1月 7, 2008 @ 3:25 am
“The chastening sting of the philosopher’s tongue”
“The magnitude of the technical problems facing the social theorists in particular is, I readily concede, extremely daunting. Some philosophers of science have thrown up their hands, declaring that the borderlands between the natural and social sciences are too complex to be mastered by contemporary imagination and may lie forever beyond reach. Questioning the very idea of consilience from biology to culture, they point to the nonlinearity of the viable equations, to second- and third-order interactions of factors, to stochasticity, and to all the other monsters that dwelleth in the Great Maelstrom Sea, and they sigh, No hope, no hope. But that is what philosophers are supposed to do. Their task is to define and explain the limits of science in the larger scheme of things, where the full dimensions of rational process are better left to – well, philosophers. For them to concede that science has no intellectual limits would be unseemly; it would be unprofessional. Their misgivings lend strength to that dwindling number of social theorists who wish to keep the borders of their dominions sealed and the study of culture unroiled by the dreams of biology.
?
Scientists themselves are fortunately not so bound. If past generations had been so deeply reflective and humble before the unknown, our comprehension of the universe would have stopped growing in the sixteenth century. The chastening sting of the philosopher’s tongue is needed but should be taken with the antidote of self-assurance, and never allowed to be fatal. It is the opposite conviction, blind faith if you prefer, that has propelled science and technology into the modern age. Bear in mind that the original Enlightenment died within philosophy but not within science. The more pessimistic philosophers may be right about the social sciences, of course, but it is better to press on as if they were wrong. There is only one way to find out. The more forbidding the task, the greater the prize for those who dare to undertake it. ”
?
Chapter 9. The Social Sciences, Consilience, Edward O. Wilson (1998)
5条评论 »
RSS feed for comments on this post · TrackBack URI
Posted by zeroyear
1月 7, 2008 @ 7:42 pm
But that is what philosophers are supposed to do. Their task is to define and explain the limits of science in the larger scheme of things, where the full dimensions of rational process are better left to – well, philosophers.
这样“定义”philosopher，很多人是不同意的:)
Posted by taicu
1月 7, 2008 @ 8:03 pm
去告诉（科学）哲学家们吧。:-)
Posted by 观者甲
1月 8, 2008 @ 11:45 pm
感谢taicu介绍这本好书。试了下emule，果然有收获 ：）
贴一段amazon的editoral review
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
The biologist Edward O. Wilson is a rare scientist: having over a long career made signal contributions to population genetics, evolutionary biology, entomology, and ethology, he has also steeped himself in philosophy, the humanities, and the social sciences. The result of his lifelong, wide-ranging investigations is Consilience (the word means “a jumping together,” in this case of the many branches of human knowledge), a wonderfully broad study that encourages scholars to bridge the many gaps that yawn between and within the cultures of science and the arts. No such gaps should exist, Wilson maintains, for the sciences, humanities, and arts have a common goal: to give understanding a purpose, to lend to us all “a conviction, far deeper than a mere working proposition, that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws.” In making his synthetic argument, Wilson examines the ways (rightly and wrongly) in which science is done, puzzles over the postmodernist debates now sweeping academia, and proposes thought-provoking ideas about religion and human nature. He turns to the great evolutionary biologists and the scholars of the Enlightenment for case studies of science properly conducted, considers the life cycles of ants and mountain lions, and presses, again and again, for rigor and vigor to be brought to bear on our search for meaning. The time is right, he suggests, for us to understand more fully that quest for knowledge, for “Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us…. Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.” Wilson’s wisdom, eloquently expressed in the pages of this grand and lively summing-up, will be of much help in that search.
Posted by 观者甲
1月 9, 2008 @ 12:15 am
Citations 里发现一本书，“新世纪的中国伦理”，试图建立进化生物学和中国伦理之间的联系。网上找不到原文，有人涉猎过吗？
A Chinese Ethics for the New Century
Donald J. Munro
A link between evolutionary biology and Chinese ethics runs through the essays in this volume. Many advances, since the 1960s and 1970s, within the fields of biology, psychology, and neurology are presented. These findings advance our knowledge of how the mind functions paying special attention to social behavior. Munro focuses on the meaning of these developments, specifically for the study of Confucian ethics, and broadly for Chinese contributions to international discussion of moral topics.
About the Author
The author of a trilogy of books on theories of human nature in pre-Qin, Southern Song, and modern China. Munro has focused on the relation of these theories to Chinese educational and social control practices. A former chair of the department of asian languages and cultures. He is professor emeritus of philosophy and of chinese at Michigan.
Posted by لایک ، فالوور ، ویو و کامنت اینستاگرام
2月 7, 2021 @ 7:09 am
Hello there! Do you use Twitter? I’d like to follow you if that would be okay.
I’m absolutely enjoying your blog and look forward
to new posts.