[Buddha-l] science #1

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Fri, 2006-01-13 at 04:54 -0500, Dan Lusthaus wrote:

> 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.

In the article from which I quoted he was actually talking about
philosophy. His argument was that "philosophy" is a term that makes
sense only in Europe and places influenced by Europeans ways of
thinking. His criteria for what qualifies as the specifically European
enterprise of philosophy end up being criteria for what qualifies as
what I have been calling science. So for Husserl there was no Chinese
philosophy, no Indian philosophy, no Muslim or Jewish philosophy, and
his reasons for saying so are exactly the same as mine for saying that
science, as the term has come to be used in modern times, is perforce
international and universal in character and therefore cannot admit of
religious or ethnic qualifications.

Incidentally, J.N. Mohanty, the well-known expert in Husserl's
philosophy, argues against Husserl's claims that the intellectual
endeavors carried out by Chinese and Indian thinkers should not be
called philosophy.

> Husserl was a mathematician who didn't become a philosopher until he was 40,

That's quite young. It's a rare person who becomes a philosopher before
the age of 50. (I doubt that I'll become one until the age of 70 or so.)

> 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.

I'll have to take your word for that. I have tried many times to read
Husserl, but I can't make heads or tails of him. He's just too bloody
abstract and technical for me.

> And we needn't get into Jung's antisemitism 

No. It is irrelevant to this discussion. Thank you for resisting the
temptation to mention it.

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico