Abstract

Man and Nature

The article discusses the book "Man and Nature," by Alfred North Whitehead. In the broadest sense the aim of philosophy and the aim of science are the same—to understand the world. In practice, moreover, there has never been any persistent and consistent theoretical delimitation of the field of one from the field of the other. And yet the fact remains that philosophers as distinguished from scientists and scientists as distinguished from philosophers continue to exist. One reason is that philosophers generally stress the importance of wholeness, while, in practice, the scientist is content to understand piecemeal—to break knowledge up into departments and to postpone, perhaps indefinitely, the unification of physics, biology, and the rest into one general science of nature.