Reading Heidegger against the Grain: Hans Jonas on Existentialism, Gnosticism, and Modern Science

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Daniel M. Herskowitz
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Hans Jonas ◽  
Instrumental Reasoning ◽  
Philosophical Interpretation ◽  
Original Contribution ◽  
Scientific Mind

This article argues that the link Hans Jonas drew between Martin Heidegger's philosophy and Gnosticism cannot be properly understood without taking into consideration his philosophical interpretation of modern science. It claims that Jonas saw Heideggerian existentialism not as a modern instantiation of Gnosticism but as a specific experiential reaction to the new cosmological outlook that emerged from the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, which negated the conceptual world that made Gnosticism possible. Jonas's interpretation is “against the grain”: by claiming that Heidegger's thought is a product of the reduction of nature to measurable, manipulable, and calculable extension governing the modern scientific mind, Jonas attributed to Heidegger the very flaws Heidegger critiqued in others. It is further claimed that Jonas's original contribution to Heidegger's reception history is not in proposing the link to Gnosticism but in reading him as the philosophical outcome of the instrumental reasoning of modern science.

scholarly journals Was there a Scientific Revolution?

2007 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 445-457 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER HARRISON
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Western History ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Cast Doubt ◽  
Major Discipline

During the middle decades of the twentieth century, the Scientific Revolution came to be understood as a key period in Western history. Recently, historians have cast doubt upon this category, questioning whether the relevant institutions and practices of the seventeenth century are similar enough to modern science to warrant the label ‘scientific’. A central focus of their criticisms has been the identity of natural philosophy – the major discipline concerned with the study of nature in the early modern period – and its differences from modern science. This paper explores natural philosophy and its relation to philosophy more generally. It concludes that a significant philosophical revolution took place in the seventeenth century, and that this was important for the subsequent emergence of modern science.

Reconceptualizing the Scientific Revolution

2007 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 491-502 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. FLORIS COHEN
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Cultural Comparison ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
Cross Cultural Comparison ◽  
The World ◽  
Century Science

Academics all over the world rightly desire to understand how modern science has come about. Indeed there was a time when historians of science had on offer a clear-cut conception of how that happened. But ongoing innovation in historiographical approaches has rendered the period from Galileo to Newton ever more elusive. Its monolithic coherence has been dissolved, a mood of sceptical resignation reigns in the profession over the very possibility of treating seventeenth-century science as more than a string of loosely connected episodes. I argue that, without returning to a historiographical past definitively behind us, coherence may be restored at a higher level of sophistication. Cross-cultural comparison, and unusual ways of dealing with historical concepts and causes, are proper tools to revitalize the issue and come up with partly novel answers to a question that in any case refuses to go away.

The Rise of Modern Science: When and Why?

1987 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 453-473 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Hooykaas
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
High Middle Ages

When did modern science arise? This is a question which has received divergent answers. Some would say that it started in the High Middle Ages (1277), or that it began with th ‘via moderna’ of the fourteenth century. More widespread is the idea that the Italian Renaissance was also the re-birth of the sciences. In general, Copernicus is then singled out as the great revolutionary, and the ‘scientific revolution’ is said to have taken place during the period from Copernicus to Newton. Others would hold that the scientific revolution started in the seventeenth century and that it covered the period from Galileo to Newton. Sometimes a second scientific revolution is said to have occurred in the first quarter of the twentieth century (Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, etc.), a revolution which should be considered as great as the first one.

Magic and the Physical World in Thirteenth-Century Scholasticism

2009 ◽  
Vol 14 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 158-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Marrone
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
Action At A Distance

AbstractThe turn to modern science in the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century is typically characterized as dependent on the novel adoption of a mechanical hypothesis for operations in nature. In fact, the Middle Ages saw a partial anticipation of this phenomenon in the scholastic physics of the thirteenth century. More precisely, it was just the two factors, denial of action at a distance and an emphasis on the primary materiality of causation, that constituted this early mechanism—or "protomechanism." The latter's emergence can be seen most clearly where scholastic thinkers—here, William of Auvergne, Thomas Aquinas and Giles of Rome—confronted the theoretical limits of natural cause and effect in their efforts to determine the reality of magic and locate its place in the natural world.

Language Matters: ‘Counsel’ in Early Modern and Modern Medicine

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Sabroe ◽  
Phil Withington
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Successful Scientist

Francis Bacon is famous today as one of the founding fathers of the so-called ‘scientific revolution’ of the seventeenth century. Although not an especially successful scientist himself, he was nevertheless the most eloquent and influential spokesperson for an approach to knowledge that promised to transform human understanding of both humanity and its relationship with the natural and social worlds. The central features of this approach, as they emerged in Bacon’s own writings and the work of his protégés and associates after 1605, are equally well known. They include the importance of experiment, observation, and a sceptical attitude towards inherited wisdom (from the ‘ancients’ in general and Aristotle in particular).

Theological Foundations for Modern Science?

Dialogue ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 597-606 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Positive Relationship ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Philosophical Foundations ◽  
Theology And Science ◽  
Theological Foundations ◽  
Recent Collection ◽  
Scientific Imagination

It is often said that philosophy in the seventeenth century returned from a Christian otherworldliness to a pagan engagement, theoretically and practically, with material nature. This process is often described as one of secularization, and the splitting off of science from natural philosophy and metaphysics is a traditional figure in accounts of the emergence of the modern. At the same time, the historiographical assumption that early modern science had religious and philosophical foundations has informed such classics as E. A. Burtt's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1932), Gerd Buchdahl's Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science (1969), and Amos Funkenstein's Theology and the Scientific Imagination (1986). A recent collection testifies to continuing interest in the theme of a positive relationship between theology and science.

« ET VIDI COELUM NOVUM ET TERRAM NOVAM »

Nuncius ◽  
1986 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 49-77
Author(s):  
MAURIZIO TORRINI
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Traditional Knowledge ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Single Access ◽  
New Science ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
Formal School ◽  
Made In ◽  
School Boundaries

Abstract<title> SUMMARY </title>Contemporary movements, united by their common rejection of traditional knowledge and by their common beginnings and development outside formal school boundaries, libertinism and the new science are often considered, evaluated and classified in the univocal light of modern thought introduced by Descartes. A comparison totally unfavourable to libertinism which did not benefit from the attempt made in some cases to assimilate it to the scientific revolution in the name of a common anti-dogmatic character. The movements were in fact distinct in their aims and motives and their occasional interaction must not make us forget the contemporary presence of different and often contrasting ideas at the dawn of modern thought. The aim of this paper is to overcome the historiographical approach which, by privileging a single access to modern thought, evaluates all the others according to the same measure.The paper, through an examination of the European discussion stimulated by Galileo's Sidereus nuncius, shows the philosophical consequences of the astronomical revolution and the series of projects, hopes and misunderstandings that marked its course. An event that did not encounter the indifference of libertines like Naude, who read in the celestial revolution confirmation of the crisis of terrestrial knowledge. In Italy the bond between libertine thought and the scientific revolution came tragically into being as from the condemnation of Galileo and found its consecration in the Neapolitan trial of the atheists at the end of the seventeenth century, thus reuniting in the name of a single orthodoxy, two different conceptions of nature and knowledge.

Feminist Criticisms of Metaphors in Bacon's Philosophy of Science

Philosophy ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
IDDO LANDAU
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Experimental Method ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Early Modern Science ◽  
Sexual Imagery ◽  
Sandra Harding ◽  
Witch Trials ◽  
Scientific Mind ◽  
Evelyn Fox Keller

Francis Bacon has received much attention from feminist philosophers of science. Many of their discussions revolve around his use of sexist, or supposedly sexist, metaphors. According to Sandra Harding, for example, ‘Bacon appealed to rape metaphors to persuade his audience that the experimental method is a good thing.’ Moreover, she claims that ‘when we realize that the mechanistic metaphors that organized early modern science themselves carried sexual meanings, it is clear that these meanings are central to the ways scientists conceptualize both the methods of inquiry and the models of nature’ (ibid.). Carolyn Merchant asserts that witch trials ‘influenced Bacon's philosophy and literary style’. And according to Evelyn Fox Keller, Bacon's explanation of the means by which science will endow humans with power ‘is given metaphorically — through his frequent and graphic use of sexual imagery.’ Fox Keller concludes that Bacon's theory is sexist, but in a more troubled and ambivalent way than Merchant and Harding believe it to be. Thus, she writes that ‘behind the overt insistence on the virility and masculinity of the scientific mind lies a covert assumption and acknowledgment of the dialectical, even hermaphroditic, nature of the “marriage between Mind and Nature.”‘ (p. 40; emphasis added). Likewise, ‘the aggressively male stance of Bacon's scientist could, and perhaps now should, be seen as driven by the need to deny what all scientists, including Bacon, privately have known, namely, that the scientific mind must be, on some level, a hermaphroditic mind.’ (p. 42).

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