Alfred North Whitehead was born on 15 February 1861 at Ramsgate on the Isle of Thanet in Kent, the son of a schoolmaster and clergyman. At the age of 14 he was sent to Sherborne public school in Dorset, which had recently gained an outstanding reputation. Here he acquired a solid knowledge of Latin and Greek: ‘I can still feel the dullness of Xenophon, Sallust, and Livy’ (ESP 9) was his confession towards the end of his life.

In 1880 he entered Cambridge University with a scholarship in mathematics. Whatever instruction he had in philosophy (history and theology were his other true passions) was obtained independently, by means of solitary lectures and discussions with friends and colleagues. The invitation to join the legendary debating club known as the ‘Apostles’ gave him ample opportunities to reflect upon philosophical issues and to exercise his dialectical skill. Life in Cambridge during these years, Whitehead would later recall, had ‘the appearance of a daily Platonic dialogue’ (ESP 10).

Upon the completion of his studies, Whitehead was appointed a fellow of Trinity College on the basis of a now lost dissertation on James Clerk Maxwell's Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism in 1884. He taught mathematics and mathematical physics at Cambridge until 1910. This was a golden age for the university, witnessing the rise of analytic philosophy in the works of George Edward Moore and Whitehead's own pupil, Bertrand Russell. The outstanding James Ward (now almost totally forgotten), John Ellis McTaggart and Charles Dunbar Broad were among his colleagues.

While in Cambridge, Whitehead published On Mathematical Concepts of the Material World (1906) and The Axioms of Projective Geometry (1907). His most important contribution to philosophy during these years was the logical treatise he co-authored with Bertrand Russell, the monumental Principia Mathematica (1910–13) – ‘a big book no part of which is wholly due to either’ (PM 93), as Russell generously acknowledged.

In 1914 Whitehead became Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London, where he had moved a few years earlier. While in London he regularly attended meetings of the newly founded Aristotelian Society, which gave him plenty of opportunities to continue his informal education in philosophy.