Resumen
Resumen de La ciencia y el mundo moderno
Para quién es
For readers who love the history of ideas, and anyone who wonders how science, religion, poetry and ethics fit together.
De qué trata este libro
Science and the Modern World is a book of lectures by Alfred North Whitehead, an English mathematician who had turned to philosophy. He gave them at the Lowell Institute in Boston in early 1925, soon after he moved to Harvard, and published them the same year. Whitehead had written with Bertrand Russell on the foundations of mathematics. Now he asks a broader question. How did science come to shape the whole way modern people think, and what has that done to us?
The book gives you a short history of ideas from the Greeks to the physics of the 1920s. It also gives you a warning and a proposal. The warning is that a method which works brilliantly can harden into a picture of the world that leaves out most of what we value. The proposal is a new way of seeing nature as a web of living processes instead of dead bits of matter. Whitehead writes as a teacher who loves his subject, and he starts where he thinks modern science began, with a certain kind of faith.
En este resumen
- 1Science began with a faith in orderFree
- 2Mathematics gave science its power
- 3Scientific materialism hides a mistake
- 4Poets and later science pushed back
- 5Modern physics points to a philosophy of organism
- 6Religion, science and society must keep learning
Idea clave 1 de 6
Science began with a faith in order
Whitehead opens by asking why modern science arose when and where it did. His answer is not only a matter of tools or clever men. He says science rests on an instinctive belief that nature has an order, that things happen for reasons, and that those reasons can be found. Without that belief, nobody would bother to look.
He traces the belief to several sources. The Greek tragedians, especially Aeschylus, and the Roman writer Seneca gave Europe a sense of fate, a cold and inevitable order that works through events. Whitehead says the idea of an order of nature grew from this sense of a moral and dramatic necessity. Science, in a way, took over the fixed pattern of fate and made it into a pattern of law.
The Middle Ages add a second source. Medieval thinkers held that God was both personal and rational, so that the world was the work of a mind and could be understood. Whitehead argues that this long habit of thinking in terms of reason prepared Europe for the idea that nature obeys rules. He does not say this was a conscious plan. He says it was a mood that soaked into the culture.
The third source is the stubborn love of facts. Whitehead sees in the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance a turn toward the particular, the thing that actually happened. For him, modern science is the marriage of two things. One is faith in a general order. The other is a passion for the exact detail. Each alone leads nowhere, and together they started a revolution.
That’s 1 of 6 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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Questions about La ciencia y el mundo moderno
What is Science and the Modern World about?
It is a history of how scientific ideas shaped Western thought from the Greeks to the 1920s. Whitehead criticizes the materialist picture of nature and offers a view based on events, processes and value.
What is the fallacy of misplaced concreteness?
It is Whitehead's name for mistaking an abstract scheme for the full reality. For example, treating nature as only matter in motion, then concluding that value and feeling are not real.
When was Science and the Modern World written?
It grew from the Lowell Lectures that Whitehead gave in Boston in 1925, soon after he joined Harvard. The book appeared the same year and became his first major statement of his philosophy.
Is Science and the Modern World hard to read?
No. Whitehead writes as a teacher who loves his subject, and he gives you a clear story, a short history of ideas from the Greeks to the physics of the 1920s. The book is also built from lectures, so each part makes one point at a time.
What is scientific materialism?
It is the view, shaped in the seventeenth century, that nature is made of matter moving in space and time under fixed laws, with no purpose or inner life. Whitehead argues it is too narrow.