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Post by Admin on Apr 11, 2022 13:46:59 GMT
Goethean science "Goethean science is an approach to knowing the world, that serves as an intuitive or "right brain" (so to speak) complement to the traditional rationalistic "left brain" science. Goethe's particular way of doing science is interesting, because it is was opposite the mechanistic and reductionistic paradigms of his contemporaries such as Newton and Laplace. Fundamental to Goethe's approach to science was his insistence that the scientist is not a passive observer of an external universe, but rather engaged in a reciprocal, participatory relationship with nature, and hence the observer is able to interact with the observed..." "Goethean science is therefore also a spiritual path, an integration of science and art, a science of quality and of wholeness, the development of a science of compassion." www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/physics/courses/sth209/gscience.htmlen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goethean_science
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Post by Admin on Apr 11, 2022 13:50:40 GMT
New organs of perception: Goethean science as a cultural therapeutics Brent Dean Robbins Janus Head 8 (1):113-126 (2005) philpapers.org/rec/ROBNOOAbstract Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s approach to science is a radical departure from the Cartesian-Newtonian scientific framework and offers contemporary science a pathway toward the cultivation of an alternative approach to the study of the natural world. This paper argues that the Cartesian-Newtonian pathway is pathological because it has as its premise humanity’s alienation from the natural world, which sets up a host of consequences that terminate in nihilism. As an alternative approach to science, Goethe’s “delicate empiricism” begins with the premise that humanity is fundamentally at home in the world: a notion which forms the basis for a Goethean science that gives primacy to perception, offers a more organic and holistic conception of the universe, and has as its goal the cultivation of aesthetic appreciation and morally responsive obligation to the observed. As an antidote to nihilism and as the basis for a more fulfilling and morally responsive science, Goethean science may serve as a kind of cultural therapeutics, a project which is necessarily interdisciplinary since it requires the integration of multiple ways of seeing from the natural sciences, the human sciences, and the humanities Keywords Continental Philosophy Language and Literature
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Post by flyingcarpet46 on Apr 12, 2022 19:00:54 GMT
Interesting. I'm sure I responded but probably ended up somewhere else on the forum (my lack of concentration)
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Post by flyingcarpet46 on Apr 12, 2022 19:14:27 GMT
Or maybe I didn't click on submit/create post. Sigh.
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Post by flyingcarpet46 on Apr 12, 2022 19:59:57 GMT
Not going to repeat my post - too tired - but the gist was that science was portrayed too simplicitly. Focused just on the method , as if there was ni scientist engaging in.it through curiosity, experimentation.etc
Have actually just read an Einstein quotation: The breakthrough came suddenly one day. I was sitting on a chair in the patent office in Bern. Suddenly the thought struck me: if a man falls freely, he does not feel his own weight. I was taken aback. This simple thought experiment made a deep impression on me. This led me to the theory of gravity."
I'm not convinced by Goethe's sequence of a leaf but it's possible he could see a pattern which i don't.
But I agree that there are many ways of perception and we shouldn't set science above all others, although it has contributed significantly to technological advances, but hold a more integrated view.
Our education system doesn't encourage engagement with objects of study . It's more 'learn the facts and the maths'.I have always wanted a 'feel' for what I've studied. I think the rise of popular science (eg documentaries and books) has changed this to some extent as scientists like Cox and his colleagues seek explain and enthuse. (deepening my own understandings from past study).
Cox, however, is intolerant of people telling him what their 'intuition' is rather than coming up with an experiment that confirmed an hypothesis.
Coming back to science being oresented too simply in the vanderbilt piece. I encountered Robert Young, who was closely connected with the radical science movement of the 1970s/80s . These scientists talked of science in terms of 'social relations' ie not neutral but socially, politically, culturally intertwined. Young argued that the concept of 'Nature' reflected this in a book Darwin's Metaphor (somewhat heavy academic read)
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Post by flyingcarpet46 on Apr 12, 2022 20:17:00 GMT
Robert Young on Darwin reputation.
PhilPapers home Darwin’s Metaphor: Does Nature Select? Robert M. Young The Monist 55 (3):442-503 (1971) Abstract It is not too great an exaggeration to claim that On the Origin of Species was, along with Das Kapital, one of the two most significant works in the intellectual history of the nineteenth century. As George Henry Lewes wrote in 1868, ‘No work of our time has been so general in its influence’.
ÑHowever, the very generality of the influence of Darwin’s work provides the chief problem for the intellectual historian. Most books and articles on the subject assert the influence but remain very imprecise about its nature. It is very difficult indeed to assess what it was about the Darwinian theory which was so influential and how its influence was felt.
This problem in Victorian intellectual history intersects with a related one in the history of science. There has been a tendency on the part of historians of science to isolate Darwin in two related ways. The first is to single him out from the mainstream of nineteenth-century naturalism in Britain and allow ‘Darwinism’ to stand duty for the wider movement of which it was in fact but a part.
The second is the tendency to single out his evolutionary theory and to demarcate it sharply from those of his predecessors and contemporaries. According to this interpretation Darwin stood alone as a real, empirical scientist and provided the first genuinely scientific hypothesis for the process by which evolution might have occurred. The theories of the other main evolutionists—Erasmus Darwin, Lamarck, Chambers, Spencer, and Wallace—were more or less besmirched by ideological, anthropomorphic, or other ‘non-scientific’ factors or by the uses to which they were put by their authors.
Charles Darwin is thus made to stand out as a figure of comparatively unalloyed scientific status and is treated in relative isolation from the social and intellectual context in which he worked and into which his theory was received.
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