So it’s happened – I’ve become too busy writing about philosophy in my real life to write about philosophy on my blog, and so I need another week of hiatus. To make up for the absence of a post by me, I’ll leave you with something better – a fantastic post by Jeff Bilbro from Christ & University on the scientism of magic, and the hubris of scientism. This post fits in extremely well with the C&U posts I linked to earlier this week (The Art of Learning).
After my
last post
on Roger Scruton’s defense of the humanities, Steve commented that perhaps I was overstating the differences between the two cultures of the sciences and the humanities: “We ought to be insisting that the hard sciences admit how much logic, language, and rhetoric their disciplines rely on; and we in the humanities ought to admit how much the hard sciences, and especially mathematics, can enrich our disciplines.” I replied in the comments that I didn’t intend to critique the sciences themselves, just “scientism,” that attitude that seeks to reduce and control in order to exploit reality for its own ends.
Still, I kept wondering how that attitude manifests itself in the humanities, and how both the humanities and the sciences might do more to work against it. Maybe instead of “scientism” a better word for this attitude is “magic.”
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