Science and the Modern World

Science and the Modern World is Alfred North Whitehead's 1925 book, based on a lecture series, tracing how the scientific picture of the world formed from the seventeenth century onwards and arguing that it had by then outlived the assumptions it was built on. Whitehead's target is what he calls scientific materialism, the doctrine that nature consists of matter distributed through space and time with no intrinsic value or relation, and his charge against it is the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, the mistake of treating an abstraction useful for a purpose as though it were the concrete thing itself. Against it he sets an account of nature as process and organism, in which events and their relations rather than enduring bits of stuff are what is basic. The book also contains his chapters on the romantic poets as witnesses against the mechanical picture, and on the relation between religion and science. It is a work of philosophy of its period and is cited for its argument, not as a result in physics.

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