mcandreb wrote:
Hi Harry,
I sense you really care about this stuff that Shotter is writing about.
I think you realize what is at stake - everything. Your emporer
reference is perfect. However the emperor must be the most powerful
'way' shaping our lives presently. And for the last 150 years, in our
part of the world, that 'way' is western science. David Noble's book 'A
World Without Women' takes this type of mindset back many more
centuries. And the child exclaiming that the emperor is naked is
Wittgenstein.
Noble (History of Science and Technology/York Univ., Toronto; Forces of
Production, 1984, etc.) challenges the commonly held assumption that
modern science developed in opposition to an authoritarian Church,
claiming instead that the celibate, male- dominated Catholic tradition
provided both support and inspiration for the scientific tradition that
would virtually supplant it--a provocative thesis backed by a
painstakingly detailed history. Christianity originated as a potentially
egalitarian religion, Noble says--but almost from the beginning, he
explains, women were forced to struggle against political and cultural
forces aimed at pushing them out of the spiritual mainstream and into
the home.
[snip]
I would not be competent to judge the details of this argument, but
it has a ring of truth to it, although I have never heard of
Wittgenstein being a latter-day Dr. Francois Rabelais -- I'd
love to hear more about this!
Two notes:
(1) I have jist finished reading Pierre Hadot's
_What is Ancient Philosophy?_. There, Hadot argues that
the philosophical schools of "pagan" Hellenistic Greece and
also Imperial Rome, were in general radically egalitarian,
discriminating neither against the poor nor against women.
To the extent that Hadot is right, we are entitled to
ask about ancient Christendom the same question as
Bernard Lewis has asked about contemporary Islam:
What went wrong?
(2) There was an alternative to the mysogenist(sp?) tendency
which in fact won out in post-Renaissance Europe. Here I would
refer yet again to Stephen Toulmin's lovely little book _Cosmopolis:
The hidden agenda of modernity_. There was a fork in the
road. The "road not taken" was that of the Renaissance
humanists, e.g., Rabelais and Erasmus, who were just as
"critical" as Decartes, Galileo et al., but even moreso,
in that they reflected on human praxis as well as upon
an abstractly constructed object domain that was
silent about Papo- and Kingo-centrism. What would the
world be like today if we were Rabelaisian instead of
Cartesian? Much better, and far more self-accountable
[AKA "scientific"...], I would expect. For, as
Husserl said: the exact Galilean mathematical sciences of nature
are only partly scientific because they do not
study their own praxis in a methodologically appropriate way.
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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