[lit-ideas] Re: On being called a Lyre [dilemmas]
- From: wokshevs@xxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, cblists@xxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2008 15:29:06 -0230
I'm in general aggreement with SC below though I would specify "scientism" to
refer to the eroneous application of scientific methods and procedures to
domains of meaning and truth that are not "get-at-able" via such methods and
procedures. Moral judgement being one of them.
But I quickly add that I do not view philosophy or any other form of inquiry or
practice as being "primary ..." Such a claim sounds religious to me.
Walter O.
MUN
Quoting cblists@xxxxxxxx:
>
> On 21-Sep-08, at 8:51 PM, wokshevs@xxxxxx wrote:
>
> > Scientists seduced by the allure of brain science ...
>
> To say nothing of philosophers seduced by same:
>
> ... philosophical scientism fails to see the role that
> science and technology play in the alienation of
> human beings from the world through the latter's
> objectification into a causally determined realm of
> nature or, more aggregiously, into a reified realm of
> commodities manipulated by an instrumental rationality.
> .... [S]cientism rests on the false assumption that the
> scientific or theoretical way of viewing things ... provides
> the primary and most significant access to ourselves and
> the world. ... [T]he scientific view of the world is derivative
> and parasitic upon a prior practical view of the world as
> [in Heideggerian terms] ready-to-hand, that is, the environing
> world that is closest, most familiar, and most meaningful
> to us, the world that is always colored by our cognitive,
> ethical and aesthetic values. That is to say, scientism ...
> overlooks the phenomenon of the *life-world* which is
> the enabling condition for scientific practice. Although
> such an anti-scientism *can* lead to obscurantism ... it
> *need* not do so. The critique of scientism ... does not
> seek to refute or negate the results of scientific research in
> the name of some mystical apprehension of the unity of
> man and nature ...; it rather simply insists that science does
> not provide the primary and most significant access to a
> sense of ourselves and the world.... [T]he practices of the
> natural sciences arise out of life-world practices, and ...
> the latter are not simply reducible to the former.
>
> [from Simon Critchley, "Introduction: what is Continental
> philosophy?", in Simon Critchley and William R Schroeder, eds. _A
> Companion to Continental Philosophy_, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers,
> 1998; p. 13]
>
> Of course, one does not have to side with Heidegger in order to be
> critical of 'scientism' - Adorno & Horkheimer (with all of their
> antipathies to Heidegger) immediately come to (well, at least, *my*)
> mind. (I think it is the 'commodities manipulated by an instrumental
> rationality' which triggers that.)
>
> Indeed I think that in Kant's 'Copernican revolution' in philosophy a
> critique of theoretical science providing 'the primary and most
> significant access to ourselves and the world' can be founded.
> (Tentative explication of this view will be made available upon
> request.)
>
> One must be fair to the scientists themselves. Not all are (or were)
> 'realists' when it comes to philosophising about their endeavours;
> indeed some regard(ed) realism as an impediment to scientific progress
> (the parenthetical past tenses - 'were' and 'regarded' are prompted by
> thoughts of the debate between the early developers of quantum theory
> and Einstein: the former thought that Einstein's commitment to realism
> a serious hindrance). 'Anti-scientism' (i.e., rejection of the view
> that science 'provides the primary and most significant access to
> ourselves and the world') is most definitely not automatically 'anti-
> science'.
>
> - Chris Bruce
> Kiel, Germany
> --
>
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