[Buddha-l] science #1

[Dan Lusthaus]

OK, Richard, let's see if we can clear a few things up, and maybe even
approach a partial agreement.

> > Which non-scientific epistemological activities do you condone?
>
> Pratyakṣa and anumāna.

These are not non-scientific but precisely the foundational tools of
science:
1. observation and
2. abstracting general principles that are subjected to rigorous logical
scrutiny.

Only in the West they call it empiricism, and don't confuse sensation for
perception, as Dharmakirti and the pramanavadins that followed him did.

> > 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.

My first name is not Paul.

> 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".

On the contrary, that seems to be your provenance.


>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.

This is your confusion, one with a history that you are playing spokesman
for. See below for more explanation. I will come back to this, since there
is something redeemable and even useful in this distinction, despite its
being fundamentally wrongheaded.

> 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.

But -- and this is not really the point I am interesting in arguing -- those
labels are not inappropriate, and, in fact, ignoring them decontextualizes
them, which, if like Husserl, you are interested in context, one should be
cautious about encouraging.

Weren't monotheistic "tendencies" at play in Einstein's resistance to
quantum theory and preference for -- despite his inability to discover any
proofs -- a unified field theory? You are avoiding a much too parochial view
of religion(s), a view with a distinctly Christian history. (see below)

>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.

Actually, as you know, Husserl was discussing not "science" as we tend to
think of it based on current American usage learned in "science" classes and
reinforced by "science" articles in magazines. He was -- as Europeans have
done for a few centuries -- speaking about Wissenschaften, which usually
gets translated as "science" in English, but includes what we would call the
humanities as well as the so-called soft and hard sciences. Perhaps a
broader but more accurate rendering would be something like "intellectual
endeavors" (arguably that is even more literal and faithful to the German).
Husserl was a mathematician who didn't become a philosopher until he was 40,
and then became an epistemologist (his focus as a philosopher was cognitive
construction and logic, i.e., pratyakṣa and anumāna), possibly the best
epistemologist so far produced in the West.

> 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.)

That's a statement about the well-known fact that Europe then, as is once
again is becoming the case, is dangerously antisemitic. This has nothing to
do with science. Jewish boxers, bakers and candlestick makers had the same
concerns. And while he was concerned about how that would impact his
professional life, he was always amused by students who found Talmudic as
well as Kabbalistic precedents and parallels to his theories. Marthe
Roberts' book on Freud documents this. Nor is it simply accidental that,
with the exception of Jung, Freud's analytic circle -- Adler, Reich, etc.,
and through Fromm, et al. -- were Jewish.

And we needn't get into Jung's antisemitism (which struck Freud the first
time he met Jung, and which he could never get Jung to even want to
overcome) and its affinities with his Collective Unconscious, etc., theories
(which, in Jung's own writings of the 30s, he extolled as dovetailing
effortlessly into Nazi racial theories).

(TO BE CONTINUED)

Dan Lusthaus