Melanie Lazarow wrote:
>
> Re: Brad McCormick's contribution.
>
> It might be your personal opinion that Darwin is not one of the most
> important scientific thinkers of the last few centuries. However as far as
> an impact on science and society is concerned your personal opinion may be
> proved wrong.
Obviously different persons will have different lists of "greatests".
(My dissertation bibliography, happily for me, was pretty
close to *my* list -- in writing my dissertation I engaged with
almost no text which I did not feel was of lasting social
value, as well as a source of personal nurturance and delight.
http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/bibliography.html
The "downside" is that my degree has *zero* cash value, so I
still have to expend the best hours of my days at a job I have to
do to reproduce individual and species life, rather than engaging
in "higher" [excuse the honorific...] activities which would place me in
"that condition which the god is in always but
man only sometimes" (Aristotle).)
In science, e.g., Galileo is probably *the* towering figure, insofar
as he (at least as I understand) invented the notion of the effective
mathematicization of "nature" by inventing idealized entities
and then testing "reality" against the behavior of those
idealizations in "time factored series".
Of course Darwin was "important".
But our civilization may yet
recognize Husserl as the next big step after Galileo (with
Kant, et al. linking the two...). Emiprical research
cannot itself be understood empirically (because it
claims to achieve discursively defensible results *about* what-is, not
merely to be part of what-is).... In the end, whether or not
evolution is true is of secondary import, just like
whether the universe is Ptolemaic of post-Einsteinean, since
all this is
just part of "the conversation we are" (Gadamer), and
*that conversation* is the ultimate reality and where we should be
investing a lot of our energy lest, running off our battery
and not our generator, we run down and grind to a halt.
To cite Bruno Latour probably
against himself, yet again, we have never yet really been modern....
As Stephen Toulmin argued in _Cosmopolis_, an alternate modern
world could have happened: one based on Rabelais and Erasmus
rather than Descartes (and Darwin, et al...).... And it would
have been a more humane modernity, in all likelihood....
In such a modernity, we might have talked about evolution,
but we would have valued the talking far more than the
evolutionary theory, instead of being "fascinated" by
such objective theories and not attending much to the
conversational process in which all such theories
find their place.
>
> Evolutionary theory turned old notions on their head and had an influence
> on every aspect of science and society today
So did Descartes, Kant, Freud, Copernicus, Thomas Kuhn, Marx,
Henry Ford and others.
But a question for you: If truth "evolves" in a Darwinean way, how
do you justify anything you say in ways that will try to
get me to agree with you by "the unforced force of the
better argument" (Habermas)?
[snip]
>
> Darwin's method, which was one of careful observation analysis and
> conclusions that challenged even his own strongly held beliefs, gave
> impetus to an empirical science of nature.
Therefore we speak of "The Darwinean sciences of nature", right? Not
"The Galilean sciences".
>
> The question of liking or disliking Darwin's writing, theory or ideas, and
> preferring others, should not be confused with the undoubtedly important
> place Darwin holds in history and I for one am grateful!
[snip]
Perhaps Mount Olympus is too small for all our mortal
"gods"?
Of course Darwin is important. But if I was going into solitary
for the rest of my life, and could take only some very small number
of books with me, I have no doubt that Darwin would not
be among them. You may choose differently....
I'll not tire everyone by pursuing this pointless
discussion any further -- I just like to try to feel
less hopeless about our "world" (which is largely only
taxonomically, not also honorifically that)....
"Your in discourse..."
+\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. / [log in to unmask]
914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA
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