Talk:Alfred North Whitehead/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Cerebellum (talk · contribs) 19:21, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

Hello, I will be reviewing this article. --Cerebellum (talk) 19:21, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks! I just want to quickly say that 1. I have just now added a paragraph to the "Religion" section, and 2. I will be on vacation for Thanksgiving from Nov. 26-30, and may not be able to quickly address issues with the article that arise during this time. If issues arise during this period, please allow me some leeway for response.

Thanks again, I feel fortunate that Whitehead's article has attracted a reviewer so soon after nomination. Joseph Petek (talk) 20:34, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

GA review (see here for what the criteria are, and here for what they are not)

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Excellent work on this article! I am glad I got to review it - I read Science and the Modern World in high school and was impressed, though I had no idea who Whitehead was or what he stood for at the time and probably understood little of what he was actually arguing. It's great to see work being done on highly important articles like this one.

1. It is reasonably well written.

   a (prose, no copyvios, spelling and grammar): b (MoS for lead, layout, word choice, fiction, and lists):

   The prose is very high-quality and you do a good job of keeping it engaging throughout, and you explain difficult concepts like Whitehead's theory of perception in a very clear way. I especially like the way you use lively turns of phrase like Cobb effectively grabbed the torch and planted it firmly in Claremont. I did make one change, removing the rhetorical question, Why create theoretical schemes for how the universe works if they can never be fully tested or verified? To me, this seems too informal, but you're welcome to put it back in if you feel strongly about it.

2. It is factually accurate and verifiable.

   a (reference section): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR):

   Personally I would like to see more inline citations, at least one per paragraph, but at present the article meets the GA standard, and I'm inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt since you seem to have some expertise in this field. See the comments below for a bit more on the references.

3. It is broad in its coverage.

   a (major aspects): b (focused):

   Meets the GA standard, but I think some more biographical information might be appropriate, as explained below.

4. It follows the neutral point of view policy.

   Fair representation without bias:

   This article seems biased towards Whitehead. For example, you write that, "interest in Whitehead has continued to grow worldwide," but the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says that Whitehead has been " not especially influential among many Anglo-American secular philosophers" and that his metaphysics "has been less than enthusiastically embraced by members of the broader philosophical community." You hint at this when you say "This is not to say that Whitehead’s thought was widely accepted or even well-understood," but you don't explain why it was not accepted or what were the main objections to it, and you talk about Whitehead having a swift "rise to prominence in philosophical circles." The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy sums things up by saying, "While Whitehead’s influence has never been great, in the opening years of the 21st century it appears to be growing in a broad range of otherwise divergent disciplines." Is that an accurate way of putting it?

There are three specific changes I would like to see. These are negotiable, so let me know if you think they are unreasonable or unnecessary.

1)The lead is problematic because it includes quotes talking about Whitehead's greatness but no indication of whether nor not those quotes represent scholarly consensus. So, consider adding a qualifier either in the first or third paragraph saying that Whitehead's ideas are not widely accepted, something like Whitehead is best known as the originator of the philosophical school known as process philosophy. The influence of Whitehead's ideas on mainstream philosophy has been limited, but today they have found application to a wide variety of disciplines, including ecology, theology, education, physics, biology, economics, and psychology, among other areas.

2) Mention key objections to Whitehead's ideas or his main critics, if there are any.

3) In either the "Philosophy and metaphysics" section or the "Influence and legacy" section, add a sentence or two about Whitehead's impact on philosophy. You talk a lot in the legacy section about what his disciples have done, but how is he regarded in the mainstream philosophical community?

1. It is stable.

   No edit wars, etc.:

   No concerns.

2. It is illustrated by images and other media, where possible and appropriate.

   a (images are tagged and non-free content have fair use rationales): b (appropriate use with suitable captions):

   Only one image - could you add in some pictures of other key people such as Russel or Cobb? Or maybe geographical locations related to Whitehead's life?

3. Overall:

   Pass/Fail:

   The only issues I see are neutrality and images. I'm placing this article on hold for seven days (longer if necessary due to Thanksgiving) to allow you to work on those. Other than that, I've left some comments below with optional suggestions for further improvements to the article beyond GA status. Pass, issues have been resolved. --Cerebellum (talk) 14:16, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

Comments

• Links: I've removed a couple of external links from the body of the article, per WP:ELPOINTS.
• Life: The article is very detailed on Whitehead's thought, but the "Life" section is a bit thin. There's more biographical information mixed in with the rest of the article, of course, but I still have some questions. Who were his parents? Why did he originally study mathematics instead of philosophy? What caused him later on to turn to philosophy? Who were his teachers or main influences on him as a student? Did he collaborate with any other scholars, beside Russel who you mention? What key events in his life shaped his thought? There may not be answers to all of these questions, but a little more detail would be helpful. Ludwig Wittgenstein is an example of an article with lots of biography, though I think it goes too far and omits important information on Wittgenstein's thought.
• Universal Algebra: When you say, "In A Treatise on Universal Algebra (1898) the term "universal algebra" had essentially the same meaning that it has today," can you briefly explain what exactly universal algebra is? Or, maybe just add a sentence explaining the main point of the work, as you do for Principia Mathematica with the sentence, "Principia Mathematica’s purpose was to describe a set of axioms and inference rules in symbolic logic from which all mathematical truths could in principle be proven."
• References: The references are adequate for the GA level, but the article could be improved further by adding more. In my opinion, each paragraph should have a citation. Here are some other statements which I think should be referenced:

• "for half a century Chicago’s Divinity School was closely associated with Whitehead’s thought"
• "Largely due to Cobb’s influence, today Claremont remains strongly identified with Whitehead’s process thought, and interest in Whitehead has continued to grow worldwide."
• "The above is some of Whitehead's most evocative writing about God, and was powerful enough to inspire the movement known as process theology"

• Prose: even if that progress remains permanently asymptotic. Do you mean here that scientific knowledge will always be incomplete? It might be better to say this in a simpler way, instead of relying on the reader's knowledge of what an asymptote is.
• Bare URLs: You sometimes use bare URLs for your citations, which can eventually lead to link rot. I would recommend providing supplementary information along with the URLs, perhaps using citation templates. --Cerebellum (talk) 18:41, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

In the section about God, what sources are being used? It only cites P&R. For example "Whitehead's idea of God is quite different from the traditional Christian notion." This suggests that there is a consensus view of what the traditional Christian notion of God is, and, further, that in this consensus view, Whitehead's stands outside of this. If this is just supposed to a plain exegesis of P&R, then it seems rather strange to me. When I read this section of P&R' I see that Whitehead identifies at least four traditions in Christianity—the divine Caesars tradition, the unmoved mover tradition, the eminently real tradition (p. 342 in the 1978 edition), which he criticizes; but then he also identifies a Galilean origin element which "dwells upon the tender elements in the world" (p. 343), with which he seems to identify his theology. Also, he seems to equally criticize the effect of those previous elements in both Christianity and Islam. --Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 20:51, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

GA Review response/revisions

Thanks. These are all good comments and good suggestions for improvement. I believe I will be able to address them all before I head out for Thanksgiving, but if I do not complete revisions by then I will drop a note here and finish after I return from vacation.

The most difficult to address will be the portions on Whitehead's influence. The IEP entry says at the very top that "Evaluating Whitehead’s influence is a difficult matter." That's no joke. On the one hand, he is little-studied directly, except in some graduate-level philosophy and theology programs. On the other hand, he greatly influenced a number of philosophers that are more widely read than Whitehead himself today (Russell and W.V.O. Quine leap to mind first, although there are others), and his thought has managed to sneak in the back door of many disciplines while people weren't paying attention. This difficulty is why I really like the Wieman quote I included at the bottom of the "Philosophy and metaphysics" section, because I think it successfully conveys that Whitehead was influential and ahead of his time while still being little-known in the popular consciousness. There is a reason that Wikipedia's article on matter leads off with "Matter is a poorly defined term in science"; in many ways I think science still has some catching up to do to reach where Whitehead was 80 years ago when he tried to tell everyone that the whole concept of matter was wrong. But how to communicate all this without bias?

In any case, I will see if I can strike the right balance on Whitehead's influence in my revisions. Joseph Petek (talk) 20:46, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

I believe I have addressed the most pressing concerns of the GA review. Here's a summary of what I've done:

• Added a bunch of pictures. Pretty self-explanatory. I tried to not let the text go too long without a picture. The hardest space to fill was the subheadings of "Philosophy and metaphysics." I ended up grabbing pictures of Locke and Bergson as influences since I couldn't think of what else might go there. At least those two pictures have information in the captions that isn't already in the article.
• Took the Latour and Deleuze quotes out of the lead. I think this alone goes a long way toward the article's greater neutrality. With these quotes gone from the lead, I did not see a need to insert a qualifier on Whitehead's influence, like the suggested "The influence of Whitehead's ideas on mainstream philosophy has been limited." The Latour and Deleuze quotes are still in the article, but they have been moved to the "Influence and legacy" section, and followed with a very explicit qualification as minority philosophical opinions.
• Added three new paragraphs to "Influence and Legacy." The first speaks to Whitehead's influence in China, the other explains that Whitehead's overall influence in the English-speaking world has been relatively small and indirect, and the third lists some possible reasons for Whitehead's lack of influence.
• Other neutrality changes. The bit about "and interest in Whitehead has continued to grow worldwide" has been replaced with "and even today he is not considered especially influential outside of relatively specialized circles." The sentence "Whitehead’s rise to prominence in philosophical circles was swift" has been changed to "Whitehead’s philosophy was highly original, and soon garnered interest in philosophical circles," and I've added a testimonial to this same "Philosophy and metaphysics" section that helps to explain the difficulty of Whitehead's thought and his peers' somewhat confused reception of it, along with the sentence, "Indeed, it may not be inappropriate to speculate that some fair portion of the respect generally shown to Whitehead by his philosophical peers at the time arose from their sheer bafflement."

That's about it. I also added a quote from Bergson I found in Lowe's biography, and made a few other minor edits and additions. I plan to work on some of the additional suggestions to get the article "beyond GA status" soon (along with addressing Atethnekos' concern with the "God" section"), but hopefully I have adequately addressed image and neutrality concerns. One thing I didn't do was "Mention key objections to Whitehead's ideas or his main critics, if there are any," simply because Whitehead is usually ignored rather than criticized (this is, I suspect, at least partly because his work is so difficult to approach without serious guidance that few have read Whitehead sufficiently to criticize him -- God knows I have not become expert in Whitehead's thought through self-study).

One other very small thing. I have quite self-consciously left in the "asymptotic" bit. Perhaps this is misguided stubbornness on my part, but to me no other word/concept captures what I want to convey with that phrase. The problem with "incomplete" and "unfinished" is that by the very nature of those words, they both suggest that the process can be complete, or can be finished. In any case, I know it's a bit silly to leave in such an obscure word, but I think the meaning can be sorted out by the context, and someone might eve learn something new seeing it. If anyone else has strong feelings on the matter, they are welcome to change it.

Let me know what you think of the edits and whether the article still needs neutrality adjustments. Joseph Petek (talk) 10:49, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

Awesome, thanks for putting in so much work so quickly! The pictures look great and I think the neutrality changes have improved the article tremendously. I agree that taking those quotes out of the lead helped a lot. I'm happy to pass this article now. Again, fantastic work! --Cerebellum (talk) 14:16, 24 November 2013 (UTC)