Science and the Modern World [cite:@whitehead_ScienceModernWorld_1925] (1925) is Alfred North Whitehead’s first major philosophical work, based on his Lowell Lectures at Harvard. The book traces the development of modern science from the seventeenth century to the twentieth and argues that the metaphysical assumptions underlying scientific materialism — that reality consists of bits of matter located in space and time, with all qualitative experience relegated to subjective appearance — are abstractions that have been mistaken for concrete reality.
It is in this work that Whitehead introduces the fallacy of misplaced concreteness: the error of treating an abstraction as though it were the full concrete reality from which it was drawn. The concept became a central diagnostic tool in his later process philosophy, developed fully in Process and Reality.
The book also develops early versions of ideas that would become central to process philosophy: the inadequacy of substance metaphysics for interpreting modern physics (particularly relativity and quantum theory), the need to treat events and relations as more fundamental than material objects, and the conviction that nature is not bifurcated into an objective world of matter and a subjective world of experience.
Related
- Alfred North Whitehead
- Process philosophy
- Fallacy of misplaced concreteness — introduced in this work
- Substance metaphysics — the framework the book critiques
- Process and Reality — Whitehead’s systematic development of the ideas begun here