Science and the Modern World
Assigned by 2 of the 9 reading lists, catalogue entry only
- Written
- 1925
- Form
- Treatise
- Language
- English
- Length
- Medium · 210 pp120 to 300 pages
- Difficulty
- Difficult4 of 5 for a first-year reader
We recommendScience and the Modern WorldFree Press, 1997The standard American paperback of the Lowell Lectures text.
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Whitehead's Lowell Lectures, given in Boston in 1925, trace the rise of scientific thinking from its medieval and Greek origins through the century of genius, the seventeenth, to the Romantic reaction, relativity and quantum theory. He argues that modern science rests on a fallacy of misplaced concreteness, treating abstractions such as simple location in space and time as the concrete reality, and that the resulting scientific materialism cannot account for organisms, value or the poet's response to nature. Later chapters sketch his alternative philosophy of organism and discuss God, religion and the requisites of social progress.
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The catalogue entry above is complete: the dates, the form, the themes and every program that assigns Science and the Modern World are verified against each program's published list.
What is missing is the part that takes real work: the summary, the key passages, and a recommended translation. The edition named below is the one most programs assign, so the buy links are useful already.
