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What if science’s greatest strength also blinds us to much of what makes life matter?
In Science and the Modern World, Alfred North Whitehead asks how science comes to shape the way people think. These lectures trace ideas from the Greeks to the physics of the 1920s. Mathematics gives science its power, but Whitehead questions what happens when a successful method becomes a complete picture of reality.
The stakes reach beyond science. Can a world understood as dead matter make room for poetry, ethics and religion? Whitehead explores scientific materialism, the Romantic poets’ resistance to it, and the challenges of relativity. He proposes a different view: nature as a web of living processes, rather than separate, lifeless parts.
What you’ll discover
- Faith in an ordered world Explore why Whitehead places confidence in nature’s order at the beginning of modern science.
- The power of pattern See how mathematics studies relations that hold regardless of the things they connect.
- A picture worth questioning Examine what scientific materialism leaves out when it treats nature as dead matter.
- Poetry pushes back Meet the Romantic resistance to a view of nature stripped of living qualities.
- Nature as living process Follow Whitehead toward a philosophy of organism, with room to reconsider science and religion.
Who will love it
This book suits readers who love the history of ideas, who wonder how science and poetry, religion and mathematics fit together, and who enjoy a thinker who widens the question.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- Scientific success can hide a mistake
- Science inherited its faith in order
- Abstraction brings power back to facts
- A useful model is not everything
- Poetry keeps value within nature
- Events connect what matter separates
- New physics calls for new concepts
- Wisdom joins evidence with cooperation
- Ask what successful ideas leave out
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Science and the Modern World
by Alfred North Whitehead · 1925
A mathematician turned philosopher asks why science works at all and what its success leaves out of the world.
Challenging5–10 hours to read20 languages
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“he stands provisionally as the last great Anglo-American philosopher before Wittgenstein's disciples spread their misty confusion, sufficiency, and terror.”
In short
What if the greatest success of modern science also hides a mistake? In 1925 the mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead stood before a Harvard audience and made that suggestion.
Science and the Modern World at a glance
- Reading time
- About 5 h4 h fast, 6 h slow
- Length
- 71,900 words
- Library level
- Challenging long sentences, a rich vocabulary
- First published
- 1925by Alfred North Whitehead
Reading time at 238 words a minute (fast 300, slow 200). How long the classics take to read · Updated
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
Science grew from a quiet change of mind
Whitehead opens with a claim about timing. The sixteenth century saw the split of Western Christianity and the rise of modern science. The Reformation was a popular uprising that soaked Europe in blood. Science began among a small group of thinkers. Even Galileo suffered only an honorable detention and a mild reprimand.
Yet the quiet movement changed more. The new thing was a mental habit, not a discovery. It joined a passionate interest in stubborn facts with an equal devotion to general principles. Whitehead calls this habit the salt that keeps life sweet. Universities exist to hand it on, and it can travel to any country with a rational society.
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Details
- First published
- 1925
- Language
- English
- Reading time
- 5 h 50 min
- Level
- Challenging
Cite this edition
Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. Library of Alexandria, 2026, libraryofalexandria.com/products/science-and-the-modern-world.
Whitehead, A. N. (2026). Science and the modern world. Library of Alexandria. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/science-and-the-modern-world (Original work published 1925)
Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. Library of Alexandria, 2026. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/science-and-the-modern-world.
@book{whitehead2026science,
author = {Whitehead, Alfred North},
title = {Science and the Modern World},
publisher = {Library of Alexandria},
year = {2026},
url = {https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/science-and-the-modern-world},
note = {First published 1925}
}
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What is Science and the Modern World about?
It traces how scientific thinking shaped Western culture from the sixteenth century to the 1920s, shows the limits of the matter-based picture of nature, and proposes a philosophy built on events and organisms.
What is the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness?
It is Whitehead's name for treating an abstraction, such as a piece of matter at a point in space and time, as if it were the full concrete reality it was drawn from.
What does Whitehead mean by scientific materialism?
He means the assumption that nature is made of senseless, valueless matter spread through space and moving by fixed laws. He says it works well as a method but is too narrow as a picture.
The author
Alfred North Whitehead
1861–1947 · English mathematician and philosopher
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) was an English mathematician and philosopher. He was born in Ramsgate, England, and taught at Cambridge and in London before moving to Harvard University in 1924. He wrote Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell, published in 1910–1913, and Science and the Modern World in 1925. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“Philosophy works slowly.”
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