You know where science came from, right??
Science has been around a long time, if you think of science as a deliberate, conscious, public effort to understand the nature of reality. If you think of science as a systematic study of "matter," then science is quite new.
This difference may seem irrelevant or random. It's not. Neither does it reflect any assumption about the nature of reality, or a pet definition of science. What I mean is, if you read quotes from Aristotle, Plato, Proclus, Lucretius, medieval writers (latin and Muslim), Galileo, Copernicus, Descartes, Mach, Heisenberg, you'll see for yourself that roughly the first half of this group grappled with a particular set of issues, in a particular way, and the second half of the group grappled with a different set of issues, in a different way.
Reading such sources is really the best - and maybe the only - way to see how different these issues and approaches are. Two books may help: To Save the Phenomena by Pierre Duhem, and Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry by Owen Barfield.
This difference may seem irrelevant or random. It's not. Neither does it reflect any assumption about the nature of reality, or a pet definition of science. What I mean is, if you read quotes from Aristotle, Plato, Proclus, Lucretius, medieval writers (latin and Muslim), Galileo, Copernicus, Descartes, Mach, Heisenberg, you'll see for yourself that roughly the first half of this group grappled with a particular set of issues, in a particular way, and the second half of the group grappled with a different set of issues, in a different way.
Reading such sources is really the best - and maybe the only - way to see how different these issues and approaches are. Two books may help: To Save the Phenomena by Pierre Duhem, and Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry by Owen Barfield.
Comments