Whitehead on the history of philosophy

One of Whitehead’s theories about the history of philosophy can be found on page 57 of Process and Reality. I’m speaking of the part where he claims that every school of philosophy requires two great figures, one whose system is adequate to reality but a bit imprecise, and a second who is more rigorous and precise but also a bit more narrow. He cites Locke and Hume as his showcase example.

It’s as interesting as all such reflections by Whitehead are, but after years of thinking it over, it seems to me like an oversimplification.

For one thing, it is more common for clusters of philosophers to appear in groups of three rather than of two.

For another thing, I’m not sure it works well even for groups of two. It doesn’t work very well for the Husserl/Heidegger pair, for instance, where it is almost reversed. (Whitehead does seem to think it has to go in that order– adequate, then rigorous.)

Maybe it works OK for Plato/Aristotle, and arguably Kant/Hegel, and there is certainly a grain of truth in it, but I think that’s only one possible way for these relationships to play out.

Incidentally, one of the things that jumps out at me about Islamic as opposed to European philosophy is that the European philosophers tend to be clustered more closely together in time, and to have some degree of personal contact with one another. The great Islamic thinkers were often islands in a personal sense, often building directly on work of a century or two earlier rather than finding their key mentors in people not much separated in time and space.