Science and the Modern World: Lowell Lectures, 1925

12mo (19 cm), XI, 266 pp. Publisher's cloth, top edge painted (minor shelf-wear; half-title somewhat toned). Fourth printing of the first edition (1926) of the Lowell Lectures delivered in 1925, the first volume of what became Whitehead's philosophical trilogy completed by Process and Reality and Adventures of Ideas. The book is a study of Western culture over three centuries as shaped by the development of science, guided by Whitehead's conviction that the mentality of an epoch springs from the dominant worldview of its educated communities--and that philosophy's role is to be the critic of cosmologies, harmonizing and scrutinizing the ultimate ideas underlying them. Its thirteen chapters trace the origins of modern science, the role of mathematics in the history of thought, the seventeenth-century genius (Galileo, Newton, Descartes), the eighteenth century, the Romantic reaction against scientific abstraction, the nineteenth century, relativity, quantum theory, science and philosophy, abstraction, God, the relationship between religion and science, and finally the requisites for social progress.…