behavioralism ::: An approach in political science that seeks to provide an objective, quantified approach to explaining and predicting political behavior. It is associated with the rise of the behavioral sciences, modeled after the natural sciences. It should not be confused with the behaviorism of psychology.
Chalmers University of Technology "body, education" A Swedish university founded in 1829 offering master of science and doctoral degrees. Research is carried out in the main engineering sciences as well as in technology related mathematical and natural sciences. Five hundred faculty members work in more than 100 departments organised in nine schools. Chalmers collaborates with the University of Göteborg. Around 8500 people work and study on the Chalmers campus, including around 500 faculty members and some 600 teachers and doctoral students. About 4800 students follow the master degree programs. Every year 700 Masters of Science in Engineering and in Architecture graduate from Chalmers, and about 190 PhDs and licentiates are awarded. Some 40% of Sweden's engineers and architects are Chalmers graduates. About a thousand research projects are in progress and more than 1500 scientific articles and research reports are published every year. Chalmers is a partner in 80 EC research projects. {(http://chalmers.se/Home-E.html)}. Address: S-412 96 Göteborg, Sweden. (1995-02-16)
(d) The methodological problem bulks large in epistemology and the solutions of it follow in general the lines of cleavage determined by the previous problem. Rationalists of necessity have emphasized deductive and demonstrative procedures in the acquisition and elaboration of knowledge while empiricists have relied largely on induction and hypothesis but few philosophers have espoused the one method to the complete exclusion of the other. A few attempts have been made to elaborate distinctively philosophical methods reducible neither to the inductive procedure of the natural sciences nor the demonstrative method of mathematics -- such are the Transcendental Method of Kant and the Dialectical Method of Hegel though the validity and irreducibility of both of these methods are highly questionable. Pragmatism, operationalism, and phenomenology may perhaps in certain of their aspects be construed is recent attempts to evaluate new epistemological methods.
(e) The problem of the A PRIORI, though the especial concern of the rationalist, confronts the empiricist also since few epistemologists are prepared to exclude the a priori entirely from their accounts of knowledge. The problem is that of isolating the a priori or non-empirical elements in knowledge and accounting for them in terms of the human reason. Three principal theories of the a priori have been advanced: the theory of the intrinsic A PRIORI which asserts that the basic principles of logic, mathematics, natural sciences and philosophy are self-evident truths recognizable by such intrinsic traits as clarity and distinctness of ideas. The intrinsic theory received its definitive modern expression in the theory of "innate ideas" (q.v.) of Herbert of Cherbury, Descartes, and 17th century rationalism. The presuppositional theory of the a priori which validates a priori truths by demonstrating that they are presupposed either by their attempted denial (Leibniz) or by the very possibility of experience (Kant). The postulational theory of the A PRIORI elaborated under the influence of recent postulational techniques in mathematics, interprets a priori principles as rules or postulates arbitrarily posited in the construction of formal deductive systems. See Postulate; Posit. (f) The problem of differentiating the principal kinds of knowledge is an essential task especially for an empirical epistemology. Perhaps the most elementary epistemological distinction is between non-inferential apprehension of objects by perception, memory, etc. (see Knowledge by Acquaintance), and inferential knowledge of things with which the knowing subject has no direct apprehension. See Knowledge by Description. Acquaintance in turn assumes two principal forms: perception or acquaintance with external objects (see Perception), and introspection or the subject's acquaintance with the "self" and its cognitive, volitional and affective states. See Introspection; Reflection. Inferential knowledge includes knowledge of other selves (this is not to deny that knowledge of other minds may at times be immediate and non-inferential), historical knowledge, including not only history in the narrower sense but also astronomical, biological, anthropological and archaeological and even cosmological reconstructions of the past and finally scientific knowledge in so far as it involves inference and construction from observational data.
Experimental Psychology: (1) Experimental psychology in the widest sense is the application to psychology of the experimental methods evolved by the natural sciences. In this sense virtually the whole of contemporary psychology is experimental. The experimental method consists essentially in the prearrangement and control of conditions in such a way as to isolate specific variables. In psychology, the complexity of subject matter is such that direct isolation of variables is impossible and various indirect methods are resorted to. Thus an experiment will be repeated on the same subjects with all conditions remaining constant except the one variable whose influence is being tested and which is varied systematically by the experimenter. This procedure yields control data within a single group of subjects. If repetition of the experiment with the same group introduces additional uncontrolled variables, an equated control group is employed. Systematic rotation of variables among several groups of subjects may also be resorted to. In general, however, psychologists have designed their experiments in accordance with what has frequently been called the "principle of the one variable."
Hartmann, Eduard von: (1842-1906) Hybridizing Schopenhauer's voluntarism with Hegel's intellectualism, and stimulated by Schelling, the eclectic v.H. sought to overcome irrationalism and rationalism by postulating the Unconscious, raised into a neutral absolute which has in it both will and idea in co-ordination. Backed by an encyclopaedic knowledge he showed, allegedly inductively, how this generates all values in a conformism or correlationism which circumvents a subjective monistic idealism no less than a phenomenalism by means of a transcendental realism. Writing at a time when vitalists were hard put to be endeavored to synthesize the new natural sciences and teleology by assigning to mechanistic causility a special function in the natural process under a more generalized and deeper purposiveness. Dispensing with a pure rationalism, but without taking refuge in a vital force, v.H. was then able to establish a neo-vitalism. In ethics he transcended an original pessimism, flowing from the admittance of the alogical and dis-teleological, in a qualified optimism founded upon an evolutionary hypothesis which regards nature with its laws subservient to the logical, as a species of the teleological, and to reason which, as product of development, redeems the irrational will once it has been permitted to create a world in which existence means unhappiness.
He was the first to recognize a fundamental critical difference between the philosopher and the scientist. He found those genuine ideals in the pre-Socratic period of Greek culture which he regarded as essential standards for the deepening of individuality and real culture in the deepest sense, towards which the special and natural sciences, and professional or academic philosophers failed to contribute. Nietzsche wanted the philosopher to be prophetic, originally forward-looking in the clarification of the problem of existence. Based on a comprehensive critique of the history of Western civilization, that the highest values in religion, morals and philosophy have begun to lose their power, his philosophy gradually assumed the will to power, self-aggrandizement, as the all-embracing principle in inorganic and organic nature, in the development of the mind, in the individual and in society. More interested in developing a philosophy of life than a system of academic philosophy, his view is that only that life is worth living which develops the strength and integrity to withstand the unavoidable sufferings and misfortunes of existence without flying into an imaginary world.
II. Early Scholastics (12 cent.) St. Anselm of Canterbury (+1109) did more than anyone else in this early period to codify the spirit of Scholasticism. His motto: credo, ut tntelligam taken from St. Augustine, expressed the organic relation that existed between the supernatural and the natural during the Middle Ages and the interpretative and the directive force which faith had upon reason. In this period a new interest was taken in the problem of the universals. For the first time a clear demarcation was noted between the realistic and the nominalistic solutions to this problem. William of Champeaux (+1121) proposed the former and Roscelin (+c. 1124) the latter. A third solution, concepiualistic in character, was proposed by Abelard (+1142) who finally crystalized the Scholastic method. He was the most subtle dialectician of his age. Two schools of great importance of this period were operating at Chartres and the Parisian Abbey of St. Victor. The first, founded by Fulbert of Chartres in the late tenth century, was characterized by its leanings toward Platonism and distinguished by its humanistic tendencies coupled with a love of the natural sciences. Many of its Greek, Arabian and Jewish sources for studies in natural sciences came from the translations of Constantine the African (+c. 1087) and Adelard of Bath. Worthy to be noted as members of or sympathizers with this school are Bernard and Thierry of Chartres (+c. 1127; c. 1150); William of Conches (+1145) and Bernard Silvestris (+1167). The two most important members of the School were Gilbert de la Poiree (+1154) and John of Salisbury (+1180). The latter was a humanistic scholar of great stylistic skill and calm, balanced judgment. It is from his works, particularly the Metalogicus, that most of our knowledge of this period still derives. Juxtaposed to the dialectic, syllogistic and rationalistic tendencies of this age was a mystical movement, headed by St. Bernard of Clairvaux (+1153). This movement did not oppose itself to dialectics in the uncompromising manner of Peter Damiani, but sought rather to experience and interiorize truth through contemplation and practice. Bernard found a close follower and friend in William of St. Thierry (+1148 or 1153). An attempt to synthesize the mystic and dialectical movements is found in two outstanding members of the Victorine School: Hugh of St. Victor (+1141) who founded its spirit in his omnia disce, videbis postea nihil esse supervuum and Richard of St. Victor (+1173), his disciple, who introduced the a posteriori proof for God's existence into the Scholastic current of thought. Finally, this century gave Scholasticism its principal form of literature which was to remain dominant for some four centuries. While the method came from Abelard and the formulas and content, in great part, from the Didascalion of Hugh of St. Victor, it was Robert of Melun (+1167) and especially Peter the Lombard (+1164) who fashioned the great Summae sententiarum.
III. Golden Age (13 cent.). The sudden elevation of and interest in philosophy during this period can be attributed to the discovery and translation of Aristotelian literature from Arabian, Jewish and original sources, together with the organization of the University of Paris and the founding of the Franciscan and Dominican Orders. Names important in the introduction and early use of Aristotle are Dominic Gundisalvi, William of Auvergne (+ 1149), Alexander Neckam (+1217), Michael Scot (+c. 1234) and Robert Grosseteste (+ 1253). The last three were instrumental in interesting Scholastic thought in the natural sciences, while the last (Robert), if not the author of, was, at least, responsible for the first Summa philosophiae of Scholasticism. Scholastic philosophy has now reached the systematizing and formularizing stage and so on the introduction of Aristotle's works breaks up into two camps: Augustinianism, comprising those who favor the master theses of Augustine and look upon Aristotle with varying degrees of hostility; Aristotelianism, comprising those who favor Aristotle, without altogether abandoning the Augustinian framework.
I. Logic of History The historical objects under observation (man, life, society, biological and geological conditions) are so diverse that even slight mistakes in evaluation of items and of the historical whole may lead to false results. This can be seen from the modern logic of history. In the 18th century, G. B. Vico contended, under the deep impression of the lawfulness prevailing in natural sciences, that historical events also follow each other according to unswerving natural laws. He assumed three stages of development, that of fantasy, of will, and of science. The encyclopedists and Saint-Simon shared his view. The individual is immersed, and driven on, by the current of social tendencies, so that Comte used to speak of an "histoire sans noms". His three stages of development were the theological, metaphysical, and scientific stage. H. Spencer and A. Fouillee regard social life as an organism unfolding itself according to immanent laws, either of racial individuality (Gobineau, Vocher de Lapauge) or of a combination of social, physical, and personal forces (Taine). The spirit of a people and of an age outweigh completely the power of an individual personality which can work only along socially conditioned tendencies. The development of a nation always follows the same laws, it may vary as to time and whereabouts but never as to the form (Burkhardt, Lamprecht). To this group of historians belong also O. Spengler and K. Marx; "Fate" rules the civilization of peoples and pushes them on to their final destination.
IV. Probability as a Primitive Notion: According to this interpretation, whicn is due particularly to Keynes, probability is taken as ultimate or undefined, and it is made known through its essential characteristics. Thus, probability is neither an intrinsic property of propositions like truth, nor an empty concept, but a relative property linking a proposition with its partial evidence. It follows that the probability of the same proposition varies with the evidence presented, and that even though a proposition may turn out to be false, our judgment that it is probable upon a given evidence can be correct. Further, since probability belongs to a proposition only in its relation to other propositions, probability-inferences cannot be the same as truth-inferences as they cannot break the chain of relations between their premisses, they lack one of the essential features usually ascribed to inference. That is why, in particular, the conclusions of the natural sciences cannot be separated from their evidence, as it may be the case with the deductive sciences. With such assumptions, probability is the group name given to the processes which strengthen or increase the likelihood of an analogy. The main objection to this interpretation is the arbitrary character of its primitive idea. There is no reason why there are relations between propositions such that p is probable upon q, even on the assumption of the relative character of probability. There must be conditions determining which propositions are probable upon others. Hence we must look beyond the primitive idea itself and place the ground of probability elsewhere.
Naturalistic ethics: Any view according to which ethics is an empirical science, natural or social, ethical notions being reduced to those of of the natural sciences and ethical questions being answered wholly on basis of the findings of those sciences. -- W.K.F.
Occult Sciences ::: In referencing the occult, we are referring to a side of reality that is hidden from both the general populace and from the mundane mind. Etymologically, even, "occult" finds its roots in the Latin for "to conceal". Although there can be religiously-colored connotations of the occult as demonic or unsavory, this is highly paradigm-dependent and almost always false. Here we use the term "occult sciences" to refer to the science of studying those hidden aspects of reality which remain less explored than traditional subjects in the natural sciences but which are far more important in understanding consciousness and cosmology. The main long-term focus of this site is on advancing the occult sciences and in reconciling those with the conventional sciences.
Ritschlianism: A celebrated school of 19th century Christian thought inaugurated by Albrecht Ritschl (1822-89). This school argued for God upon the basis of what is called the religious value-judgment. Two kinds of judgments are said to characterize man's reaction to his world of experience: (1) dependent or concomitant, those dependent upon perceived facts, such as the natural sciences; (2) independent or religious those which affirm man's superior worth independent of the limitations of the finite world and man's dependence upon a superhuman order of reality, God. God is not reached by speculation, nor by the "evidences" in nature, nor by intuitions or mystic experience, nor by a rational a priori or intimate feeling. God is implied in the religious value judgment: "though he slay me will I trust him." That man needs God as a deliverer from his bonds is the assertion of the independent religious value-judgment; the consequences following this judgment of need and worth sustain him with courage and victory over every obstacl.e Ritschlianism is notable in the emphasis it placed upon the category of value, an emphasis which has grown stronger in contemporary theistic belief. -- V.F.
taxonomy ::: n. --> That division of the natural sciences which treats of the classification of animals and plants; the laws or principles of classification.
“The ‘Mundane Egg’ is, perhaps, one of the most universally adopted symbols, highly suggestive as it is, equally in the spiritual, physiological, and cosmological sense. . . . The mystery of apparent self-generation and evolution through its own creative power repeating in miniature the process of Cosmic evolution in the egg, both being due to heat and moisture under the efflux of the unseen creative spirit, justified fully the selection of this graphic symbol. The ‘Virgin Egg’ is the microcosmic symbol of the macrocosmic prototype — the ‘Virgin Mother’ — Chaos or the Primeval Deep. The male Creator (under whatever name) springs forth from the Virgin female, the immaculate root fructified by the Ray. Who, if versed in astronomy and natural sciences, can fail to see its suggestiveness? Cosmos as receptive Nature is an Egg fructified — yet left immaculate; once regarded as boundless, it could have no other representation than a spheroid. The Golden Egg was surrounded by seven natural elements (ether, fire, air, water), ‘four ready, three secret’ ” (SD 1:65).
The study of society, societal relations. Originally called Social Physics, meaning that the methods of the natural sciences were to be applied to the study of society. Whereas the pattern originally was physics and the first sociologists thought that it was possible to find laws of nature in the social realm (Quetelet, Comte, Buckle), others turned to biological considerations. The "organic" conception of society (Lilienfeld, Schaeffle) treated society as a complex organism, the evolutionists, Gumplowicz, Ratzenhofer, considered the struggle between different ethnic groups the basic factor in the evolution of social structures and institutions. Other sociologists accepted a psychological conception of society; to them psychological phenomena (imitation, according to Gabriel Tarde, consciousness of kind, according to F. H. Giddings) were the basic elements in social interrelations (see also W. McDougall, Alsworth Ross, etc.). These relations themselves were made the main object of sociological studies by G. Simmel, L. Wiese, Howard Becker. A kind of sociological realism was fostered by the French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, and his school. They considered society a reality, the group-mind an actual fact, the social phenomena "choses sociales". The new "sociology of knowledge", inaugurated by these French sociologists, has been further developed by M. Scheler, K. Mannheim and W. Jerusalem. Recently other branches of social research have separated somewhat from sociology proper: Anthropogeography, dealing with the influences of the physical environment upon society, demography, social psychology, etc. Problems of the methodology of the social sciences have also become an important topic of recent studies. -- W.E.
This opposition of natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) and cultural or socio-historical sciences (Geistestvtssenschaften) is characteristic of idealistic philosophies of history, especially of the modern German variety. See Max Weber, Gesamm. Aufrätze z. Sozio u. Sozialpolitik, 1922; W. Windelband, Geschichte u. Naturwissenschaft, 1894; H. Rickert, Die Grenzen d. Naturwiss. Begriffsbildung, eine logische Einleitung i. d. histor. Wissenschaften, 1899; Dilthey (q.v.); E. Troeltsch, Der Histortsmus u. s. Probleme, 1922; E. Spranger, Die Grundlagen d. Geschichteswissensch., 1905.
Variable error: The average departure or deviation from the average between several given values. In successive measurements of magnitudes considered in the natural sciences or in experimental psychology, the observed differences are the unavoidable result of a great number of small causes independent of each other and equally likely to make the measurement too small or too large. In experimental psychology in particular, the real magnitude is known in some cases, but its evaluation tends to be on the average too large or too small. The average error is the average departure from the true magnitude, while the variable error is the deviation as already defined. -- T.G.
WORLD VIEW The world view is our total knowledge of the matter aspect of reality. The world view includes the physical and natural sciences and their offshoots.
Without a world view, a knowledge of reality, the necessary basis of life view is lacking. A rational conception of reality is all the more important since the life view is of fundamental, indispensable importance. P 3.1.1f
KEYS (10k)
1 Werner Karl Heisenberg (1901-1976)
1 Werner Heisenberg
1 Eugene Paul Wigner
NEW FULL DB (2.4M)
3 E O Wilson
3 Anonymous
2 Werner Heisenberg
2 Terrence W Deacon
2 Justus von Liebig
2 Benedict XVI
1:The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.
~ Werner Heisenberg,#KEYS
2:The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you. ~ Werner Karl Heisenberg (1901-1976), #KEYS
3:Considered from this point of view, the fact that some of the theories which we know to be false give such amazingly accurate results is an adverse factor. Had we somewhat less knowledge, the group of phenomena which these "false" theories explain would appear to us to be large enough to "prove" these theories. However, these theories are considered to be "false" by us just for the reason that they are, in ultimate analysis, incompatible with more encompassing pictures and, if sufficiently many such false theories are discovered, they are bound to prove also to be in conflict with each other. Similarly, it is possible that the theories, which we consider to be "proved" by a number of numerical agreements which appears to be large enough for us, are false because they are in conflict with a possible more encompassing theory which is beyond our means of discovery. If this were true, we would have to expect conflicts between our theories as soon as their number grows beyond a certain point and as soon as they cover a sufficiently large number of groups of phenomena. In contrast to the article of faith of the theoretical physicist mentioned before, this is the nightmare of the theorist. ~ Eugene Paul Wigner, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences, #KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:The book one must read to learn natural sciences is the book of nature. The book from which to learn religion is your own mind and heart. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 2:Spiritual science attempts to speak about non-sensory things in the same way that the natural sciences speak about sense-perceptible things... No one can ever deny others the right to ignore the supersensible, but there is never any legitimate reason for people to declare themselves authorities, not only on what they themselves are capable of knowing, but also on what they suppose cannot be known by any other human being. ~ rudolf-steiner, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:Laws are important and valuable in the exact natural sciences, in the measure that those sciences are universally valid. ~ Max Weber, #NFDB
2:The progress of mankind is due exclusively to the progress of natural sciences, not to morals, religion or philosophy. ~ Justus von Liebig, #NFDB
3:Bacon identified in relation to the natural sciences: the mismatch between the complexity of the world and our capacity to understand it. ~ Matthew Syed, #NFDB
4:The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you. ~ Werner Heisenberg, #NFDB
5:The book one must read to learn natural sciences is the book of nature. The book from which to learn religion is your own mind and heart. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
6:The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.
~ Werner Heisenberg,#NFDB
7:The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation of it. ~ Eugene Wigner, #NFDB
8:In the natural sciences, and particularly in chemistry, generalities must come after the detailed knowledge of each fact and not before it. ~ Joseph Louis Gay Lussac, #NFDB
9:In a few decades of reconstruction, even the mathematical natural sciences, the ancient archetypes of theoretical perfection, have changed habit completely! ~ Edmund Husserl, #NFDB
10:He believed we must avoid narrow specialization and instead strive to build bridges between the “hard” technical and natural sciences and the “soft” humanistic ones. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
11:The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and … there is no rational explanation for it. —Eugene Wigner, 1960 ~ Max Tegmark, #NFDB
12:It is not US law that prohibits Iranian nationals from applying and enrolling in UMass’s engineering and natural sciences graduate programs; it is UMass itself that is doing that. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
13:A famous name has this peculiarity that it becomes gradually smaller especially in natural sciences where each succeeding discovery invariably overshadows what precedes. ~ Jacobus Henricus van t Hoff, #NFDB
14:There are few humanities that could surpass in discipline, in beauty, in emotional and aesthetic satisfaction, those humanities which are called mathematics, and the natural sciences. ~ Robert Watson Watt, #NFDB
15:Physics was the first of the natural sciences to become fully modern and highly mathematical.Chemistry followed in the wake of physics, but biology, the retarded child, lagged far behind. ~ Michael Crichton, #NFDB
16:The progress of the natural sciences in modern times has of course so much exceeded all expectations that any suggestion that there may be some limits to it is bound to arouse suspicion. ~ Friedrich August von Hayek, #NFDB
17:A technical solution may be defined as one that requires a change only in the techniques of the natural sciences, demanding little or nothing in the way of change in human values or ideas of morality. ~ Garrett Hardin, #NFDB
18:But there is another reason for the high repute of mathematics: it is mathematics that offers the exact natural sciences a certain measure of security which, without mathematics, they could not attain. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
19:Developing formal tools capable of integrating this missing cipher—absential influence—into the fabric of the natural sciences is an enterprise that should be at the center of scientific and philosophical debate. ~ Terrence W Deacon, #NFDB
20:it attempts to show that the necessary conditions of logical and mathematical reasoning, which undergird the natural sciences as a human activity, require the rejection of all broadly materialist worldviews. Reppert ~ William Lane Craig, #NFDB
21:If it were customary to send daughters to school like sons, and if they were then taught the natural sciences, they would learn as thoroughly and understand the subtleties of all the arts and sciences as well as sons. ~ Christine de Pizan, #NFDB
22:Mathematics is the queen of sciences and number theory is the queen of mathematics. She often condescends to render service to astronomy and other natural sciences, but in all relations she is entitled to the first rank. ~ Carl Friedrich Gauss, #NFDB
23:I believe sanity and realism can be restored to the teaching of Mathematical Statistics most easily and directly by entrusting such teaching largely to men and women who have had personal experience of research in the Natural Sciences. ~ Ronald Fisher, #NFDB
24:The most vitally characteristic fact about mathematics is, in my opinion, its quite peculiar relationship to the natural sciences, or more generally, to any science which interprets experience on a higher than purely descriptive level. ~ John von Neumann, #NFDB
25:If we conceive all the changes in the physical world as reducible to the motion of atoms, motions generated by means of the fixed nuclear forces of those atoms, the whole of the world could thus be known by means of the natural sciences. ~ Wilhelm Dilthey, #NFDB
26:The grounding in natural sciences which I obtained in the course of my medical studies, including preliminary examinations in botany, zoology, physics, and chemistry, was to become decisive in determining the trend of my literary work. ~ Johannes V Jensen, #NFDB
27:I admitted, that the world had existed millions of years. I am astonished at the ignorance of the masses on these subjects. Hugh Miller has it right when he says that 'the battle of evidences must now be fought on the field of the natural sciences.' ~ James A Garfield, #NFDB
28:[T]he true natural sciences lock together in theory and evidence to form the ineradicable technical base of modern civilization. The pseudosciences satisfy personal psychological needs... but lack the ideas or the means to contribute to the technical base. ~ E O Wilson, #NFDB
29:Theories in the natural sciences which have been replaced by others which do the same job better are of no interest to the current practice of science. This cannot be the case where those theories have helped to constitute what they interpret or explicate. The ~ Anthony Giddens, #NFDB
30:Let mental culture go on advancing, let the natural sciences progress in even greater extent and depth, and the human mind widen itself as much as it desires: beyond the elevation and moral culture of Christianity, as it shines forth in the Gospels, it will not go. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
31:The tendencies are considerably weaker in the natural sciences, which, for the past several centuries, have survived and flourished through such constant challenge, and therefore, at best, seek to encourage it. Serving the status quo in political and socioeconomic realms is a different matter. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
32:nightmarish memories of the trauma of birth into postnatal freedom and the oceanic bliss of the womb. And even that was only the surface. Behind all biologically determined needs there was also dearly a genuine craving for transcendence that could not be reduced to any simple formula of natural sciences. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
33:I am a philosopher in the natural sciences. Matters of the heart I leave to the poets, but it has occurred to me, as a failed poet myself, that the cruelest aspect of love is its inviolable integrity. We do not choose to love—or I should say, we cannot choose not to love. Do you understand? ~ Rick Yancey, #NFDB
34:Eugene Wigner wrote a famous essay on the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in natural sciences. He meant physics, of course. There is only one thing which is more unreasonable than the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physics, and this is the unreasonable ineffectiveness of mathematics in biology. ~ Israel Gelfand, #NFDB
35:The prime lesson the social sciences can learn from the natural sciences is just this: that it is necessary to press on to find the positive conditions under which desired events take place, and that these can be just as scientifically investigated as can instances of negative correlation. This problem is beyond relativity. ~ Ruth Benedict, #NFDB
36:The morphological characteristics of plant and animal species form the chief subject of the descriptive natural sciences and are the criteria for their classification. But not until recently has it been recognized that in living organisms, as in the realm of crystals, chemical differences parallel the variation in structure. ~ Karl Landsteiner, #NFDB
37:I have never, so far, in all the studies I have done, met a contradiction between what the human, experimental and natural sciences are telling us and the Islamic rules. In fact, the opposite is true: anything that is coming from the modern sciences is helping me better understand the text. It's not a contradiction. It's a relation. ~ Tariq Ramadan, #NFDB
38:There is one thing only which a Muslim can profitably learn from the west, the exact sciences in their pure and applied form. Only natural sciences and mathematics should be taught in Muslim schools, while tuition of European philosophy, literature and history should lose the position of primacy which today it holds on the curriculum. ~ Muhammad Asad, #NFDB
39:The social sciences offer equal promise for improving human welfare; our lives can be greatly improved through a deeper understanding of individual and collective behavior. But to realize this promise, the social sciences, like the natural sciences, need to match their institutional structures to today's intellectual challenges. ~ Nicholas A Christakis, #NFDB
40:The theoretical side of physical chemistry is and will probably remain the dominant one; it is by this peculiarity that it has exerted such a great influence upon the neighboring sciences, pure and applied, and on this ground physical chemistry may be regarded as an excellent school of exact reasoning for all students of the natural sciences. ~ Svante Arrhenius, #NFDB
41:This did not have to be the case, because the faith was, from its very beginnings, greater, broader, and deeper. Even today faith in creation is not unreal; even today it is reasonable; even from the perspective of the data of the natural sciences it is the "better hypothesis," offering a fuller and better explanation than any of the other theories. ~ Benedict XVI, #NFDB
42:Darwin's book is very important and serves me as a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history. One has to put up with the crude English method of development, of course. Despite all deficiencies not only is the death-blow dealt here for the first time to 'teleology' in the natural sciences, but their rational meaning is empirically explained. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
43:Faith preceded understanding, and so faith informed and shaped understanding. Working from this principle, Kuyper insisted that reason, natural science, and methodological naturalism were not ideologically neutral. Even the most technical of natural sciences, he observed, operated within the framework of the faith, or higher commitments, of the practitioner. ~ George M Marsden, #NFDB
44:Natural Magick is taken to be nothing else, but the chief power of all the natural Sciences; which therefore they call the top and perfection of Natural Philosophy, and which is indeed the active part of the same; which by the assistance of natural forces and faculties, through their mutual & opportune application, performs those things that are above Human Reason. ~ Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, #NFDB
45:I note that warmists are often banging on about the fact that sceptics like Christopher Booker and myself 'only' have arts degrees. But actually that's our strength, not our weakness. Our intellectual training qualifies us better than any scientist - social or natural sciences - for us to understand that this is, au fond, not a scientific debate but a cultural and rhetorical one. ~ James Delingpole, #NFDB
46:The role of metaphysics in relation to other disciplines, whether philosophical or not and including the natural sciences, is thus a foundational role. Lack of clarity in the concepts of metaphysics implies lack of clarity in other disciplines - both theoretical and practical disciplines - employing those concepts or employing concepts that depend on those of metaphysics. ~ Gonzalo Rodriguez Pereyra, #NFDB
47:Yes, the natural sciences are telling us a great deal about human origins, the origins of our species the origins of our minds; we're on our way to explaining a large part of it. I'll accept an answer provided only by such means as obtaining and exploring, analyzing and arguing over the evidence - not because of a scribe's myopic view of the subject written 500 years before the birth of Christ! ~ E O Wilson, #NFDB
48:We ought not to believe those who today, adopting a philosophical air and with a tone of superiority, prophesy the decline of culter and are content with the unknowable in a self-satisfied way. For us there is no unknowable, and in my opinion there is also non whatsoever for the natural sciences. In place of this foolish unknowable, let our watchword on the contrary be: we must know - we shall know. ~ David Hilbert, #NFDB
49:Almost everyone... seems to be quite sure that the differences between the methodologies of history and of the natural sciences are vast. For, we are assured, it is well known that in the natural sciences we start from observation and proceed by induction to theory. And is it not obvious that in history we proceed very differently? Yes, I agree that we proceed very differently. But we do so in the natural sciences as well. ~ Karl Popper, #NFDB
50:Spiritual science attempts to speak about non-sensory things in the same way that the natural sciences speak about sense-perceptible things...No one can ever deny others the right to ignore the supersensible, but there is never any legitimate reason for people to declare themselves authorities, not only on what they themselves are capable of knowing, but also on what they suppose cannot be known by any other human being. ~ Rudolf Steiner, #NFDB
51:Without an acquaintance with chemistry, the statesman must remain a stranger to the true vital interests of the state, to the means of its organic development and improvement; ... The highest economic or material interests of a country, the increased and more profitable production of food for man and animals, ... are most closely linked with the advancement and diffusion of the natural sciences, especially of chemistry. ~ Justus von Liebig, #NFDB
52:Literary or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our education is predominantly verbal and therefore fails to accomplish what it is supposed to do. Instead of transforming children into fully developed adults, it turns out students of the natural sciences who are completely unaware of Nature as the primary fact of experience, it inflicts upon the world students of the humanities who know nothing of humanity, their own or anyone else's. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
53:It has been held that, since its essential normativity cannot be accommodated within the natural sciences, we might be forced to throw the concept of action and with it action concepts on the trash heap of outdated theories. With action concepts a logical basis of first person thought disappears. Renouncing action concepts is a form of self-annihilation: logical self-annihilation. It annihilates a source of the power to think and say 'I'. ~ Sebastian R dl, #NFDB
54:So long as authority inspires awe, confusion and absurdity enhance conservative tendencies in society. Firstly, because clear and logical thinking leads to a cumulation of knowledge (of which the progress of the natural sciences provides the best example) and the advance of knowledge sooner or later undermines the traditional order. Confused thinking, on the other hand, leads nowhere in particular and can be indulged indefinitely without producing any impact upon the world. ~ Stanislav Andreski, #NFDB
55:I do sense, as compared with let's say the early '50s, there's somewhat more of a careerism. I don't think it's anything special to economics; it's equally true with physics or biology. A graduate education has become a more career-oriented thing, and part of that is because of the need for funding. In fact, that's a much worse problem in the natural sciences than it is in economics. So you can't even do your work in the natural sciences, particularly, and even to some extent in economics, without funding. ~ Kenneth Arrow, #NFDB
56:The natural sciences have the clearest patterns. Physics admits of a lovely unification, not just at the level of fundamental forces, but when considering its extent and implications. Classifications like ‘optics’ or ‘thermodynamics’ are just straitjackets, preventing physicists from seeing countless intersections. Even putting aside aesthetics, the practical applications that have been overlooked are legion; years ago engineers could have been artificially generating spherically symmetric gravity fields. Having ~ Ted Chiang, #NFDB
57:People were no longer concerned with understanding what a text said or what a thing was from the aspect of its fulfillment, but from that of its beginning, its source. As a result of this isolation from the whole and of this literal-mindedness with respect to particulars, which contradicts the entire inner nature of the Bible but which was now considered to be the truly scientific approach, there arose that conflict between the natural sciences and theology which has been, up to our own day, a burden for the faith. ~ Benedict XVI, #NFDB
58:This means that if we are able to make sense of absential relationships, it won’t merely illuminate certain everyday mysteries. If the example of zero is any hint, even just glimpsing the outlines of a systematic way to integrate these phenomena into the natural sciences could light the path to whole new fields of inquiry. And making scientific sense of these most personal of nature’s properties, without trashing them, has the potential to transform the way we personally see ourselves within the scheme of things. The ~ Terrence W Deacon, #NFDB
59:The effects of heat are subject to constant laws which cannot be discovered without the aid of mathematical analysis. The object of the theory is to demonstrate these laws; it reduces all physical researches on the propagation of heat, to problems of the integral calculus, whose elements are given by experiment. No subject has more extensive relations with the progress of industry and the natural sciences; for the action of heat is always present, it influences the processes of the arts, and occurs in all the phenomena of the universe. ~ Joseph Fourier, #NFDB
60:Without the instruments and accumulated knowledge of the natural sciences... humans are trapped in a cognitive prison. They are like intelligent fish born in a deep shallowed pool. Wondering and restless, longing to reach out, they think about the world outside. They invent ingenious speculations and myths about the origin of the confining waters, of the sun and the sky and the stars above , and the meaning of their own existence. But they are wrong, always wrong because the world is too remote from ordinary experience to be merely imagined. ~ E O Wilson, #NFDB
61:If you ask ... the man in the street ... the human significance of mathematics, the answer of the world will be, that mathematics has given mankind a metrical and computatory art essential to the effective conduct of daily life, that mathematics admits of countless applications in engineering and the natural sciences, and finally that mathematics is a most excellent instrumentality for giving mental discipline... [A mathematician will add] that mathematics is the exact science, the science of exact thought or of rigorous thinking. ~ Cassius Jackson Keyser, #NFDB
62:A different conception of society, very different from that which now prevails, is in process of formation. Under the name of Anarchy, a new interpretation of the past and present life of society arises, giving at the same time a forecast as regards its future, both conceived in the same spirit as the above-mentioned interpretation in natural sciences. Anarchy, therefore, appears as a constituent part of the new philosophy, and that is why Anarchists come in contact, on so many points, with the greatest thinkers and poets of the present day. ~ Peter Kropotkin, #NFDB
63:Fiqh is man-made!"
By that reasoning and applying your standards, so are logic, math, natural sciences, and virtually every single body of knowledge and its fruits. If being man made is sufficient reason to reject fiqh, it's more than sufficient reason to reject those, too. And before arguing that science is special, know that the epistemology and philosophy of science are also man-made.
UPDATE. Pay particular attention to where it says the "body of knowledge." And if you want to eliminate that qualifier, read up a bit on antirealism. ~ Musa Furber,#NFDB
64:The natural sciences are sometimes said to have no concern with values, nor to seek morality and goodness, and therefore belong to an inferior order of things. Counter-claims are made that they are the only living and dynamic studies... Both contentions are wrong. Language, Literature and Philosophy express, reflect and contemplate the world. But it is a world in which men will never be content to stay at rest, and so these disciplines cannot be cut off from the great searching into the nature of things without being deprived of life-blood. ~ Cyril Norman Hinshelwood, #NFDB
65:A … difference between most system-building in the social sciences and systems of thought and classification of the natural sciences is to be seen in their evolution. In the natural sciences both theories and descriptive systems grow by adaptation to the increasing knowledge and experience of the scientists. In the social sciences, systems often issue fully formed from the mind of one man. Then they may be much discussed if they attract attention, but progressive adaptive modification as a result of the concerted efforts of great numbers of men is rare. ~ Lawrence Joseph Henderson, #NFDB
66:The social sciences are obsessed by epistemological questioning in a way that no science, no real science is. You never have a chemistry class that starts with the methodology of chemistry; you start by doing chemistry. And the problem is that since the social sciences don’t know what it is to be scientific, because they know nothing about the real sciences, they imagine that they have to be listing endless numbers of criteria and precautions before doing anything. And they usually miss precisely what is interesting in natural sciences which is [LAUGHS] a laboratory situation and the experimental protocol! ~ Bruno Latour, #NFDB
67:That Marxism is not a science is entirely clear to intelligent people in the Soviet Union. One would even feel awkward to refer to it as a science. Leaving aside the exact sciences, such as physics, mathematics, and the natural sciences, even the social sciences can predict an event—when, in what way and how an event might occur. Communism has never made any such forecasts. It has never said where, when, and precisely what is going to happen. Nothing but declamations. Rhetoric to the effect that the world proletariat will overthrow the world bourgeoisie and the most happy and radiant society will then arise. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, #NFDB
68:Like most things in the story the natural sciences can tell about the world, it’s all so beautiful, so gracefully simple, yet so rewardingly complex, so neatly connected—not to mention true—that I can’t even begin to imagine why anyone would ever want to believe some New Age ‘alternative’ nonsense instead. I would go so far as to say that even if we are all under the control of a benevolent God, and the whole of reality turns out to be down to some flaky spiritual ‘energy’ that only alternative therapists can truly harness, that’s still neither so interesting nor so graceful as the most basic stuff I was taught at school about how plants work. ~ Ben Goldacre, #NFDB
69:You cannot grant to universities the intellectual freedom that scholarship requires, it is argued, and also deny the moral freedom that enables students to adapt through their own "experiments in living." Freedom is indivisible, and without it knowledge cannot grow.
The problem with that argument is that, outside the natural sciences and a few solid humanities like philosophy and Egyptology, academic freedom is a thing of the past. What is expected of the student in many courses in the humanities and social sciences is ideological conformity, rather than critical appraisal, and censorship has become accepted as a legitimate part of the academic way of life. ~ Roger Scruton,#NFDB
70:The success of mathematical physics led the social scientist to be jealous of its power without quite understanding the intellectual attitudes that had contributed to this power. The use of mathematical formulae had accompanied the development of the natural sciences and become the mode in the social sciences. Just as primitive peoples adopt the Western modes of denationalized clothing and of parliamentatism out of a vague feeling that these magic rites and vestments will at once put them abreast of modern culture and technique, so the economists have developed the habit of dressing up their rather imprecise ideas in the language of the infinitesimal calculus. ~ Norbert Wiener, Ex-Prodigy - My Childhood and Youth (1964), #NFDB
71:The Christian message does not begin with "accept Christ as your Savior"; it begins with "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth". The Bible teaches that God is the sole source of the entire created order. No other gods compare with Him; no natural forces exist on their own; nothing receives its nature or existence from another source. Thus, His Word, or laws, or creation ordinances give the world its order and structure. God's creative world is the source of the laws of physical nature (natural sciences), human nature (ethics, politics, economics, aesthetics) and even logic. That's why Psalm 119:91 says, "all things are your servants". There is no philosophically or spiritually neutral subject matter. ~ Nancy R Pearcey, #NFDB
72:In the natural sciences, some checks exist on the prolonged acceptance of nutty ideas, which do not hold up well under experimental and observational tests and cannot readily be shown to give rise to useful working technologies. But in economics and the other social studies, nutty ideas may hang around for centuries. Today, leading presidential candidates and tens of millions of voters in the USA embrace ideas that might have been drawn from a 17th-century book on the theory and practice of mercantilism, and multitudes of politicians and ordinary people espouse notions that Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and others exploded more than two centuries ago. In these realms, nearly everyone simply believes whatever he feels good about believing. ~ Robert Higgs, #NFDB
73:In this book, you will encounter various interesting geometries that have been thought to hold the keys to the universe. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) suggested that "Nature's great book is written in mathematical symbols." Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) modeled the solar system with Platonic solids such as the dodecahedron. In the 1960s, physicist Eugene Wigner (1902-1995) was impressed with the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences." Large Lie groups, like E8-which is discussed in the entry "The Quest for Lie Group E8 (2007)"- may someday help us create a unified theory of physics. in 2007, Swedish American cosmologist Max Tegmark published both scientific and popular articles on the mathematical universe hypothesis, which states that our physical reality is a mathematical structure-in other words, our universe in not just described by mathematics-it is mathematics. ~ Clifford A Pickover, #NFDB
74:The result is a dangerous lag between the natural sciences and the social sciences. The natural sciences and the technologies they spawn carry us into the future at bewildering speed, in the process remolding our understanding of ourselves and revolutionizing our relationships with each other and the natural world. The social sciences plod along behind, unable to generate fast enough the knowledge we need to build new institutions for our new world. The renowned management expert Peter Drucker sums up the problem this way: “Effective government has never been needed more than in this highly competitive and fast-changing world of ours, in which the dangers created by the pollution of the physical environment are matched only by the dangers of worldwide armaments pollution. And we do not have even the beginnings of the political theory or the political institutions needed for effective government in the knowledge-based society of organizations. ~ Thomas Homer Dixon, #NFDB
75:The tradition of Islamic science of course gradually weakened but it did not decay as rapidly as some people have claimed in the West. It continued on into the 10th, 11th and 12th Islamic centuries especially in the fields of medicine and pharmacology. If one is going to talk about the decay of the Islamic sciences, it is only of the last two or three centuries that one should speak if one takes the whole of the Islamic world into consideration. And one should not be ashamed of that fact because no civilization in the history of science has always been avidly interested in the natural sciences throughout its whole history. There have been periods of greater interest and those of lesser interest in every civilization, and there is no reason why one should equate the gradual loss of impetus in the cultivation of the sciences in the Islamic world with an automatic decadence of that civilization. This is a modern, Western view which equates civilization with science as understod in the modern sense. ~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr, #NFDB
76:The observation and experiments necessary for the pursuit of alchemy did not comport with the Greek idea of philosophy. This is shown by the saying of Socrates, that the nature of external objects could be discovered by thought without observation, and by the renunciation of all natural sciences by the Cynics. This came largely from the fact that they saw in the nature around them the mutable only. Plato separated logic, as the knowledge of the immutable, from physics, the knowledge of the mutable. That which was subject to indefinite change would not repay observing nor recording, therefore they could not conceive of astronomy and physics as serious objects of mental occupation. There was nothing to be learned from fields and trees and stones. One of the philosophers is said to have gone to the length of putting out his eyes, in order that his mind might not be influenced by external objects, but might wholly give itself to pure contemplation. The intellectual power and grasp of these philosophers were wonderful, but faulty and misleading, since the real and practical was left out. ~ Francis Preston Venable, A Short History of Chemistry (1894) pp. 9-10., #NFDB
77:Of courage undaunted, possessing a firmness and perseverance of purpose which nothing but impossibilities could divert from its direction, careful as a father of those committed to his charge, yet steady in the maintenance of order and discipline, intimate with the Indian character, customs, and principles; habituated to the hunting life, guarded by exact observation of the vegetables and animals of his own country against losing time in the description of objects already possessed; honest, disinterested, liberal, of sound understanding, and a fidelity to truth so scrupulous that whatever he should report would be as certain as if seen by ourselves – with all these qualifications as if selected and implanted by nature in one body for this express purpose, I could have no hesitation in confiding the enterprise to him. To fill up the measure desired, he wanted nothing but a greater familiarity with the technical language of the natural sciences, and readiness in the astronomical observations necessary for the geography of his route. To acquire these he repaired immediately to Philadelphia, and placed himself under the tutorage of the distinguished professors of that place. ~ Stephen E Ambrose, #NFDB
78:What I have described as a blind spot is not a mere oversight on Sellars's part. I think it reflects Sellars's attempt to combine two insights: first, that meaning and intentionality come into view only in a context that is normatively organized, and, second, that reality as it is contemplated by the sciences of nature is norm-free. The trouble is that Sellars thinks the norm-free reality disclosed by the natural sciences is the only location for genuine relations to actualities. That is what leads to the idea that placing the mind in nature requires abstracting from aboutness.
Now Aquinas, writing before the rise of modern science, is immune to the attractions of that norm-free conception of nature. And we should not be too quick to regard this as wholly a deficiency in his thinking. (Of course in all kinds of ways it is a deficiency.) There is a live possibility that, at least in one respect, Thomistic philosophy of mind is superior to Sellarsian philosophy of mind, just because Aquinas lacks the distinctively modern conception of nature that underlies Sellars's thinking. Sellars allows his philosophy to be shaped by a conception that is characteristic of his own time, and so misses an opportunity to learn something from the past. ~ John Henry McDowell,#NFDB
79:What was the nature of the universe into which she had been born? Why did it exist at all? If it had a purpose, what was it? These seemed to her the only questions worth exploring. And the only valid technique evolved by humans for exploring such questions was the scientific method, a robust and self-correcting search for the truth. Yet it had become obvious to her since about the age of twelve that science as it had progressed so far – physics, chemistry, biology, all the rest – had only inched towards grappling with the true questions, the fundamentals. Those questions had only been addressed by theologians and philosophers, it seemed to her. Unfortunately, their answers were a mush of doubt, self-delusion and flummery that had probably done more harm than good. And yet that was all there was. For now she had devoted herself, nominally at least, to theology and philosophy, as well as to explorations of the natural sciences, such as on this expedition. She had even received grants to help support this mission to the stepwise East from the Vatican, the Mormons, from Muslim orders, and various philosophical foundations. Dealing with such bodies, she had quickly learned when not to share her view that organized religion was a kind of mass delusion. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
80:Considered from this point of view, the fact that some of the theories which we know to be false give such amazingly accurate results is an adverse factor. Had we somewhat less knowledge, the group of phenomena which these "false" theories explain would appear to us to be large enough to "prove" these theories. However, these theories are considered to be "false" by us just for the reason that they are, in ultimate analysis, incompatible with more encompassing pictures and, if sufficiently many such false theories are discovered, they are bound to prove also to be in conflict with each other. Similarly, it is possible that the theories, which we consider to be "proved" by a number of numerical agreements which appears to be large enough for us, are false because they are in conflict with a possible more encompassing theory which is beyond our means of discovery. If this were true, we would have to expect conflicts between our theories as soon as their number grows beyond a certain point and as soon as they cover a sufficiently large number of groups of phenomena. In contrast to the article of faith of the theoretical physicist mentioned before, this is the nightmare of the theorist. ~ Eugene Paul Wigner, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences, #NFDB
81:Now, analysis, the breaking of the wholes into parts, is fundamental to science, but for judging works of art, the procedure is more uncertain: what are the natural parts of a story, a sonnet, a painting? The maker's aim is to project his vision by creating not a machine made up of parts but the impression of seamless unity that belongs to a living thing. Looking at an early example of systematic criticism by analysis -- say, Dante's comments on his sonnet sequence La Vita Nuova -- one sees that the best he can do is to tell again in prose what the first two lines mean, then the next three, and so on in little chunks through the entire work. We may understand somewhat better his intention here and there, but at the same time we vaguely feel that the exercise was superfluous and inappropriate. Reflection tells us why: those notations taken together do not add up to the meaning of the several poems. In three words: analysis is reductive. Since its patent success in natural sciences, analysis has become a universal mode of dealing not merely with what is unknown or difficult, but also with all interesting things as if they were difficult. Accordingly, analysis is a theme. Depending on the particulars of its effect, it can also be designated reductivism. ~ Jacques Barzun, #NFDB
82:During the 1950s, Logical Positivists such as A. J. Ayer (1910–91) asked whether it made sense to believe in God. The natural sciences provided the only reliable source of knowledge because it could be tested empirically. Ayer was not asking whether or not God existed but whether the idea of God had any meaning. He argued that a statement is meaningless if we cannot see how it can be verified or shown to be false. To say “There is intelligent life on Mars” is not meaningless since we can see how we could verify this once we had the necessary technology. Similarly a simple believer in the traditional Old Man in the Sky is not making a meaningless statement when he says: “I believe in God,” since after death we should be able to find out whether or not this is true. It is the more sophisticated believer who has problems, when he says: “God does not exist in any sense that we can understand” or “God is not good in the human sense of the word.” These statements are too vague; it is impossible to see how they can be tested; therefore, they are meaningless. As Ayer said: “Theism is so confused and the sentences in which ‘God’ appears so incoherent and so incapable of verifiability or falsifiability that to speak of belief or unbelief, faith or unfaith, is logically impossible.”2 ~ Karen Armstrong, #NFDB
83:He rebukes critics of ‘those who cultivate the natural sciences’, who prefer to remain ignorant of natural causes, because to close one’s mind to science is to shut oneself off from the only certain and reliable criterion of truth we possess.5 Nothing happens or exists beyond Nature’s laws and hence there can be no miracles; and those that are believed, or alleged, to have occurred, in fact had natural causes which at the time men were unable to grasp. Characteristically, he seeks natural causes for every phenomenon which has impressed or frightened men, including humanity’s love of miracles itself. The appeal of ‘miracles’ is so great, he observes, that men have not ceased to this day to invent miracles with a view to convincing people they are more beloved of God than others, and are the final cause of God’s creation and continuous direction of the world.6 Contriving and invoking ‘miracles’ and persuading others to believe in them, is thus itself a natural phenomenon, as is the habit of those who proclaim and elaborate ‘miracles’ to denounce as ‘impious’ those who seek to explain them as natural events.7 At the core of Spinoza’s philosphy, then, stands the contention that ‘nothing happens in Nature that does not follow from her laws, that her laws cover everything that is conceived even by the divine intellect, and that Nature observes a fixed and immutable order,’ that is, that the same laws of motion, and laws of cause and effect, apply in all contexts and everywhere. ~ Jonathan I Israel, #NFDB
84:We often fail to grasp the seriousness of the menace to the Jewish heritage involved in the modern ideology because we use the term "traditional conception of God" loosely. If we use it in the sense of the belief in the existence of a supreme being as defined by the most advanced Jewish thinkers in the past, there is nothing in that belief which cannot be made compatible with views held by many a modern thinker of note. But if by the term "traditional conception of God" we mean the specific facts recorded in the Bible about the way God revealed himself and intervened in the affairs of men, then tradition and the modern ideology are irreconcilable.
The chief opposition to the traditional conception of God in that sense arises not from the scientific approach to the study of nature in general, or even man in general. It arises from the objective study of history. The natural sciences like physics and chemistry cannot disprove the possibility of miracles, though they may assert their improbability. But the objective study of history has established the fact that the records of miracles are unreliable, and that the stories about them are merely the product of the popular imagination. The traditional conception of God is challenged by history, anthropology and psychology; these prove that beliefs similar to those found in the Bible about God arise among all peoples at a certain stage of mental and social development, and pass through a process of evolution which is entirely conditioned by the development of the other elements in their civilization. ~ Mordecai Menahem Kaplan,#NFDB
85:Thus, by science I mean, first of all, a worldview giving primacy to reason and observation and a methodology aimed at acquiring accurate knowledge of the natural and social world. This methodology is characterized, above all else, by the critical spirit: namely, the commitment to the incessant testing of assertions through observations and/or experiments — the more stringent the tests, the better — and to revising or discarding those theories that fail the test. One corollary of the critical spirit is fallibilism: namely, the understanding that all our empirical knowledge is tentative, incomplete and open to revision in the light of new evidence or cogent new arguments (though, of course, the most well-established aspects of scientific knowledge are unlikely to be discarded entirely).
. . . I stress that my use of the term 'science' is not limited to the natural sciences, but includes investigations aimed at acquiring accurate knowledge of factual matters relating to any aspect of the world by using rational empirical methods analogous to those employed in the natural sciences. (Please note the limitation to questions of fact. I intentionally exclude from my purview questions of ethics, aesthetics, ultimate purpose, and so forth.) Thus, 'science' (as I use the term) is routinely practiced not only by physicists, chemists and biologists, but also by historians, detectives, plumbers and indeed all human beings in (some aspects of) our daily lives. (Of course, the fact that we all practice science from time to time does not mean that we all practice it equally well, or that we practice it equally well in all areas of our lives.) ~ Alan Sokal,#NFDB
86:And no matter how much the gray people in power despise knowledge, they can’t do anything about historical objectivity; they can slow it down, but they can’t stop it. Despising and fearing knowledge, they will nonetheless inevitably decide to promote it in order to survive. Sooner or later they will be forced to allow universities and scientific societies, to create research centers, observatories, and laboratories, and thus to create a cadre of people of thought and knowledge: people who are completely beyond their control, people with a completely different psychology and with completely different needs. And these people cannot exist and certainly cannot function in the former atmosphere of low self-interest, banal preoccupations, dull self-satisfaction, and purely carnal needs. They need a new atmosphere— an atmosphere of comprehensive and inclusive learning, permeated with creative tension; they need writers, artists, composers— and the gray people in power are forced to make this concession too. The obstinate ones will be swept aside by their more cunning opponents in the struggle for power, but those who make this concession are, inevitably and paradoxically, digging their own graves against their will. For fatal to the ignorant egoists and fanatics is the growth of a full range of culture in the people— from research in the natural sciences to the ability to marvel at great music. And then comes the associated process of the broad intellectualization of society: an era in which grayness fights its last battles with a brutality that takes humanity back to the middle ages, loses these battles, and forever disappears as an actual force. ~ Arkady Strugatsky, #NFDB
87:But what is the use of the humanities as such? Admittedly they are not practical, and admittedly they concern themselves with the past. Why, it may be asked, should we engage in impractical investigations, and why should we be interested in the past?
The answer to the first question is: because we are interested in reality. Both the humanities and the natural sciences, as well as mathematics and philosophy, have the impractical outlook of what the ancients called vita contemplativa as opposed to vita activa. But is the contemplative life less real or, to be more precise, is its contribution to what we call reality less important, than that of the active life?
The man who takes a paper dollar in exchange for twenty-five apples commits an act of faith, and subjects himself to a theoretical doctrine, as did the mediaeval man who paid for indulgence. The man who is run over by an automobile is run over by mathematics, physics and chemistry. For he who leads the contemplative life cannot help influencing the active, just as he cannot prevent the active life from influencing his thought. Philosophical and psychological theories, historical doctrines and all sorts of speculations and discoveries, have changed, and keep changing, the lives of countless millions. Even he who merely transmits knowledge or learning participates, in his modest way, in the process of shaping reality - of which fact the enemies of humanism are perhaps more keenly aware than its friends. It is impossible to conceive of our world in terms of action alone. Only in God is there a "Coincidence of Act and Thought" as the scholastics put it. Our reality can only be understood as an interpenetration of these two. ~ Erwin Panofsky,#NFDB
88:It is often asserted that education is breaking down because of overspecialisation. But this is only a partial and misleading diagnosis. Specialisation is not in itself a faulty principle of education. What would be the alternative - an amateurish smattering of all major subjects? Or a lengthy studium generale in which men are forced to spend their time sniffing at subjects which they do not wish to pursue, while they are being kept away from what they want to learn? This cannot be the right answer, since it can only lead to the type of intellectual man, whom Cardinal Newman castigated -'an intellectual man, as the world now conceives of him. ,..one who is full of "views" on all subjects of philosophy, on all matters of the day'. Such 'viewiness' is a sign of ignorance rather than knowledge. 'Shall I teach you the meaning of knowledge?' said Confucius. 'When you know a thing to recognise that you know it, and when you do not, to know that you do not know - that is knowledge.' What is at fault is not specialisation, but the lack of depth with which the subjects are usually presented, and the absence of meta- physical awareness. The sciences are being taught without any awareness of the presuppositions of science, of the meaning and significance of scientific laws, and of the place occupied by the natural sciences within the whole cosmos of human thought. The result is that the presuppositions of science are normally mistaken for its findings. Economics is being taught without any awareness of the view of human nature that underlies present-day economic theory. In fact, many economists are themselves unaware of the fact that such a view is implicit in their teaching and that nearly all their theories would have to change if that view changed. How could there be a rational teaching of politics without pressing all questions back to their metaphysical roots? Political thinking must necessarily become confused and end in 'double-talk' if there is a continued refusal to admit the serious study of the meta- physical and ethical problems involved. The confusion is already so great that it is legitimate to doubt the educational value of studying many of the so-called humanistic subjects. I say 'so- called' because a subject that does not make explicit its view of human nature can hardly be called humanistic. All ~ Ernst F Schumacher, #NFDB
89:The textbooks of history prepared for the public schools are marked by a rather naive parochialism and chauvinism. There is no need to dwell on such futilities. But it must be admitted that even for the most conscientious historian abstention from judgments of value may offer certain difficulties.
As a man and as a citizen the historian takes sides in many feuds and controversies of his age. It is not easy to combine scientific aloofness in historical studies with partisanship in mundane interests. But that can and has been achieved by outstanding historians. The historian's world view may color his work. His representation of events may be interlarded with remarks that betray his feelings and wishes and divulge his party affiliation. However, the postulate of scientific history's abstention from value judgments is not infringed by occasional remarks expressing the preferences of the historian if the general purport of the study is not affected. If the writer, speaking of an inept commander of the forces of his own nation or party, says "unfortunately" the general was not equal to his task, he has not failed in his duty as a historian. The historian is free to lament the destruction of the masterpieces of Greek art provided his regret does not influence his report of the events that brought about this destruction.
The problem of Wertfreíheit must also be clearly distinguished from that of the choice of theories resorted to for the interpretation of facts. In dealing with the data available, the historian needs ali the knowledge provided by the other disciplines, by logic, mathematics, praxeology, and the natural sciences. If what these disciplines teach is insufficient or if the historian chooses an erroneous theory out of several conflicting theories held by the specialists, his effort is misled and his performance is abortive. It may be that he chose an untenable theory because he was biased and this theory best suited his party spirit. But the acceptance of a faulty doctrine may often be merely the outcome of ignorance or of the fact that it enjoys greater popularity than more correct doctrines.
The main source of dissent among historians is divergence in regard to the teachings of ali the other branches of knowledge upon which they base their presentation. To a historian of earlier days who believed in witchcraft, magic, and the devil's interference with human affairs, things hàd a different aspect than they have for an agnostic historian. The neomercantilist doctrines of the balance of payments and of the dollar shortage give an image of presentday world conditions very different from that provided by an examination of the situation from the point of view of modern subjectivist economics. ~ Ludwig von Mises,#NFDB
90:You’ve said, “You can lie or distort the story of the French Revolution as long as you like and nothing will happen. Propose a false theory in chemistry and it will be refuted tomorrow.” How does your approach to the world as a scientist affect and influence the way you approach politics? Nature is tough. You can’t fiddle with Mother Nature, she’s a hard taskmistress. So you’re forced to be honest in the natural sciences. In the soft fields, you’re not forced to be honest. There are standards, of course; on the other hand, they’re very weak. If what you propose is ideologically acceptable, that is, supportive of power systems, you can get away with a huge amount. In fact, the difference between the conditions that are imposed on dissident opinion and on mainstream opinion is radically different. For example, I’ve written about terrorism, and I think you can show without much difficulty that terrorism pretty much corresponds to power. I don’t think that’s very surprising. The more powerful states are involved in more terrorism, by and large. The United States is the most powerful, so it’s involved in massive terrorism, by its own definition of terrorism. Well, if I want to establish that, I’m required to give a huge amount of evidence. I think that’s a good thing. I don’t object to that. I think anyone who makes that claim should be held to very high standards. So, I do extensive documentation, from the internal secret records and historical record and so on. And if you ever find a comma misplaced, somebody ought to criticize you for it. So I think those standards are fine. All right, now, let’s suppose that you play the mainstream game. You can say anything you want because you support power, and nobody expects you to justify anything. For example, in the unimaginable circumstance that I was on, say, Nightline, and I was asked, “Do you think Kadhafi is a terrorist?” I could say, “Yeah, Kadhafi is a terrorist.” I don’t need any evidence. Suppose I said, “George Bush is a terrorist.” Well, then I would be expected to provide evidence—“Why would you say that?” In fact, the structure of the news production system is, you can’t produce evidence. There’s even a name for it—I learned it from the producer of Nightline, Jeff Greenfield. It’s called “concision.” He was asked in an interview somewhere why they didn’t have me on Nightline. First of all, he says, “Well, he talks Turkish, and nobody understands it.” But the other answer was, “He lacks concision.” Which is correct, I agree with him. The kinds of things that I would say on Nightline, you can’t say in one sentence because they depart from standard religion. If you want to repeat the religion, you can get away with it between two commercials. If you want to say something that questions the religion, you’re expected to give evidence, and that you can’t do between two commercials. So therefore you lack concision, so therefore you can’t talk. I think that’s a terrific technique of propaganda. To impose concision is a way of virtually guaranteeing that the party line gets repeated over and over again, and that nothing else is heard. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
5 Psychology
3 Philosophy
2 Occultism
1 Poetry
1 Integral Theory
1 Cybernetics
1 Christianity
4 Carl Jung
2 Jean Gebser
2 The Secret Doctrine
2 The Practice of Psycho therapy
2 The Ever-Present Origin
2 Mysterium Coniunctionis
1.01 - Fundamental Considerations, #The Ever-Present Origin, #Jean Gebser, #Integral
It is our belief that the essential traits of a new age and a new reality are discernible in nearly all forms of contemporary expression, whether in the creations of modern art, or in the recent findings of the Natural Sciences, or in the results of the humanities and sciences of the mind. Moreover we are in a position to define this new reality in such a way as to emphasize one of its most significant elements. Our definition is a natural corollary of the recognition that mans coming to awareness is inseparably bound to his consciousness of space and time.
Scarcely five hundred years ago, during the Renaissance, an unmistakable reorganization of our consciousness occurred: the discovery of perspective which opened up the three-dimensionality of space. This discovery is so closely linked with the entire intellectual attitude of the modern epoch that we have felt obliged to call this age the age of perspectivity and characterize the age immediately preceding it as the unperspectival age. These definitions, by recognizing a fundamental characteristic of these eras, lead to the further appropriate definition of the age of the dawning new consciousness as the aperspectival age, a definition supported not only by the results of modern physics, but also by developments in the visual arts and literature, where the incorporation of time as a fourth dimension into previously spatial conceptions has formed the initial basis for manifesting the new.Aperspectival is not to be thought of as merely the opposite or negation of perspectival; the antithesis of perspectival is unperspectival. The distinction in meaning suggested by the three terms unperspectival, perspectival, and aperspectival is analogous to that of the terms illogical, logical, and alogical or immoral, moral, and amoral. We have employed here the designation aperspectival to clearly emphasize the need of overcoming the mere antithesis of affirmation and negation. The so-called primal words (Urworte), for example, evidence two antithetic connotations: Latin altus meant high as well as low; sacer meant sacred as well as cursed. Such primal words as these formed an undifferentiated psychically-stressed unity whose bivalent nature was definitely familiar to the early Egyptians and Greeks. This is no longer the case with our present sense of language; consequently, we have required a term that transcends equally the ambivalence of the primal connotations and the dualism of antonyms or conceptual opposites.
--
It is our task in this book to work out this aperspectival basis. Our discussion will rely more an the evidence presented in the history of thought than on the findings of the Natural Sciences as is the case with the authors Transformation of the Occident. Among the disciplines of historical thought the investigation of language will form the predominant source of our insight since it is the preeminent means of reciprocal communication between man and the world.
It is not sufficient for us to merely furnish a postulate; rather, it will be necessary to show the latent possibilities in us and in our present, possibilities that are about to become acute, that is, effectual and consequently real. In the following discussion we shall therefore proceed from two basic considerations:
1.01 - Principles of Practical Psycho therapy, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
more than the measurable facts of the Natural Sciences: it embraces the
problem of mind, the father of all science. The psycho therapist becomes
1.01 - THAT ARE THOU, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
It is, however, certain that many activities undertaken by some minds at the present time were not, in the remote past, undertaken by any minds at all. For this there are several obvious reasons. Certain thoughts are practically unthinkable except in terms of an appropriate language and within the framework of an appropriate system of classification. Where these necessary instruments do not exist, the thoughts in question are not expressed and not even conceived. Nor is this all: the incentive to develop the instruments of certain kinds of thinking is not always present. For long periods of history and prehistory it would seem that men and women, though perfectly capable of doing so, did not wish to pay attention to problems, which their descendants found absorbingly interesting. For example, there is no reason to suppose that, between the thirteenth century and the twentieth, the human mind underwent any kind of evolutionary change, comparable to the change, let us say, in the physical structure of the horses foot during an incomparably longer span of geological time. What happened was that men turned their attention from certain aspects of reality to certain other aspects. The result, among other things, was the development of the Natural Sciences. Our perceptions and our understanding are directed, in large measure, by our will. We are aware of, and we think about, the things which, for one reason or another, we want to see and understand. Where theres a will there is always an intellectual way. The capacities of the human mind are almost indefinitely great. Whatever we will to do, whether it be to come to the unitive knowledge of the Godhead, or to manufacture self-propelled flame-throwers that we are able to do, provided always that the willing be sufficiently intense and sustained. It is clear that many of the things to which modern men have chosen to pay attention were ignored by their predecessors. Consequently the very means for thinking clearly and fruitfully about those things remained uninvented, not merely during prehistoric times, but even to the opening of the modern era.
The lack of a suitable vocabulary and an adequate frame of reference, and the absence of any strong and sustained desire to invent these necessary instruments of though there are two sufficient reasons why so many of the almost endless potentialities of the human mind remained for so long unactualized. Another and, on its own level, equally cogent reason is this: much of the worlds most original and fruitful thinking is done by people of poor physique and of a thoroughly unpractical turn of mind. Because this is so, and because the value of pure thought, whether analytical or integral, has everywhere been more or less clearly recognized, provision was and still is made by every civilized society for giving thinkers a measure of protection from the ordinary strains and stresses of social life. The hermitage, the monastery, the college, the academy and the research laboratory; the begging bowl, the endowment, patronage and the grant of taxpayers moneysuch are the principal devices that have been used by actives to conserve that rare bird, the religious, philosophical, artistic or scientific contemplative. In many primitive societies conditions are hard and there is no surplus wealth. The born contemplative has to face the struggle for existence and social predominance without protection. The result, in most cases, is that he either dies young or is too desperately busy merely keeping alive to be able to devote his attention to anything else. When this happens the prevailing philosophy will be that of the hardy, extraverted man of action.
1.02 - The Three European Worlds, #The Ever-Present Origin, #Jean Gebser, #Integral
Aperspectivity, through which it is possible to grasp and express the new emerging consciousness structure, cannot be perceived in all its consequences be they positive or negative unless certain still valid concepts, attitudes, and forms of thought are more closely scrutinized and clarified. Otherwise we commit the error of expressing the "new" with old and inadequate means of statement. We will, for example, have to furnish evidence that the concretion of time is not only occurring in the previously cited examples from painting, but in the Natural Sciences and in literature, poetry, music, sculpture, and various other areas. And this we can do only after we have worked out the new forms and modes necessary for an understanding of aperspectivity.
The very amalgamation of time and the psyche noted earlier, with its unanticipated chaotic effect as manifested by surrealism and later by tachism, clearly demonstrate that we can show the arational nature of the aperspectival world only if we take particular precautions to prevent aperspectivity from being understood as a mere regression to irrationality (or to an unperspectival world), or as a further progression toward rationality (toward a perspectival world). Man's inertia and desire for continuity always lead him to categorize the new or novel along familiar lines, or merely as curious variants of the familiar. The labels of the venerated "Isms" lie ever at hand ready to be attached to new victims. We must avoid this new idolatry, and the task is more difficult than it first appears.
1.05 - THE HOSTILE BROTHERS - ARCHETYPES OF RESPONSE TO THE UNKNOWN, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
to unite the Natural Sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities.588)
Jungs ideas particularly his alchemical ideas have been inappropriately, unfairly and dangerously
--
even... exact Natural Sciences [such as chemistry and physics] could not, and still cannot, avoid basing
their thought systems on certain hypotheses. In classical physics, up to the end of the 18th century, one
--
Why were we so dominated by that idea? One of the chief fathers of Natural Sciences and a great
protagonist of the absoluteness of the idea of causality was the French philosopher Descartes, and he
--
in Natural Sciences are generally due to the appearance of a new archetypal model by which reality can
be described; that usually precedes big developments, for there is now a model which enables a much
--
occult traditions and the Natural Sciences. It is true that Newton never published the results of his
alchemical experiments, although he declared that some of them were crowned with success. His
--
had to integrate into a nonconfessional Christianity the Hermetic tradition and the Natural Sciences of
medicine, astronomy, and mechanics. In fact, this synthesis constituted a new Christian creation,
1.07 - Medicine and Psycho therapy, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
viewpoint of the Natural Sciences, it appears as one biological factor among
many others. In man this factor is usually identified with the conscious
--
to the Natural Sciences, psycho therapy needs the help of the humane
sciences as well.
1.07 - The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, #Sex Ecology Spirituality, #Ken Wilber, #Philosophy
But paradigms are first and foremost injunctions, actual practices (all of which have nondiscursive components that never are entered in the theories they support)-they are methods for disclosing new data in an addressed domain, and the paradigms work because they are true in any meaningful sense of the word. Science makes real progress, as Kuhn said, because successive paradigms cumulatively disclose more and more interesting data. Even Foucault acknowledged that the Natural Sciences, even if they had started as structures of power, had separated from power (it was the pseudosciences of biopower that remained shot through with power masquerading as knowledge).
Neither the New Agers nor the "new paradigmers" had anything resembling a new paradigm, because all they offered was more talk-talk. They had no new techniques, no new methodologies, no new exemplars, no new injunctions-and therefore no new data. All they possessed, through a misreading of Kuhn, was a pseudo-attempt to trump normal science and replace it with their ideologically favorite reading of the Kosmos.
1.08 - Information, Language, and Society, #Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, #Norbert Wiener, #Cybernetics
to expect in the Natural Sciences. We cannot afford to neglect
them; neither should we build exaggerated expectations of their
1.poe - Eureka - A Prose Poem, #Poe - Poems, #unset, #Integral Yoga
"Than the persons" -the letter goes on to say -"than the persons thus suddenly elevated by the Hog-ian philosophy into a station for which they were unfitted -thus transferred from the sculleries into the parlors of Science -from its pantries into its pulpits -than these individuals a more intolerant -a more intolerable set of bigots and tyrants never existed on the face of the earth. Their creed, their text and their sermon were, alike, the one word 'fact' -but, for the most part, even of this one word, they knew not even the meaning. On those who ventured to disturb their facts with the view of putting them in order and to use, the disciples of Hog had no mercy whatever. All attempts at generalization were met at once by the words 'theoretical,' 'theory,' 'theorist' -all thought, to be brief, was very properly resented as a personal affront to themselves. Cultivating the Natural Sciences to the exclusion of Metaphysics, the Mathematics, and Logic, many of these Bacon-engendered philosophers -one-idead, one-sided and lame of a leg -were more wretchedly helpless -more miserably ignorant, in view of all the comprehensible objects of knowledge, than the veriest unlettered hind who proves that he knows something at least, in admitting that he knows absolutely nothing.
"Nor had our forefathers any better right to talk about certainty, when pursuing, in blind confidence, the a priori path of axioms, or of the Ram. At innumerable points this path was scarcely as straight as a ram's-horn. The simple truth is, that the Aristotelians erected their castles upon a basis far less reliable than air; for no such things as axioms ever existed or can possibly exist at all. This they must have been very blind, indeed, not to see, or at least to suspect; for, even in their own day, many of their long-admitted 'axioms' had been abandoned: -'ex nihilo nihil fit,' for example, and a 'thing cannot act where it is not,' and 'there cannot be antipodes,' and 'darkness cannot proceed from light.' These and numerous similar propositions formerly accepted, without hesitation, as axioms, or undeniable truths, were, even at the period of which I speak, seen to be altogether untenable: -how absurd in these people, then, to persist in relying upon a basis, as immutable, whose mutability had become so repeatedly manifest!
2.03 - THE ENIGMA OF BOLOGNA, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[53] Such phenomena, whether historical or individual, cannot be explained by causality alone, but must also be considered from the point of view of what happened afterwards. Everything psychic is pregnant with the future. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a time of transition from a world founded on metaphysics to an era of immanentist explanatory principles, the motto no longer being omne animal a Deo but omne vivum ex ovo. What was then brewing in the unconscious came to fruition in the tremendous development of the Natural Sciences, whose youngest sister is empirical psychology. Everything that was naively presumed to be a knowledge of transcendental and divine things, which human beings can never know with certainty, and everything that seemed to be irretrievably lost with the decline of the Middle Ages, rose up again with the discovery of the psyche. This premonition of future discoveries in the psychic sphere expressed itself in the phantasmagoric speculations of philosophers who, until then, had appeared to be the arch-pedlars of sterile verbiage.
[54] However nonsensical and insipid the Aelia-Laelia epitaph may look, it becomes significant when we regard it as a question which no less than two centuries have asked themselves: What is it that you do not understand and can only be expressed in unfathomable paradoxes?
3.03 - THE MODERN EARTH, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
transcends the Natural Sciences and has successively invaded and
218
3-5 Full Circle, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
One of the highlights of the work of the Center for Interdisciplinary Creativity at Southern Connecticut State College was the sponsoring of Mr. Haskell's pioneering course, Assembly of the Sciences, in the spring semester, 1969. Twenty persons enrolled for either the three semester-hour credits or for auditor status. Included were graduate students, elementary, secondary and college teachers and administrators from the social and Natural Sciences, music, the humanities and fine arts. I am pleased to be able to say that I was one of the auditors.
The seminar is scheduled to be repeated at the SCSC Center in the coming spring semester. The following excerpts from the seminar syllabus will provide a general idea of the nature, methods, and purpose of the seminar.
--
"The key to the progress of the Natural Sciences in Europe [and thus to the rise of the Lower Industrialist out of the Literate culture], lay very largely in a growing habit of testing theories against careful measurement, observation, and upon occasion, experiment," the historian William McNeill points out. "Astronomers and physicists undertook closer observations and more exact measurements only after Copernicus (d.1543) had put an alternative to traditional Ptolemaic and Aristotelian theories before the learned world; and Copernicus did so, not on the basis of observations and measurements, but on grounds of logical simplicity and aesthetic symmetry." p.593.17
Today, Aurelio Peccei, president of the scientific Club of Rome, is calling for "A Copernican change of attitude".19 For the modern industrial world, this change of attitude is presented in the book you hold before you now: it is an alternative to our malfunctioning congeries of specialized one-field scientific and humanistic theories. We present this alternative to you on the basis of observations and measurements, such as Arthur Jensen's, and on the grounds of logical simplicity. And, far beyond these grounds, we present it because this Copernican change of attitude is necessary to the survival of the Empire of Man and of its otherwise doomed participants--human, animal, vegetable, and mineral.
6.09 - THE THIRD STAGE - THE UNUS MUNDUS, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[775] This solution was a compromise to the disadvantage of physis, but it was nevertheless a noteworthy attempt to bridge the dissociation between spirit and matter. It was not a solution of principle, for the very reason that the procedure did not take place in the real object at all but was a fruitless projection, since the caelum could never be fabricated in reality. It was a hope that was extinguished with alchemy and then, it seems, was struck off the agenda for ever. But the dissociation remained, and, in quite the contrary sense, brought about a far better knowledge of nature and a sounder medicine, while on the other hand it deposed the spirit in a manner that would paralyse Dorn with horror could he see it today. The elixir vitae of modern science has already increased the expectation of life very considerably and hopes for still better results in the future. The unio mentalis, on the other hand, has become a pale phantom, and the veritas Christiana feels itself on the defensive. As for a truth that is hidden in the human body, there is no longer any talk of that. History has remorselessly made good what the alchemical compromise left unfinished: the physical man has been unexpectedly thrust into the foreground and has conquered nature in an undreamt-of way. At the same time he has become conscious of his empirical psyche, which has loosened itself from the embrace of the spirit and begun to take on so concrete a form that its individual features are now the object of clinical observation. It has long ceased to be a life-principle or some kind of philosophical abstraction; on the contrary, it is suspected of being a mere epiphenomenon of the chemistry of the brain. Nor does the spirit any longer give it life; rather is it conjectured that the spirit owes its existence to psychic activity. Today psychology can call itself a science, and this is a big concession on the part of the spirit. What demands psychology will make on the other Natural Sciences, and on physics in particular, only the future can tell.
BOOK I. -- PART I. COSMIC EVOLUTION, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
immaculate root fructified by the Ray. Who, if versed in astronomy and Natural Sciences, can fail to see
its suggestiveness? Cosmos as receptive Nature is an Egg fructified -- yet left immaculate; once
BOOK I. -- PART III. SCIENCE AND THE SECRET DOCTRINE CONTRASTED, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
chemists themselves. Natural Sciences cannot go hand in hand with materialism. To be at the height of
their calling, men of science have to reject the very possibility of materialistic doctrines having aught
--
abnormal phenomena; the other, as fervid a Spiritualist as he was great in Natural Sciences. It becomes
evident that while pondering over the ultimate divisibility of matter, and in the hitherto fruitless chase
The Act of Creation text, #The Act of Creation, #Arthur Koestler, #Psychology
In the Natural Sciences, the analysis of rhythmic periodicities the
numerical patterns underlying the phenomena of naive experience
--- Overview of noun natural_science
The noun natural science has 1 sense (first 1 from tagged texts)
1. (1) natural science ::: (the sciences involved in the study of the physical world and its phenomena)
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun natural_science
1 sense of natural science
Sense 1
natural science
=> science, scientific discipline
=> discipline, subject, subject area, subject field, field, field of study, study, bailiwick
=> knowledge domain, knowledge base, domain
=> content, cognitive content, mental object
=> cognition, knowledge, noesis
=> psychological feature
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
--- Hyponyms of noun natural_science
1 sense of natural science
Sense 1
natural science
=> life science, bioscience
=> chemistry, chemical science
=> physics, natural philosophy
=> physics, physical science
=> earth science
=> cosmography
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun natural_science
1 sense of natural science
Sense 1
natural science
=> science, scientific discipline
--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun natural_science
1 sense of natural science
Sense 1
natural science
-> science, scientific discipline
=> natural history
=> natural science
=> mathematics, math, maths
=> agronomy, scientific agriculture
=> agrobiology
=> agrology
=> architectonics, tectonics
=> metallurgy
=> metrology
=> nutrition
=> psychology, psychological science
=> information science, informatics, information processing, IP
=> cognitive science
=> social science
=> strategics
=> systematics
=> thanatology
=> cryptanalysis, cryptanalytics, cryptography, cryptology
=> linguistics
--- Grep of noun natural_science
natural science
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