Download or read book Order and Organism written by Murray Code and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1985-06-30 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is now needed is a way of thinking about the physical that is realistic in outlook but which departs radically from the mechanistic post-Galilean tradition. Since it seems clear that we can no longer take for granted the certainty and absolute objectivity of scientific knowledge, any alternative view must be able to do full justice to subjective modes of knowing. Order and Organism shows how Alfred North Whitehead's thought can reconcile some of the most insistent demands of common sense with the esoteric results of modern physics and mathematics. Whitehead shows a way to resolve the perennial puzzle of why mathematics works. Under his view, it is possible to account for the necessity and uniqueness of mathematical theories without denying the fact that such theories often arise from the mathematician's essentially aesthetic interest in various kinds of pattern.