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Science and the Modern World
Whitehead's 1925 Lowell Lectures — the book that introduced the fallacy of misplaced concreteness and launched his philosophical turn from mathematics to metaphysics.
Science and the Modern World is the book in which Whitehead first articulated the diagnosis that would animate the rest of his career: that seventeenth-century scientific materialism had bequeathed to Western thought a picture of nature as composed of inert substances bearing properties, a picture adequate for some engineering purposes but disastrously inadequate as a general metaphysics. The Lowell Lectures at Harvard in 1925 traced the consequences of this error through the rise of modern science and showed why a new philosophical framework — what would become his philosophy of organism — was required.
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The book is accessible where Process and Reality is forbidding. It surveys the scientific revolution, diagnoses its metaphysical assumptions, and proposes an alternative, all in prose that a general reader can follow. It was widely read in its time and remains the best introduction to Whitehead's concerns for those not prepared to tackle the technical apparatus of his mature system.
The central chapter, 'The