Customer Reviews

Science and the Modern World

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Naturally, a book written in the midst (or even aftermath) of the relativity revolution is going to be both insightful and limited. Whitehead's book is, in this regard, a child of its age. Yet this is not the entire story, since Whitehead possessed the gift of being able to contextualize his own thought and thus leave it open-ended.

The technical aspects of the book are, of course, sparse on facts. There is evidence that Whitehead (who, in 1925, had been at Harvard for only a year and was now engaged full-time with philosophy, less so with the mathematics of his earlier career) was aware of the sweeping changes in the world brought on by the quantum physics. He was certainly aware of its potential. Niels Bohr said that anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it; on this definition, Whitehead did indeed understand it, because the new physics never ceased to amaze him. He grew up, after all, and was edicated as a mathematician, in a very Newtonian world. But it is important to situate the book: the theories that shape what we today know as quantum mechanics were still being debated and worked out in the 20s. Most of the most stiking information has been theorized since that time, certainly long after Whitehead's death. Two examples are Bell's work on separated systems (60s) and Wheeler's discussion of a self-observing universe (1979!).

Whitehead's book is most useful as a book on the philosophy of science, as well as a succinct and accurate appraisal of science in the modern world (modern meaning 17th-19th centuries, historically speaking). He takes a very "post" modern view of the extent of science, writing in chapter one, "if science is not to degenerate into a medly of ad hoc hypotheses, it must become philosophical and must enter upon a thorough criticism of its own foundations." At the same time one can imagine his glee over such recent developments as chaos theory. Whitehead would disagree with Einstein, and side with Bohr: God does indeed play dice.

If you take your science as religion, i.e. the scientific method is still your Nicene creed, you will dislike this book, and most of the recent work on the philosophy of science. However, if you are interested in a hermeneutical perspective on science's recent past, and are willing to see science as as much a faith committment as any other world view (a la Kuhn, for example), you will benfit greatly from this book. If you take Rouse's (1987, 1996) and van Huyssteen's (1998, 1999) position that even so-called "hard" science is thoroughly corrigible and foundationalist, you will enjoy this book. Whitehead's ideas are opposed to scientific materialism from the get-go, and he is absolutely against dogmatism on the part of science or philosophy. To this extent, 75 years down the road this is still a great book, worth the price of the volume simply for the essays "Origins of Modern Science," "Science and Philosophy," and "Religion and Science" alone.

In short: A serious and thoughtful book about the meaning and impact of science. This is not light, popular science reading. (If you're looking for that, I highly recommend the works of folks like Freeman Dyson or Stephen Jay Gould.)

_Science and the Modern World_ has some stunning, timeless insights, and many things I'm fond of quoting. Here's a favorite, from the last chapter:

"Modern science has imposed upon humanity the necessity for wandering. Its progressive thought and its progressive
technology make the transition through time, from generation to generation, a true migration into uncharted seas of adventure.
The very benefit of wandering is that it is dangerous and needs skill to avert evils. We must expect, therefore, that the future
will disclose dangers."

(Here it comes:)

"It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties."

(*P*O*W*!*)

"The prosperous middle classes, who ruled the nineteenth century, placed an excessive value upon the placidity of existence. They refused to face the necessities for social reform imposed by the new industrial system, and they are now refusing to face the necessities for intellectual reform imposed by the new knowledge."

(Same as it ever was!)

"The middle class pessimism over the future of the world comes from a confusion between civilization and security. In the immediate future there will be less security than in the immediate past, less stability. It must be admitted that there is a degree of instability which is inconsistent with civilization. But, on the whole, the great ages have been unstable ages."

Whew.

I cannot make a good summary of this book, for I do not know it well enough. I do have a sense of its great depth and beauty. Whitehead seems to me not only a profound thinker but a humble person who stands in certain awe before the Universe. He opens by describing the way a few people in a small part of Europe caused a great revolution in human thinking. He argues that this Scientific Revolution will amount to the triumph of Reason in the world. His chapters are on, The Origins of Modern Science, Mathematics as Element in the History of Thought, The Century ofGenius, The Eighteenth Century, The Romantic Reaction, The Nineteenth Century, Relativity, The Quantum Theory ,Science and Philosophy, Abstraction, God, Religion and Science, Requisites for Social Progress.

I was moved by the concluding words of his book .

" I have endeavoured in these lectures to give a record of a great adventure in the region of thought. It was shared in by all the races of Western Europe .It developed with the slowness of a mass movement. Half a century is its unit of time. The tale is the epic of an episode in the manifestation of reason. It tells how a particular direction of reason emerges in a race by the long preparation of antecedent epochs, how after its birth its subject- matter gradually unfolds itself, howit attains its triumphs, how its influence moulds the very springs of action of mankind ,and finally how at its moment of supreme success its limitations disclose themselves and call for a renewed exercise of the creative imagination. The moral of the tale is the power of reason ,its decisive influence on the life of humanity. The great conquerors from Caesar to Napoleon, influenced profoundly the lives of subsequent generations. But the total effect of this influence shrinks to insignificance, if compared to the entire transformation of human habits and human mentality produced by the long line of men of thought from Thales to the present day, men individually powerless, but ultimately the rulers of the world. p. 186

Whitehead is widely regarded as a humane philosopher in the best sense of that word--a philosopher able to get across very difficult ideas with a wink and a smile. Also, he has always been commended for his prose style in his more intimate writings, at least in his books based on lectures (the best of which are Science in the Modern World and Adventures of Ideas). Process and Reality is difficult but worth the effort; one does need a glossary at times, but this isn't a review of that book.

It is hard to imagine a philosophy book written with more clarity than this one. I think that the quotes given by reviewers witness that fact. The only review here, it turns out, which dilikes the book because of its "unreadability" is the one riddled with spelling and grammatical errors itself. Hard reading, it turns out, is even harder if one cannot spell. With that, I heartily concur.

To see a reissue of one of Whitehead's classic books is very pleasing and timely. There have been very few people with his depth of understanding of science and technology. The historical and philosophical analyses of this book, written many decades ago, are still fresh and very important.

I found this a curious blend of sparkling expression with sometimes impenetrable prose. It seems worth reading from a general-semantics view because of Whitehead's influence on Alfred Korzybski's work. In this book, Whitehead uses the history of western science as a backdrop for examining some of its basic assumptions and for discussing his own alternative to scientific materialism, which he calls the "theory of organic mechanism," (81) a forerunner of general-systems theory. Whitehead strongly emphasizes a process view of nature: "...nature is a structure of evolving processes. The reality is the process" (74). His discussion of what he calls the fallacy of misplaced concreteness seems close to Korzybski's notion of confusion of orders of abstraction. Whitehead pushes for including the concerns of philosophy, art and religion in a broadened view of science. He argues against "A self-satisfied rationalism [that] is in effect a form of anti-rationalism. It means an arbitrary halt at a particular set of abstractions" (201). Opposed to such limitations, he argues instead that "...almost any idea that jogs you out of your current abstractions may be better than nothing" (62). You may skip the book's at times difficult metaphysics and still find many gems to jog you.

The content of the book is just terrific. See other reviews.

I just wanted to let folks know that for their $19.95, they are getting a very cheaply made book. The cover is quite thin, but even worse, the book is printed on awful, pulpy paper--worse than most romance/mystery novels.

I'm sure that it will pass out of its concrescence sooner than most books . . . .

This is one of the most important writings of the twentieth century. I first read it for a college course in the 1960's (and for that I thank my teacher, Dr. Peter Caws), and I have returned to it many times since. Yes, it is difficult to comprehend this profound book in one reading, but it is well worth the effort.

The book conceptualizes the way of thinking that led to and supported the development of modern science. It proceeds to show not only the value but also the limitations of that way of thinking and how it affected the development of Western civilization in both enriching and limiting ways. The book suggests, long after it was written, how these persisting limitations may be plaguing our current personal, social, political and economic life. By no means is the book anti-science; it is instead asking us to see a bigger reality beyond science but that includes science. That bigger reality includes aesthetics, broadly conceived. His description of the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness," though applied to the philosophy of scientific materialism, points to a more general mental error of mistaking mental abstractions for reality itself. It is an error present, for example, in today's politics, where words like "liberal," "socialism," "big government," "capitalism" and "freedom," are thrown about as though there was an identifiable reality that they described. Such abstractions substitute for experience instead of enriching it. The error is even reflected in much (not all) modern architecture, where often abstract forms dominate with boring and sterile emptiness within the forms. The error of substituting abstraction for empirical reality affects not only how we see ourselves in relation to the world around us, but also our social, political, economic and culture milieu.

So I recommend this book, for if you put forth the effort to understand it, it may enrich your life.

--John L. Hodge, author

I gave this five stars only so as to not effect the ratings of the previous, more knowledgeable reviewer. I am having some difficulty, however, understanding major portions of this book. It was written in 1925 and I expect that some of what was said would no longer be applicable today. Whitehead may well have changed his views regarding quantum mechanics and relativity. In fact, he continually refers to an "ether" that had already been abandoned by his time. Much of it is very accessible review of Hume, Locke and the Romantic poets. But his command of the more technical aspects of the science may no longer be useful. My question is: Does anyone out there know of a book that attempt to update his book or some guide as to how to interpret some of Whitehead's special language. I am very interested in this book and would like to understand it much better than I can at this time.

The ideas and philosophical concepts in this book are generally sensible, rational, and correct, but the writing style and execution leaves much to be desired. In other words, this book is extremely difficult. The impenetrable density of this prose is intolerable, especially considering it was written IN ENGLISH, in the TWENTIETH CENTURY! If someone had handed me this book with a blank cover, I would have been convinced that it was originally written in old German during the time of Kant, and verbosely translated by some frustrated acedemic. It is beyond me how any book writeen in English so recently could be so unreadable.

I might recommend this book to someone with a highly scientific, mathematical and empiricist mind-set. After all, Whitehead is an accomplished mathematician, and his book has an aire of unbiased, empirical objectivity. For a mathematician with a desire to cross over into the philosophy genre, this might be a good choice. But for normal philosophy readers who come from a liberal arts/literary background, this book will probably come across as obfiscated and tortuous.