Science And The Modern World

Science and the Modern World is Alfred North Whitehead's sweeping meditation on how modern science transformed Western civilization's deepest assumptions. Based on his Lowell Lectures of 1925, it ranges from the rise of early modern science and mathematics to relativity, quantum theory, religion, and social progress, treating science not merely as discovery but as a new cosmology that reshaped philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics alike. Whitehead traces this revolution to a long historical preparation: Greek thought, medieval habits of order, Roman law, Stoic philosophy, and the Western Church all helped form the intellectual climate in which science could emerge. Yet the decisive breakthrough came in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when close attention to fact joined with a passion for broad principles and a conviction that nature is intelligible through law. Along the way, Whitehead confronts the philosophical challenge posed by Hume and argues that science rests on a profound faith in an ordered universe. Sympathetic, ambitious, and wide-ranging, this is both a history of ideas and a searching inquiry into the foundations of modern thought. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.