulysses as representing two modes of reason in The Function of Reason, and his style of presentation. But the Harvard lectures show that Whitehead also conceived of Plato as mainly a mathematician whose metaphysics is a result of his dealing with eternal forms.