Search Results (16)

Philosophers often rely on sciences of their own time. This is especially true for scientists writing philosophical works. In the case of Ernst Mach, the scientific references are mainly to physics, physiology, evolutionary biology and—in a somewhat different manner—the new discipline of psychology. Like so many authors in the late 19th century, Mach had extreme confidence in the methods of the natural sciences. However, this trait, often called scientism or positivism, can easily be used in polemical accounts that obscure other aspects of Mach’s thought. Mach is well-known for both his analysis of sensations and his evolutionary conception of perception and knowledge. The tension between the ambition to clarify the empirical basis of perception on the one hand and the focus on the natural origins of human perception on the other hand is, however, considerable. A comparison of these two perspectives can contribute to an ontological understanding of experience that sheds new light on the much-discussed topic of sense data and at the same time clarifies the difference between experience and observation and the role of experimental science in this context. In some respects, Mach seems closer to William James than to his followers in the Vienna circle. The accusation of idealism made by Lenin in his influential critique of positivism overlooks the implications of this naturalist approach but offers the occasion to dwell on the ontological implications of something that can be called natural historicity. Comparisons with Aristotle, Bacon, Descartes and Kant situate the empiricist theory of perception. Full article

This paper studies the auto/biographies of high-caste middle-class Punjabi Khatri men, and those of cognate castes like Arora and Baniya, written in the first half of the twentieth century: men who were born in the second half of the nineteenth century or early twentieth century. While the discourse on caste under the colonial regime exploded, there was also an embarrassment about caste, or re-thinking its place in society among the upper-caste groups who invested in ideas of progress, improvement and scientism. It is argued that caste was referenced in the memoirs, life stories and self-reflexive writing when these men spoke of their familial backgrounds and admired the deep religiosity and devotionalism of their fathers even though some paternal practices were incongruent with the reformism of the sons. Caste is also in play when one traces the advantages of literacy, education, professional accomplishments, mobility, and reformist activities of men who came to have an important presence in public life. A number of these men had similar life trajectories, indicative of how some aspects of colonial educational and administrative structures could be utilized by them. Full article

I argue for a transformative revival or actualization of the very core of an integrative, methodologically secured form of intellect-mystical asceticism. This approach draws on traditional sources that are re-examined from a systematic—synthetic and transcultural—philosophical perspective and in light of the multi-civilizational global environment of the 21st century. The main traditional points of reference in this paper are provided by Nicolaus de Cusa and Ibn Sīnā, and I refer to a few others, such as Attar of Nishapur, in passing. I begin by developing a basic concept of intellect-mystical asceticism. It is distinguished from mystification, science, scientism, and modes of everyday communication and cognition. Then, I make the case for an updated, transcultural approach to intellect-mysticism that can foster the internal (social) and external (environmental) reintegration of the human noosphere and technosphere in future planetary development. In this context, a modern intellect-mystical philosophical notion of “knowing non-knowing” (wissendes Nichtwissen, docta ignorantia) is developed. It is inspired by Nicolaus de Cusa and contextualized from a systematic transcultural angle at the same time. Finally, I discuss the problem of the practical, or rather ascetic, realization of the related possibilities of intellect-mystical self-enfolding. Here, the preceding steps of the reflection are mapped onto an outline regarding distinct developmental stages of such a transformative intellect-mystical practice in Ibn Sīnā’s Remarks and Admonitions (al-Ishārāt wat-Tanbīhāt). Full article

Milk bioactivity refers to the specific health effects of milk components beyond nutrition. The science of milk bioactivity involves the systematic study of these components and their health effects, as verified by empirical data, controlled experiments, and logical arguments. Conversely, ’faith in milk bioactivity’ can be defined as personal opinion, meaning, value, trust, and hope for health effects that are beyond investigation by natural, social, or human sciences. Faith can be strictly secular, but also influenced by spirituality or religion. The aim of this paper is to show that scientific knowledge is frequently supplemented with faith convictions to establish personal and public understanding of milk bioactivity. Mammalian milk is an immensely complex fluid containing myriad proteins, carbohydrates, lipids, and micronutrients with multiple functions across species, genetics, ages, environments, and cultures. Human health includes not only physical health, but also social, mental, and spiritual health, requiring widely different fields of science to prove the relevance, safety, and efficacy of milk interventions. These complex relationships between milk feeding and health outcomes prevent firm conclusions based on science and logic alone. Current beliefs in and understanding of the value of breast milk, colostrum, infant formula, or isolated milk proteins (e.g., immunoglobulins, α-lactalbumin, lactoferrin, and growth factors) show that both science and faith contribute to understand, stimulate, or restrict the use of milk bioactivity. The benefits of breastfeeding for infants are beyond doubt, but the strong beliefs in its health effects rely not only on science, and mechanisms are unclear. Likewise, fear of, or trust in, infant formula may rely on both science and faith. Knowledge from science safeguards individuals and society against ‘milk bioactivity superstition’. Conversely, wisdom from faith-based convictions may protect science from unrealistic ‘milk bioactivity scientism’. Honesty and transparency about the potentials and limitations of both scientific knowledge and faith convictions are important when informing individuals and society about the nutritious and bioactive qualities of milk. Full article

This article traces the emergence of what is nowadays called “postsecular” religion from German-Jewish philosophy of the 1920s and 1930s. The three different cases of Franz Rosenzweig, Alexander Altmann, and Leo Strauss impel us to pay particular attention to a few recurring argumentative and rhetorical strategies. The emergence of postsecularism marks a shift in the epistemic foundations of Jewish religious thought, which had long been under pressure from secular European thought. Beginning with Rosenzweig, Jewish philosophy used secular categories of European philosophy to facilitate a return to the foundations of Judaism, eventually turning against what it sees as the epistemic weaknesses of secularism itself. This article traces the new phenomenon to Rosenzweig’s evolving view of secularism, especially to his ridicule of Siegfried Kracauer’s secular messianism, before examining a few key arguments in his book The Star of Redemption (1921). A brief discussion of Alexander Altmann’s writings of the early 1930s provides that even modern Orthodox Jewish thought, which had never been “secular”, used postsecular categories and arguments to make the philosophical case for orthodoxy. Leo Strauss’s introduction to his Philosophy and Law (1935) provides a far more elaborated form of Rosenzweig’s argument. As this article seeks to show, postsecular Jewish thought comes with a slight twist of epistemic relativism, particularly when it comes to the juxtaposition of the Biblical and scientific “world-views”. But here it merely draws the full consequences of modern science, beating scientism with its own weapons. Furthermore, religious thought in the 20th century had no other option than to rebuild itself on postsecular grounds. Full article

Many people assume ceaseless conflict between natural science and Christianity, but the real conflict has been between scientism and Christianity. Scientism is the view that only the sciences (especially not theology) generate knowledge or rational belief. I show how Christianity generated rational beliefs that contributed to the rise of science. This science-fostering rational belief included rationales for when to practice methodological naturalism, and when to study nature without that restriction. Both practices cultivated science, though in different ways. This historical difference is of enduring value for recent debates about metaphysical naturalism (atheism), creationism, theistic evolution, and intelligent design. Full article

Dworkin’s and other analytic/positivist philosophers’ theoretical approach to law leads inexorably to politicization, totalitarianism, less justice, less trust in government, and less truth. A more practical approach is Fuller’s, which is based on experience of human behavior and an analysis of what has worked in the past. That is also the approach traditionally used in the common law system. This article uses a comparative study of the two Western traditions, their history, and their most prominent legal philosophers to explicate how and why Dworkin’s and Fuller’s approaches are consistent and inconsistent with those traditions, followed by a comparative analysis of the results obtained by prominent international NGOs. Dworkin’s approach, which grows out of analytic philosophy, is unworkable because like all scientistic theories, it treats human beings mechanistically, de-emphasizing personal responsibility, ignoring the need for individual incentive, and it assumes an all-encompassing, all-powerful government of experts to make legal decisions for a collectivity. Under Fuller’s common law approach, the proper role of law is to manage conflict, as it cannot be prevented and cannot always be resolved, thus building the public’s trust in government as unbiased and apolitical as possible. This concept of the rule of law places law above government, minimizes politicization, incentivizes personal responsibility, individual incentive, and entrepreneurship, and is the only true common good among men. Full article

This article uses data from students in England to pilot and validate an ‘Attitudes to Science and Religion’ instrument which explores secondary school students’ perceptions of the relationship between science and religion, as well as their attitudes towards science and towards religion. This instrument was developed in part from previous studies and is intended for educators and researchers for both pedagogical and research purposes. The post-pilot questionnaire was then used with 1102 Year 9/10 students from 18 schools in England to answer two research questions: (1) Is there a relationship between students’ attitudes towards science and their perceptions as to whether science and religion are compatible? (2) What are the characteristics of students who report that science and religion are compatible? Students who reported that science and religion were compatible had more positive perceptions of science and of their ability in science, were more likely to have future aspirations in science and showed more positive attitudes towards science education. There was no statistically significant difference between Christian and Muslim students in their responses about the compatibility of science and religion, nor about whether evolution and creationism should be taught in the science classroom. Muslim students were as positive as were Christian students about their science education and the benefits of science; however, they were less positive about the role of science in explaining the world. Students who reported science and religion as being compatible were more likely to hold religious beliefs than a belief in scientism. Implications of this research are that there ought to be a place for discussion about the relationship between science and religion within school lessons and that high quality discussion is likely to be fostered by developing students’ critical thinking skills. Full article

Despite the suspicions of Gnosticism that have been cast against Michel Henry’s phenomenology, the truth is that his approach in no way belittles the earth, the nature we inhabit. The purpose of this article is to sketch an eco-phenomenology from Henry’s notion of bodily-ownness. In this sense, I show how Henry defends an intimate and intrinsic connection between the human and nature that risks being severed by the imposition of scientistic ideology. In doing so, an integral ecology emerges from Henry’s radical phenomenology. On the one hand, human beings shall abandon their selfish way of life, in the sense of ceasing to want to dominate, control and transform the world at will. On the other hand, they do so in order to regain their original connection with nature, where they exist in a radical passivity in which life is given to them and is realized more fully as a person in harmony with the earth. In this sense, contrary to some current ecological movements, the ecology that arises from Henry’s approach does not set human beings against nature. In fact, in order for nature to be respected, human beings do not have to disappear, withdraw or stop progressing in the life proper to them. Full article

This conceptual paper starts by outlining six important concerns of Science|Environment|Health (S|E|H), a new pedagogy of science that has been developed during the last decade by a Special Interest Group of the ESERA community. The paper points out that the importance of these six concerns even increased during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. They play an essential role in preparing future citizens not only for coping with the pandemic but in general with other great challenges that lie ahead of our world. In this way S|E|H is naturally connected to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and the paper discusses how S|E|H work in recent years may inspire education for sustainable development. The six concerns are: (1) the question of curricular change, (2) the role of knowledge in S|E|H contexts, (3) the danger of scientism and the tension between individual and political responsibility, (4) decision-making in S|E|H contexts, (5) the challenge of coping with uncertainty, and (6) the question of scientific holism. Structured by these concerns, the paper reviews recent research of the S|E|H community. These findings are reframed by the Two-Eyed Seeing approach that has recently found growing interest in the S|E|H community. This new approach distinguishes between the scientific image and the life-world image on an ontological basis, which helps to disentangle the six concerns and to provide a framework for tackling them in teacher education and educational research—in S|E|H contexts and also in education for sustainable development. Full article

Mainland Chinese grow up in a nation with Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism as their cultural heritage, and are educated with atheism, materialism, and scientism in contemporary China. However, the high rate of conversion to Christianity among Chinese immigrants in Anglo-Saxon countries constitutes a distinctive feature in studies of migration. This paper aims to investigate the reasons for becoming Christian and the development of spirituality of a group of first-generation Chinese Australians from mainland China. All the seven participants are highly educated women who migrated to Australia as adults and had young children at the time of conversion. Data were collected mainly through open-ended in-depth interviews, and triangulated with private conversations, observations, and WeChat messaging. This ethnographic qualitative research found that these immigrants’ Christian attempts were prominently triggered by settlement crisis as new immigrants and as immigrant parents. They see Christianity and church community as a strong vehicle to resolve integration difficulties in a new society, such as economic and career insecurities, social isolation, language barriers, marital crises, and parenting dilemmas. Their Christian movement is facilitated by identified ideological congruence but hindered by cultural conflicts between their newly acquired Christian doctrines and their previously instructed values. The findings have implications for immigrant families, secular institutions, and religious organizations, as to the psychosocial well-being of new migrants. Full article

This article tries to be funny in a very serious way, following Virginia Woolf’s call in Three Guineas that, in the face of man-made disasters, we may have to make fools of ourselves in relation to common sense. Apocalypses, such as the Anthropocene, climate change, and mass extinction require—like the Second World War that Woolf refused to simplify—a tentative search for knowledge, not controlling and predictable methods in the search for a solution. The article is based on how Jacques Derrida’s discussion with Immanuel Kant regarding how truth should sound before the apocalypse over the years has increasingly come to describe contemporary doxa, within which there is only room for mystagogues, who inaugurate followers in the “real truth” behind “fake news”, or scientisticists, who believe that facts and truth are the same thing. When Derrida shows how these two positions depend on each other, sharing the modern belief that knowledge is associated with development, boundaries and control, he also shows how this narrows knowledge down to the predictable, and, thus, makes it complicit with the mistaken efforts of control responsible for today’s challenges. Against this background, the article analyzes works by the artist, Eva Löfdahl, and links them with questions concerning connections between truth, knowledge, art, and science. Full article

Many people assume that there has been ceaseless conflict between science and Christianity. I argue that the real conflict has been between scientism and religion. Scientism is the view that only the sciences generate knowledge or rational belief. Scientism, as typically articulated, entails the opinion that reliable belief about divinity (theological realism) is impossible. I debunk four historic science–Christianity conflict myths and show how they have promoted scientism. These four science–religion myths function as part of a larger warfare narrative about science and Christianity. This misleading warfare thesis often comes packaged with an alternative anti-theistic “myth” in the anthropological sense—in this case, a worldview-shaping narrative that awakens the imagination to interpret the world in scientistic and non-theistic ways. I call this the scientistic warfare myth and explore its major flaws. Full article

There is a belief that exercise has a major role to play in the current health and wellbeing agendas. Consequently, health interventions are implemented based upon the recommendations of the ACSM and similar exercise research organizations. However this development has been challenged through both social and political perspectives. Specifically accusations of medicalization have been raised against the increasing relationship between the exercise and medical domains. The purpose of this article is to present a similar critique of the growing emergence of a medical paradigm within the exercise domain. In this instance the focus will examine the relationship between exercise professional, exercise science and the proposed medical paradigm. Through the use of philosophical essay and systematic review of literature, it is argued that a continuing shift by exercise science to mirror the medical paradigm will cause a number of issues and potential hazards in the working practices of its professionals. Full article

Prior to the nineteenth century, those who are now regarded as scientists were referred to as natural philosophers. With empiricism, science was claimed to be a superior form of knowledge to philosophy, and natural philosophy was marginalized. This claim for science was challenged by defenders of natural philosophy, and this debate has continued up to the present. The vast majority of mainstream scientists are comfortable in the belief that through applying the scientific method, knowledge will continue to accumulate, and that claims to knowledge outside science apart from practical affairs should not be taken seriously. This is referred to as scientism. It is incumbent on those who defend natural philosophy against scientism not only to expose the illusions and incoherence of scientism, but to show that natural philosophers can make justifiable claims to advancing knowledge. By focusing on a recent characterization and defense of natural philosophy along with a reconstruction of the history of natural philosophy, showing the nature and role of Schelling’s conception of dialectical thinking, I will attempt to identify natural philosophy as a coherent tradition of thought and defend it as something different from science and as essential to it, and essential to the broader culture and to civilization. Full article