[Buddha-l] In Praise of Eckhart Tolle

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Thu, 2006-01-12 at 01:13 -0500, Dan Lusthaus wrote:
> > Give me a break, Dr Funhouse. First, I have never advocated any form of
> > scientism. Scientism (which is usually used as a pejorative term) is the
> > view that science is the only reliable means of attaining knowledge, and
> > I have never said anything even close to that.
> 
> Which non-scientific epistemological activities do you condone?

Pratyakṣa and anumāna.

> Don't pass pronouncements on what you evidently know nothing about. 

That's what I do, Dan. If I restricted myself to making pronouncements
on what I know something about, I'd be a muni, like you.

That notwithstanding, I think you are making the same mistake that
several others in this discussion have made, namely, to equivocate on
the word "science". When I say that by most modern definitions of the
word "science", there is no such thing as Jewish science, I am simply
claiming that science is something that by its very nature cannot be
restricted to religious indoctrination, cultural conditioning, personal
prejudices and so forth. If someone is coming anywhere near that
asymptotic ideal of science as the term is now used by Peirce, Popper,
Hempel, Hacking and Haack (sounds like a Manhattan law firm, eh?), then
a Jew who makes a contribution to science does so despite being a Jew,
and a Christian makes a contribution to science despite being a
Christian. One does not talk about the second law of thermodynamics as
an example of Christian physics, just as one does not speak of the
theory of relativity as an example of Jewish physics or the theories of
mathematical logic developed by Bertrand Russell as atheist mathematics
or the research being done by V.S. Ramachandran as Hindu
neurophysiology. The criteria of what constitutes science that I cited
were articulated by Husserl, a Jewish thinker, but it would be an overly
narrow description of his criteria to call them the criteria of Jewish
science. 

If you'd like a painful reminder of this issue, just recall Freud's
worries that his theory of psychoanalysis would not be recognized as
science but would be dismissed as some form of Jewish mysticism.
(Perhaps our friend Steven Feite would be quick to dismiss Freud's
corpus on psychoanalytic theory as Kabbalah Lite.)

> Of the more than 800 hits you will find on Amazon.com if you search
> there for "Islamic science" 

Which proves that even Amazon.com is capable of making category
mistakes, or at least reflecting the category mistakes of those who do
searches there.

You need to learn something about how search engines work, Dan. They
treat two words juxtaposed as a Boolean OR. (Boole was a famous theorist
in the area of Christian mathematics.) So if you go to Google and type
"whale logic" into the search engine, you'll get nearly 1,000,000 hits.
That means there are nearly 1,000,0000 web pages that discuss either
whales or logic. Even typing "whale logic" into Amazon.com yields 18
books (seventeen of them textbooks on logic, one of them a children's
book about whales.) So when you type "Islamic science" into Amazon,
you'll get 800 hits, but only a small fraction of those will be about
Islamic science. And of those that are, what you'll find is that most of
them are talking about science in the sense of a body of knowledge, not
in the sense of science as it is used by most philosophers of science.
So a book about practical medical procedures known to medieval Muslims
is hardly a book about Islamic science.

> Outgrowing universalistic pronouncements based on eurocentric misconceptions
> is long overdue.

Goodness, Dan, how did you get so stuck in the uncritically leftist
political correctness of the 1970s? There is nothing in the least
Eurocentric about the view that science is an enterprise that ideally
strives to transcend all geographical and ethnic limitations. That is a
view of science that you can find advocated by philosophers of science
and by practicing scientists all over the Americas, all over Asia, and
in Africa. And whichever of those continents you go to, you'll find the
philosophers of science and the practicing scientists there telling you
that the ideal of science as something that transcends cultural
interests, commercial applications, religious indoctrination and
personal prejudice is rather new. 

> Dan (proponent of accuracy in historical judgements)

You may propound historical accuracy, but in this case you have
completely failed to practice it. 

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico