Book Review: "Science and the Modern World"

The collection of Alfred Whitehead's lectures from 1925, published in 1929 by Cambridge University Press (now in the public domain, including at https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1133704W/Science_and_the_modern_world), provides a clear overview of philosophy and metaphysics over the course of European history since the ancient Greeks. Well, a clear overview through the 19th century, anyway. The word "modern" in the title is not exactly applicable anymore. The book is not focused on learning or instruction, though, as prominent cultural events, the topics are mentioned.

What I did get from the book is a much better appreciation for how prevailing social views have evolved over the millennia, and where I stand in relation to this history. People who hold fast to qualitative-only or quantitative-only methodological doctrine might be interested in the concluding sentence of chapter IX Science and Philosophy: "It should be the task of the philosophical schools of this century to bring together the two streams into an expression of the world-picture derived from science, and thereby end the divorce of science from the affirmations of our aesthetic and ethical experiences." My impression is that Whitehead was looking to the 20th century to bridge the Aristotle-Plato divide, the classification-measurement divide, the science-humanity divide. Purely quantitative and purely qualitative research methods represent these extreme positions, while advances in physics and medicine during Whitehead's life demonstrated a synthesis not adequately represented by either position in isolation. Web 2.0 technology may be well suited to analysis from both positions, bridging measurable statistics and descriptives to present a more complete understanding of the phenomenon than could be derived from either perspective, alone.

Whitehead, A.N.. 1929. Science and the Modern World: Lowell Lectures 1925. Cambridge University Press, London.