History and the Unification of Human Knowledge

Central European History, 2010

Teaching History: A Journal of Methods

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 2000

is one of America's great sociological theorists, but his new book, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change, may have succeeded in writing him out of his own rather considerable reputation. The Sociology of Philosophies is a book of breathtaking range, offering a provocative theory of intellectual creativity and reputations that challenges the very category of a "great theorist" while solidifying Collins's place at the forefront of the sociology of ideas and knowledge. Using a world history of philosophy as case material, Collins outlines a powerful theoretical framework for the social scientific analysis of intellectual networks, academic disciplines and the world of ideas itself. Collins's book will start arguments as well as inspire new research, and it is not difficult to predict the controversies that will emerge. The Sociology of Philosophies is practically a recipe for a turf war. Many intellectual historians will be shocked at the hubris of Collins's analysis. Never one prone to thinking in narrow and specialized terms, Collins offers us a global analytic history of philosophical thinking from the Greeks, Romans, the Enlightenment philosophes, the Reformation and Medieval Catholic theology through to the existentialists in the West, as well as dealing in great detail with non-Western thought over many centuries in China, India, and Japan. Many philosophers will be outraged by Collins's argument that the concept of a "great philosopher" is a social construction, reflecting the needs of intellectual networks fixated on a competition for attention more than on the intrinsic quality of ideas or on a disinterested search for truth. Collins treats many major philosophers with skeptical irreverence, as when he calls F. W. J. Schelling a "niche hog" and refers to Ludwig Wittgenstein's "personality cult" and brooding over suicide as a claim for status in the intellectual elite. Collins's book-length attempt to explain philosophers' creativity and reputations by social, organizational, and network factors will ruffle feathers, as when he offers a sociological account of why G. W. F. Hegel made it and Arthur Schopenhauer did not. And intellectuals more generally will find little comfort in Collins's brutally unsentimental critique of the cult of the intellectual hero. Collins draws a picture of intellectuals as self-interested, calculating status climbers who are as concerned with gaining eminence and financial security as they are with the various social and intellectual movements and causes often associated with what we now call "public intellectuals." Collins's critics have a point. The norms of contemporary intellectual history rightly call for specialization in specific geographical areas in particular times, allowing for the consultation of primary documentary evidence in original languages and the mastery of the relevant literature. Collins, in contrast, writes a global intellectual history based on secondary sources. Errors of detail are inevitable in this book, as is a sacrifice of depth. And while Collins's discussion of world philosophical ideas is well written and impressive, specialists will have many interpretations to challenge and nuances to add. These legitimate criticisms of Collins's book, however, should not deter us from taking his theory of intellectual creativity and reputation very seriously indeed. Turf wars work both ways. Intellectual historians who work in one area or within a

Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics

Science started to acquire its modern sense (as 'natural philosophy') during the Scientific Revolution, from Copernicus to Newton and the Age of Enlightenment, as it gradually freed itself from the shackles of theology and absolutism, from a thousand years of stasis and obscurantism (Russo 1996). Under the influence of Descartes, Leibniz, and others, faith and dogma gave way to rationalism. 'Gradually, theoreticians behind the movement that had begun as a grand attempt to merge God and syllogisms realized that logic did not require the link to the divine' (Schlain 1998). When the Royal Society of London was founded in 1660, it tried to protect itself from intellectual fallacies, from the 'four kinds of illusions which block men's minds'. These illusions, listed by Francis Bacon in his Novum Organum Scientiarum, were (1) the idola tribus (idols of the tribe), perceptual errors due to the limitations of the senses; (2) the idola specus (idols of the cave), personal prejudices; (3) the idola fori (idols of the marketplace) caused by shared language and commerce; and (4) idola theatri (idols of the theatre), i.e. systems of philosophy and proof-whence came the Royal Society's motto 'Nullius in verba' (which means do not take anybody's word for it), and the exclusion of discussions concerning politics and religion, impediments to clear thought, from its conduct. From then until quite recently, science was almost universally regarded as a system which formulates laws to describe information and turn it into knowledge, the systematic study of nature by methodical processes of observation, experiment, measurement and inference which generate that information, and tests of the laws. These procedures are collectively called the scientific method. 'It is the matter-of-fact as against the romantic, the objective as against the subjective, the empirical, the unprejudiced, the ad hoc as against the a priori' (Waddington 1948, p. 61).

The notion that "humanism" and "science" are inevitably opposed to one another in their content, methods, and goals, has multiple origins which reinforce its currency. While one can trace the fear that "scientism" would undermine traditional morality and mythology back to the Athens of Aristophanes,' the more relevant source for the twentieth-century sense of a gulf between the notorious "two cultures"2 lies no doubt, as Owen

Herder: Philosophy and Anthropology, 2017

From within the philosophy of history and history of science alike, attention has been paid to Herder’s naturalist commitment and especially to the way in which his interest in medicine, anatomy, and biology facilitates philosophically significant notions of force, organism, and life. As such, Herder’s contribution is taken to be part of a wider eighteenth-century effort to move beyond Newtonian mechanism and the scientific models to which it gives rise. In this scholarship, Herder’s hermeneutic philosophy—as it grows out of his engagement with poetry, drama, and both literary translation and literary documentation projects —has received less attention. Taking as its point of departure Herder’s early work, this chapter proposes that, in his work on literature, Herder formulates an anthropologically sensitive approach to the human sciences that has still not received the attention it deserves.

The ageless wisdom gives us an advanced perspective and a deeper understanding of history. The evolutionary unfolding through historic movements and events reveal to the eye the unfolding plan of the human progressive movement. History, politics, sociology and economics reveal much through the teachings.

Nearly a quarter of a century ago, a brash young author published in these pages a rather tendentious review of a book by a respected senior scholar. Greeting the publication of Thomas L. Hankins's Science and the Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 1985), the reviewer ignored most of the content of the book, focusing instead on the relationship signalled in the title, that between the sciences in the eighteenth century and the contemporaneous movement of the Enlightenment. The reviewer insisted that the relationship was in urgent need of clarification. He liberally recommended more theoretical consideration of this, but had little to show to represent the kind of historical scholarship he favoured. Several readers found the ending of the review anticlimactic. It gestured toward the possibility of reconstructing an integrated vision of the Enlightenment, but made only vague recommendations as to how this might be achieved. The invocation of Michel Foucault in this connection did not seem particularly promising. Fortunately, Professor Hankins accepted the ambivalent tribute with remarkable forbearance and good grace, and the reviewer was forgiven the youthful impetuosity of his venture. 1

A. Allegra-F. F. Calemi-M. Moschini (a cura di), Alla fontana di Silöe, Orthotes, Napoli-Salerno, pp. 251-264, 2019

Humanities and the scientific image of man, today 1. From an epistemological point of view 1.1. From "two cultures" to "two images": Snow and Sellars About 60 years ago, Charles Percy Snow (1905-1980) famously analysed the relationship between the so called «two cultures»: that of «literary intellectuals», on the one hand, and that of «scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists», on the other. 1 Snow was extremely worried about the existence of «two polar groups», separated by «a gulf of mutual incomprehension -sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding» and his concern mainly reflected his own personal history, because, as he himself declared: «by training I was a scientist: by vocation I was a writer». 2 While Snow's analysis was extremely successful and vivid in identifying a distinctive feature of our times, his explanation of it and his suggestions for overcoming the divide are widely regarded as somewhat unsatisfactory. I argue that one reason for this inadequacy is the fact that Snow's analysis essentially concentrates on sociological, historical and pedagogical factors, rather than on the epistemological ones. This produces a discourse which, while effectively (and ironically) describing some effects of the split at issue, leaves us, nevertheless, without much insight into his deep causes.

European Journal of Philosophy, 2021

On 24 March 1877, in a lecture recognized as "the first and indeed the most decisive attack on established historical scholarship," the German physiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond addressed the topic of "Civilization and Science" (du Bois-Reymond, 1912; Fuchs, 1994). Passing over "the unedifying details of politics," du Bois-Reymond pointed to a comparable absence of moral or aesthetic improvement among "the heroes of literature and art" (du Bois-Reymond, 1912, pp. 608-620). As he saw it the true basis of historical development was to be found in the study of the natural world. "Science is the chief instrument of civilization," he announced, "and the history of science the essential history of humanity" (du Bois-Reymond, 1912, p. 596). Du Bois-Reymond's proclamation could serve as the charter of my field. Indeed, George Sarton repeated its argument six decades later in an address inaugurating a "seminary on the history of science" at Harvard University: Definition. Science is systematized positive knowledge, or what has been taken as such at different ages and in different places. Theorem. The acquisition and systematization of positive knowledge are the only human activities that are truly cumulative and progressive. Corollary. The history of science is the only history that can illustrate the progress of mankind. In fact, progress has no definite and unquestionable meaning in other fields than the field of science (Sarton, 1936, p. 5). The last volume of Stephen Gaukroger's four-part history, Civilization and the Culture of Science, takes aim at this familiar story of triumph. Gaukroger's book is divided into four parts. First, it recounts how champions of science presented the investigation of the natural world as the basis of Western superiority. Then, it describes how claims for the unity of science came to substitute for the dogma of Christian universality. Next, it shows how scientists grounded those claims in an Epicurean doctrine that reduced nature to matter and energy. Finally, it recalls how economics, philosophy, technology, eugenics, and popular culture endorsed this secular characterization of the world. Such a presentation has its merits. It is not hard to find a line of continuity between Christian missionaries who strove to enlighten the world and 19th-century boosters who spread the gospel of science. Improvements in knowledge lent Condorcet, Comte, and Spencer the same conviction that Ricci, Bossuet, and Intorcetta drew from teachings of the Church. Similarly, Virchow, du Bois-Reymond, and Büchner's calls to unite biology with chemistry and physics helped to compensate for the disappointments of the Revolution of 1848. Haeckel, Dobzhansky, Simpson, and Mayr saw evolution as the key to progress in nature; Mill attempted to unify "ethics, politics, economics, and logic" (p. 251); Cohen, Windelbrand, and Cassirer employed Kantian reasoning to defend science "as the motor of civilization and culture" (p. 287); touts hawked science in children's books,