New Organs of Perception

Janus Head ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-126
Author(s):  
Brent Dean Robbins ◽  

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's approach to science is a radical departure from the Cartesian-Newtonian scientific framework and offers contemporary science a pathway toward the cultivation of an alternative approach to the study of the natural world. This paper argues that the Cartesian-Newtonian pathway is pathological because it has as its premise humanity's alienation from the natural world, which sets up a host of consequences that terminate in nihilism. As an alternative approach to science, Goethe's "delicate empiricism" begins with the premise that humanity is fundamentally at home in the world: a notion which forms the basis for a Goethean science that gives primacy to perception, offers a more organic and holistic conception of the universe, and has as its goal the cultivation of aesthetic appreciation and morally responsive obligation to the observed. As an antidote to nihilism and as the basis for a more fulfilling and morally responsive science, Goethean science may serve as a kind of cultural therapeutics, a project which is necessarily interdisciplinary since it requires the integration of multiple ways of seeing from the natural sciences, the human sciences, and the humanities.

2018 ◽  
pp. 187-232
Author(s):  
Alison E. Martin

This chapter is devoted to Humboldt’s last, great work Cosmos. This multi-volume ‘Sketch of a Physical Description of the World’ ranged encyclopaedically from the darkest corners of space to the smallest forms of terrestrial life, describing the larger systems at work in the natural world. But, as British reviewers were swift to query, where was God in Humboldt’s mapping of the universe? Appearing on the market in 1846, just a year after Robert Chambers’ controversial Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, Humboldt’s Cosmos unavoidably underwent close scrutiny. Hitherto overlooked correspondence between Humboldt and Edward Sabine shows how the Sabines deliberately reoriented the second volume of the English translation for Longman/Murray explicitly to include references to the ‘Creator’ and thus restore Humboldt’s reputation. The fourth volume of the Longman edition on terrestrial magnetism – Edward Sabine’s specialism – included additions endorsed by Humboldt which made Sabine appear as co-writer alongside the great Prussian scientist, and Cosmos a more obviously ‘English’ product. Otté, who produced the rival translation for Bohn, was initially under pressure herself to generate ‘original’ work that differed from its rival, producing a version of a work that would remain central to scientific thought well up to the end of the nineteenth century.


Author(s):  
Scott A. Davison

The theodicy explored in Chapter 13 is naturalistic in the sense that it does not appeal to the existence of good things or events or processes that cannot be studied using the natural sciences. More specifically, unlike most of the theodicies that are typically discussed in the literature, this one does not involve any claims about human survival of death, the existence of a soul, libertarian human freedom, or divine intervention, miraculous or otherwise. The theodicy explored here involves the following claims: Everything that exists is intrinsically valuable to some degree; the universe as a whole is a thing of immense intrinsic value; the immense intrinsic value of the universe as a whole provides God with a justifying reason for creating it; the evil in the world is offset by the intrinsic values of the creatures affected together with the intrinsic value of the world that comes from its regularity.


Author(s):  
Fathimath Saeed

Chaos and complexity theory has been used in the study of the natural sciences for over thirty years. Throughout the years, experts from various fields have used it as a new way to view the world around them, including its applications to the field of education and subsystems within the education system. However very few studies have been conducted on the application of chaos theory to classroom discipline. The field of classroom discipline, like the natural world, can also be observed from this perspective because it exhibits many features of chaotic/complex systems. Classrooms are often described as complex, dynamic and unpredictable environments. This makes it difficult for teachers to understand and manage classroom discipline. This paper explores the complexity of classroom discipline and how the principles of chaos and complexity theory reflect on classroom discipline. This would help inform management strategies and alternatives that would in turn enhance and improve student academic achievement and overall performance.


Author(s):  
Andrew Steane

This chapter tackles the question of whether or not the natural world presents us with a picture empty of purpose or good or evil or concern. No empirical evidence can entirely refute the claim that random fluctuation is the complete truth about the origin of all things, but it follows that this is not a scientific claim. Therefore it is a question of forming a reasonable judgement. It appears that the natural world has a depth and richness that exceeds what would be necessary for thinking brains to come to be realized in it. Also, notwithstanding the pain of the world, it is a project that merits our engagement and commitment, and occasionally the transcendent breaks in. We are not competent to make an overall judgement, but we can join in with the creative process of the world and find our role.


2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-49
Author(s):  
David Alinurdin

Dalam dekade terakhir, interaksi sains dan teologi dalam upaya membangun konsep tindakan ilahi di dalam dunia natural telah sampai pada satu kesimpulan untuk mencari titik temu kausal di mana Allah Pencipta yang transenden dan nonfisik dapat bertindak di dalam proses-proses natural yang terjadi di dalam dunia ciptaan. Sebuah gerakan akademis yang diakui kredibilitasnya dalam usaha menemukan titik temu kausal dengan cara-cara baru yang memasukkan penafsiran filosofis dari sains kekinian ke dalam teologi adalah Divine Action Project (DAP), yang merumuskan sebuah teori tindakan ilahi yang disebut NIODA (Noninterventionist Objective Divine Action). NIODA berusaha mencari lokus tindakan ilahi khusus yang tidak bertentangan dengan hukum alam yaitu di dalam proses-proses fisik yang dapat ditafsirkan sebagai indeterminisme secara ontologis, seperti mekanika kuantum. Tulisan ini akan mengkaji asumsi-asumsi filosofis di balik NIODA dan memperlihatkan bahwa konsep ini dapat diterima secara saintifik namun tidak memadai secara teologis karena masih terikat dengan asumsi Laplace warisan zaman pencerahan yang menganggap alam semesta ini tertutup secara kausal bagi tindakan ilahi. Karena itu, di bagian terakhir, tulisan ini juga akan mengusulkan beberapa poin penting dalam upaya membangun sebuah konsep tindakan ilahi yang memadai secara teologis maupun saintifik, yang dibangun di atas fondasi teologi penciptaan yang trinitarian dan kovenantal. In the last decade, the interaction between science and theology in the effort to develop the concept of divine action in the natural world has come to a conclusion to find a causal joint where transcendent and nonphysical Creator God can act in natural processes that occur in the world of creation. An academic movement whose credibility has been recognized in its efforts to find a causal joint in new ways that incorporate philosophical interpretations of contemporary science into theology is the Divine Action Project (DAP), which formulates a concept of divine action called NIODA (Noninterventionist Objective Divine Action). NIODA seeks to find a locus of special divine action that does not conflict with laws of nature in physical processes that can be interpreted as ontological indeterminism, such as quantum mechanics. This paper will examine the philosophical assumptions behind NIODA and show that this concept is scientifically acceptable but not theologically adequate because it is still bound by Laplace's assumption of the enlightenment's legacy which considers the universe to be causally closed to divine action. Therefore, in the last part, this paper will also propose several important points in the effort to develop a concept of special divine action that is both theologically and scientifically adequate, built on the basis of a trinitarian and covenantal biblical theology of creation.


2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 123
Author(s):  
Jan-Erik Lane

<em>Thus far, all the debate about climate change in the myriad of UN conferences and special meetings has been about the application of the theories of the natural sciences to the global warming phenomena. Now, that there is a decision by the governments of the world countries to go ahead with a radical decarbonisation policy in the 21st century, the lessons from the social science theories must be taken into account. The COP21 project is a case of policy implementation, but implementation is difficult. Greenhouse Gases (GHG) like CO2:s stem from the anthropogenic sources of carbon emissions from the factors that drives not only the universe but also all social systems, viz. energy. This article spells out the energy-emissions conundrum of mankind.</em>


2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-152
Author(s):  
Daniel Susser ◽  

In Husserl’s Missing Technologies, Don Ihde urges us to think deeply and critically about the ways in which the technologies utilized in contemporary science structure the way we perceive and understand the natural world. In this paper, I argue that we ought to extend Ihde’s analysis to consider how such technologies are changing the way we perceive and understand ourselves too. For it is not only the natural or “hard” sciences which are turning to advanced technologies for help in carrying out their work, but also the social and “human” sciences. One set of tools in particular is rapidly being adopted—the family of information technologies that fall under the umbrella of “big data.” As in the natural sciences, big data is giving researchers in the human sciences access to phenomena which they would otherwise be unable to experience and investigate. And like the former, the latter thereby shape the ways those scientists perceive and understand who and what we are. Looking at two case studies of big data-driven research in the human sciences, I begin in this paper to suggest how we might understand these phenomenological and hermeneutic changes.


Antichthon ◽  
1986 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 1-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald Lateiner

Today one expects a truth or the truth to be characterized by objectivity, communicability, and unity. It should be testable, precisely expressed, consistent, and logical. To be all this, the truth must conform to the world of observation, and it must be based on data that can verify or falsify it. A truth may be general or particular, and research in different disciplines, of course, will pursue information and truths by different methods.Some thinkers express dissatisfaction with the narrowness of this concept of truth, which is largely based on the specific needs of the inductive model of the natural sciences. It makes us uncomfortable, however, to say that the poet has one kind of truth, the philosopher another, the doctor, the physicist, and the geographer still others, and the historian another, yet autonomous truth. History is among the fields of study most subject to misapprehension, for it lies between human sciences and human arts, also between cases and laws.


2002 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 563-585 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frédéric Vandenberghe

Starting with an overview of possible solutions to the problem of social order, the author presents a non-acritical reconstruction of Edmund Husserl's transcendental phenomenology of intersubjectivity as a sympathetic alternative to Habermas's theory of communicative action. By means of a detailed analysis of the concept of empathy (Einfühlung), he shows that Husserl's phenomenology of intersubjectivity offers a triple foundation of the sciences. As a warrant of the objectivity of the world, it grounds the natural sciences; as a presupposition of sociality, it founds the social sciences; as mediated by culture, it grounds the social sciences as human sciences.


Author(s):  
Bénédicte Meillon

      Ecopoetics forms a human expression of the naturecultures that sustain us, enfolding us within an earth that is much more than a mere environment. In consequence, the ecopoet serves as a mediator between the multitudinous voices and lifeforms that take part in the song of the world. Weaving its way into the matter and texts of the world, human language—I argue in the wake of new materialism—provides the measure of and seeks inspiration in the apparent randomness and underlying design motivating the evolution of complex systems in the universe. I interweave approaches originating in Anglophone ecocriticism and ecophilosophy with ecopoetics—as Jonathan Bate and Scott Knickerbocker have defined it—with its close attention paid to the complex, interlaced fabric of the text. Barbara Kingsolver’s ecopoet(h)ics draws from chaos theory, inviting readers to shift interpretative paradigms, moving away from linear, binary grids of logic and reading, toward integrating complex, overlapping systems of meaning. Focusing on Kingsolver’s novel Prodigal Summer (2000), this paper argues that, as Snyder once put it, art is not so much “an imposition of order on chaotic nature, freedom, and chaos;” rather it is “a matter of discovering the grain of things, of uncovering the measured chaos that structures the natural world,” of revealing “the way [wild] phenomena actualize themselves,” including within a wild ecopoetic language. Resumen      La ecopoética constituye una expresión humana de las naturaculturas que nos dan sustento y nos sitúan en relación a una tierra entendida como algo más que un simple medio ambiente. En consecuencia, el ecopoeta funciona como un mediador entre las numerosas voces y formas de vida que configuran la canción del mundo. Abriéndose camino a través de la materia y los textos, sostengo que el lenguaje humano, visto a partir de los nuevos materialismos, proporciona la medida de y busca inspiración en la aparente aleatoriedad y el diseño subyacente que motiva la evolución de los sistemas complejos del universo. Aquí combino diferentes enfoques originados en la ecocrítica y la ecofilosofía anglófona con el concepto de ecopoética (siguiendo la definición de Jonathan Bate y Scott Knickerbocker) prestando particular atención al complejo entramado del texto. La ecopoética de Barbara Kingsolver se basa en la teoría del caos e invita a los lectores a cambiar paradigmas interpretativos, alejándose de las lógicas de lectura lineales y binarias, para integrarse dentro de complejos sistemas de significado. Centrándose en la novela Prodigal Summer (2000) de Kingsolver, este artículo plantea que, como ha señalado Snyder, el arte reside no tanto en "una imposición de un orden en la naturaleza caótica, la libertad y el caos, "sino que representa más bien "una cuestión de descubrir el grano de las cosas, de revelar el caos medido que estructura el mundo natural", mostrando "la forma en que los fenómenos [naturales] se actualizan a sí mismos", a partir de la inclusión de un lenguaje ecopoético salvaje.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document