12/29/2023 0 Comments Alfred north whitehead ideology![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Scientific reason, if accurate, was valid, but it was not the only valid kind of reasoning: noncontradiction, validity, truth, value, meaning, purpose, and obligation were necessary presuppositions of the scientific method but not themselves scientific phenomena. Lewis knew that science was one of the great products of the human mind, but he insisted that it was a subset of reason and not simply equivalent to it. He would not defy science on romantic or gnostic grounds. Much as he criticized radical empiricism and its sterile, truncated rationalism, he was himself too much of a rationalist in the classic, Aristotelian sense to countenance esoteric or occult mysticism and the depreciation of reason. Romantic self-absorption and pantheistic gnosticism are targets of Lewis satire in The Pilgrims Regress. (Yeats was probably the model for the magician in Lewis Dymer and for Merlin in That Hideous Strength.) The appeal of pantheistic gnosticism was something that Lewis understood and withstood it lies at the heart of occult "New Age" spirituality, "Deep Ecology," and a good deal of "Eco-feminism" today. Harwood and from the whole history of Romanticism, culminating in the work and world of W. The first was familiar to him from the theosophy of his close friends Owen Barfield and A. Yet there is an opposite temptation that Lewis also criticizedthe temptation to defy science, from the standpoint of either romantic/pantheistic gnosticism or theological fideism. Lewis Abolition of Man is, inter alia, an extended treatise against the deification of science. Crocker and Aldous Huxley have seen its reductionism leading straight to the moral nihilism of the Marquis de Sade, and later to Social Darwinism and the Nietzschean transvaluation of values in the interest of amoral strength and force. Thoughtful twentieth-century commentators such as Lester G. The deification of science first became explicit in the writings of the atheistic French philosophes La Mettric, DHolbach, and Diderot. Vogt and the other materialists contradict themselves, though, becauseas Lewis often notedthey claim that their own scientific thoughts are true. As the German materialist Bernhard Vogt put it, "Thoughts come out of the brain as gall from the liver, or urine from the kidneys," implying that thoughts are just as irrational and beyond our control. Its logical terminus is determinism or "epiphenomenalism," Huxleys notion that the brain and mind are fully determined by-products of irrational physical processes. "Science deified" is scientism, radical empiricism, materialism, or naturalism, an implicit or explicit rejection of all nonquantifiable realities or truths, including the truths of reason. In fact he had received the kind of philosophical education at Oxford that enabled him, like John Henry Newman before him, to resist the two opposed temptations that the historian of science Richard Olson has labeled "science deified" and "science defied." On this centenary of Lewis birth, we might describe his attitude as an appreciation of "mere science." Lewis noted that nothing he could say would keep some people from saying that he was anti-science, a charge he was nevertheless eager to refute. Single Issues of The Independent Review.Podcast: Independent Outlook / Conversations.International Economics and Development. ![]()
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