A Centennial Reflection on Whitehead’s Vision and Its Legacy
2025 marks the 100th anniversary of Alfred North Whitehead's Science and the Modern World – a bold call to rethink the foundations of science in light of a more organic, relational, and value-laden view of reality. A century later, we live in what is often called a postmodern world: one marked by skepticism toward absolute certainties, situated knowing, and a growing recognition of the limits of reductionist and mechanistic thinking.
This one-day international conference brings together philosophers, scientists, and transdisciplinary scholars to explore how science might evolve within this postmodern context. The tensions Whitehead identified – between abstraction and concreteness, mechanism and organism, fact and value – remain unresolved but newly urgent in the face of global ecological, social, and epistemic crises.
By reflecting on Whitehead's vision from the vantage point of the postmodern world, participants will consider how humanity can move beyond its modernist inheritance toward a more integrative, life-affirming cosmology. The gathering welcomes diverse perspectives that challenge reductionist assumptions, rethink categories like life, matter, and mind, and reimagine science as part of a dynamic, relational, and meaning-filled universe.
Check in, morning networking
Welcome remarks and keynote presentation
Celebration dinner & networking
Whether your work engages quantum physics, evolutionary biology, cosmology, systems thinking, metaphysics, or science and values, we invite you to join this centennial reflection on the future of humankind in an age of polycrisis.