The First Attempted Science of Consciousness

Kültür araştırmaları dergisi, 2021

Spiritualists in the 19 th century have endeavored to prove their assessments by using science itself which tried to debunk their field's phenomena. The most principal claims of spiritualism have been the possibility of communicating with spirits through the agency of mediums and visioning a close person who has been in the moment of dying or far away. Scientific studies have not only been used to prove these assessments but to create new concepts and perceptions about psychic experiences. The aim of this article is to determine that spiritualists have assimilated themselves into society by using science apart from being denounced as superstitious. Hereby, what spiritualists have suggested in terms of science will be documented within a historical process and the terms which they have coined will be examined. It will be clarified that the people who have evaluated these phenomena consisted of scientists, scholars and literary figures. SPR (The Society for Psychical Research), which was completely formed by scientists and scholars, investigated the mediums and put them under multiple psychical experiments. These researches were published in their anthology named as Phantasms of The Living and their periodicals named as "The Proceedings". The terms which were coined in order to scientificate spiritualism have been "psychic force", "telepathy", "hallucination" and "ectoplasm". It will be concluded that these terms have enabled to categorize the assessments of spiritualism which were communicating and visioning spirits, and also accommodated the psychic researchers and mediums to express themselves subjectively by assimilation into society.

Natural Sciences and Human Thought, 1995

The relationship between natural sciences and human thought has long been at the centre of philosophical debate and has of course been the subject of a variety of interpretations. Beginning in the middle of last century developments in scientific disciplines accelerated the dissolution of the idealist and positivist synthesis and opened the way for a (partially) new role for philosophy: the critical analysis of the results and the methodologies of science. In this century neo-Kantian discussions about the conditions determining the possibility of scientific knowledge, the neopositivist analysis of scientific theories, phenomenological attempts to achieve a closer grasp of reality, sociological emphasis on the role of shared values, and linguistic explanations have shared the stage to various degrees. In addition, far-reaching criticism of the general scientific approach to knowledge and of its technological implications has stressed the limits not only of the scientific concept of truth but also, and more radically, the possibility of the subject's access to "rational" knowledge free of historically determined values, interests, emotions, and feelings. From this point of view man's very nature precludes the possibility of critical enquiry based on rational criteria of extratemporal validity. Controversial postmodernist trends stress differences rather than unity and localize and relativize values and meanings. There is a widespread belief that "the positive knowledge of science may not ultimately be for the best, as the downside of scientifically produced military and industrial technics becomes quite unavoidably apparent" [1]. All these philosophical trends have had an influence on history, philosophy, and sociology of science. Historiography, still based on a linear, cumulative, positivist approach at the beginning of the century, shifted in the 1960s toward more sophisticated rational reconstructions in the form of the dynamics of research programs, only to be challenged by intellectual history and the history of ideas, on the one hand and by the sociology of institutions and, more recently, the sociology of knowledge, on the other. New cultural, anthropological, archaeological, and "gender" studies are coming forward, while textual analysis

Psychical research in the history and philosophy of science. An introduction and review

As a prelude to articles published in this special issue, I briefly sketch changing historiographical conventions regarding the ‘occult’ in recent history of science and medicine scholarship. Next, a review of standard claims regarding psychical research and parapsychology in philosophical discussions of the demarcation problem reveals that these have tended to disregard basic primary sources and instead rely heavily on problematic popular accounts, simplistic notions of scientific practice, and outdated teleological historiographies of progress. I conclude by suggesting that rigorous and sensitively contextualized case studies of past elite heterodox scientists may be potentially useful to enrich historical and philosophical scholarship by highlighting epistemologies that have fallen through the crude meshes of triumphalist and postmodernist historiographical generalizations alike.

According to Friedel Weinert, " What makes a change revolutionary is its upheaval in an established structure, a reversal of viewpoints, and a replacement of presuppositions. It is a general rearrangement of elements in a network, be it conceptual, political, or social. Some elements in the system are displaced, some replaced and others remain. A large number of scholars assert that the myriad developments in the fields of the Universe and cosmos, physics, anatomical processes, geography, chemistry and alchemy, philosophies and methods of logic, scientific method, religious spaces and effects of religion on the intellectual circle and the entire politico-socioeconomic environment all over were a result of a massive phenomenon, a revolution called the 'Scientific Revolution.' There is an assertion that origins of modern science date to the 17 th Century, a period so marked by innovative thinking that it has been called 'The Century of Genius.' With the various new discoveries and the creation of a new kind of intellectual climate, the intellectual crisis in Europe was solved. It led to a rethinking of moral and religious matters as well as man's ideas on nature. The process by which this new view of the universe and the knowledge of science came to be established is called 'Scientific Revolution.' However, quite a few scholars bring out various reasons that might have led to a greater interest and progress in science. Weinert, questions the contribution of Copernicus as anything being 'revolutionary'. Recent scholars like Steven Shapin have tried to disseminate the constituents of the so called 'Revolution', thus coming to a conclusion that what happened as a series of events in the field of scientific development was not a revolution at all. This paper was done as a part of an assignment, however, it seeks to take a preliminary look at the debate.

BJHS: Themes, 2024

Over the past four decades, historians of science have come to discard crisis as a guiding heuristic in 'big-picture' narratives of scientific change. In this article, we argue that it can be rehabilitated without reintroducing the conceptual drawbacks of earlier historiographies. We suggest that analysing material crises as distinct episodes of knowledge-in-the-making focuses attention on the mangling of science and social order. We distinguish material crises from Kuhnian intellectual crises; the analysis of material crises begins with the interactive dynamics of actor practices and performances, emergent within concrete social orders, rather than from technical breakdowns within isolable theoretical paradigms. Drawing on Reinhart Koselleck's account of crisis, we characterize such events as patterned shifts in the tempo of actor behaviours, which are brought about by real-time processes of realization. In addition to the familiar, contemporary cases of climate change and COVID-19, we sketch out how three historical crises transformed knowledge production in disparate ways: the Ming-Qing transition in late imperial China, crises of labour precarity in seventeenth-century Istanbul and the 1960 Sharpeville massacre in South Africa.

European Review, 2007

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.