Is science intrinsically scientistic?

Introduction

If this question arises, it’s because, although denounced by science itself, scientism seems to flow almost naturally from it, not only culturally, in the minds of the times and outside science, but also in science itself, as a result of methodologies that, while perfectly scientific, could turn out to be scientistic by nature. That’s the question!

The problem of scientism is not new; it has been discussed for many decades by multiple philosophers, such as Stanley Hoffmann (1928-2015)¹, Tom Sorell (1951)², Gregory Peterson³, Anastasios Brenner (1959)⁴, etc., but also by scientists such as Arthur Eddington (1882-1944), Wittgenstein (1889-1951), Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992)⁵, Jean Fourastié (1907-1990), Wolfgang Smith (1930) and others.

After recalling what is meant by science and scientism, this essay will seek to answer this question from a rather metaphysical point of view.

Science and Scientism, Definitions.

The concept of science is classically understood here as knowledge through causes (scientia est cognitio per causas), while the notion of scientism (in the pejorative sense) appears far more complex, encompassing beliefs or considerations such as that only science enables knowledge, that it can resolve any philosophical question, or that it constitutes the solution to any human question (political, social, ethical…).Ernest Renan (1823-1892) (L’Avenir de la science : pensées de 1848, Calmann-Lévy, 1890, p. 37.)).

Faced with this extreme, reminiscent of certain regimes of sinister memory but which Renan of course did not have in mind, we can classify the different aspects of scientism, or even scientisms, according to their decreasing claim, as follows:

• “The scientific spirit and methods must be extended to all areas of intellectual and moral life” (Lalande, ibid.).
• “Keeping no trace of its human origin [… science] has an absolute value”((Le Dantec, Contre la métaphysique, questions de méthode, Félix Alcan, 1912; quoted by Lalande, Voc. tech. et crit. de la phi., PUF, 1951, p. 960. Emphasis added,)
• Science gives a faithful description of the world, whether it be empirical science (Sorell, op. cit.) or inductive methods⁶.

In other words, the key components of scientism can be summed up in two ideologies that are still relevant today:

1. Science allows us to know everything – like the philosopher and logician Quine (1908-2000), who no longer saw the difference between philosophy and science;
2. It should be applied to everything – such as models for measuring human love ⁷ or Karl Popper (1902-1994) denouncing this “naive use” of exact sciences in the humanities.

Scientism, an Anti-Chronological Retrospective

Contemporary Period.

Beginning with the XXI^e century, scientism is necessarily still at work, as it is copiously denounced; let’s quote historian Peter Schöttler (1950): “Scientisme. Sur l’histoire d’un concept difficile” (2013)⁸, epistemologist Jean Paul Charrier: Scientisme et occident: Essais d’épistémologie critique (L’Harmattan, 2011), psychoanalyst Hervé Castanet: Un monde sans réel. Sur quelques effets du scientisme contemporain (Himeros, 2006), agronomist Matthieu Calame: Lettre ouverte aux scientistes : alternatives démocratiques à une idéologie cléricale (éditions Charles Léopold Mayer, 2011), mathematician and physicist Wolfgang Smith: Ancient Wisdom and Modern Misconceptions – A Critique of Contemporary Scientism⁹ (Angelico Press, 2013), and more.

Throughout the 20th^e century, there was no shortage of critics of scientism, notably against the hegemony of science and its drift into technoscience; let’s mention the famous Georges Bernanos (1888-1948) in La France contre les robots (1947)¹⁰, industrial society and its machinismo significantly reducing citizens’ freedom and leading to deviated modes of thought, Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) in his Sceptical Essays (George Allen & Unwin, 1928), especially promoting a necessary independence of spirit, or Bill Joy (1954), warning against an end to humanity¹¹. Let’s add André Valenta: Le scientisme ou l’incroyable séduction d’une doctrine erronée (Mélodie, 1995); René Laforgue: Au-delà du scientisme (Guy Trédaniel, 1995), Claire Salomon-Bayet, “Contre le scientisme ordinaire” (Le Débat, n° 73, January-February 1991), Friedrich Hayek, already quoted, and even the surgeon Jean Fiolle (1884-1955): Scientisme et science (Mercure de France, 1936).

This is because the XIX^e century was a great scientific century in all fields, such as mathematics (Cauchy, Galois, Gauss, Riemann…), chemistry (Mendeleïev…), biology (Lamarck, Claude Bernard…), medicine (Jenner, Pasteur…), genetics (Mendel…), physics (Fresnel, Huygens, Maxwell, Gauss, Ampère, Faraday, Sadi Carnot, Bolzmann, Hertz, Pierre et Marie Curie…), etc.

It’s no surprise, then, that scientism was also gaining in popularity with the likes of Charles Darwin (1809-1882), Saint-Simon (1760-1825) and Auguste Comte (1798-1857), with his famous law of three states. It was at this point that the word first appeared (1898)¹² with initially positive (Le Dantec¹³, Abel Rey¹⁴ and pejorative (“scientistic fetishism”, said Victor Hugo) meanings, discriminating between positions of excessive infatuation and necessary retreat from scientific knowledge.

As can be seen, in this contemporary period, scientism integrates a notion of evolutionism – everything that science cannot explain, it will be able to explain later -, linked to the ideology of progress, itself discriminated between criticism of the modern world (René Guénon, etc.) and apology for modernism.) and apology for modernism¹⁵ right up to transhumanism. Paradoxically, this scientism also includes a notion of positivism, i.e. the idea of sticking to the relationships between phenomena, privileging the elaboration of the laws of positive science rather than the search for causes.   

Modern Period.

The beginnings of scientism can be found in the 18th^e century, with the “positive sciences” of Lagrange (1795-1796) and Condorcet (1743-1794), and their development in the 17th^e by Francis Bacon (1560-1626), Galileo (1564-1642) and Descartes (1596-1650)¹⁶. From the very beginnings of the modern era, the concept of progress, progression, even evolutionism (in the generic sense) was already at work¹⁷, is the time it takes reason, starting from sensations, to reach “rational positivity”, which Kant (1724-1804) will philosophically set to music¹⁸. If we agree that the “positivist” exclusivity of science is the premise of scientism, then the rationalist reduction that accompanies it is part and parcel of it. Added to this is the break with Aristotelian science, prepared by Gassendi (1592-1655)¹⁹) and endorsed by Descartes in his Discourse on Method (1637).

Middle Ages.

This “positive spirit” can be traced back to the Middle Ages²⁰ and into the XV^e century, a period of which Roger Bacon (1214-1294), promoter of the experimental method initiated by Robert Grossetête (1168-1253), was a worthy representative.

His pragmatic understanding of science and technology led him to envision the machines we know today:

machines without oarsmen, so that the largest ships on the rivers or seas will be driven by a single man with a greater speed than if they had a large crew […], cars such that, without animals, they will move with incredible speed […], a machine enabling one man to attract to himself a thousand others by violence and against their will […], machines to move in the sea and rivers, even to the bottom, without danger […]. […] And such things can be achieved almost without limit, for example bridges thrown over rivers without piles or supports of any kind, and unheard-of mechanisms and contraptions.²¹.

Should we see this as the beginning of technical proof of scientific knowledge, which would become the scientism of the “postmodern” era of technoscience? Probably not. On the other hand, the close association between science and technique, or theory and experiment, is already underway, and will lead, by drift, to what will much later be known as “technoscience”.

More fundamentally, Bacon asserts the necessity of employing mathematics in the sciences: “All science requires mathematics” (“omnis scientia requirit mathematicam“²²), committing scientific knowledge to quantitative abstraction, which seems the only one left today, to the detriment of qualities. However, insofar as mathematical abstraction is only a complementary tool to other approaches and considerations²³), what’s wrong with that at the time? as nowadays. Thus, in Roger Bacon, despite Comte’s misgivings, Bacon recognizes two experiences: “one is through the external senses […] and this experience is human and philosophical”, i.e. rational construction; the other consists of “interior illuminations”²⁴, i.e. the reception of intelligibles²⁵.

Antiquity.

Greece conceived of science as essentially “disinterested”: it was not a question of making oneself master of nature, but, being a source of contemplation, nature could not be dominated, but, at best, understood. What’s more, with the technical works associated with the sciences in the hands of slaves, machinismo, which could have been developed, seems unnecessary and, indeed, will have led to a “contempt for manual labor [… so that] the mechanical arts are opposed, as servile, to the liberal arts, and free men refuse to practice them”²⁶.

His science never “got very close to physical reality; it borrowed little from the observation of natural phenomena; it did not experiment. The very notion of experimentation remained alien to it. It built a mathematics without seeking to use it in the exploration of nature“²⁷. It could even be said that, while the social world “must be subject to number and measure, nature represents rather the realm of the approximate, to which neither exact calculation nor rigorous reasoning apply”²⁸.

This system of thought, of which Aristotle, paradoxically the founder of the rigor of scientific discourse, is the “absolute” representative, would spread and be maintained in subsequent worlds, be they Greek, Latin, Byzantine, Islamic, and even in medieval Christianity.

Scientism Has rather Modern Roots

The whole of the Middle Ages was marked by major inventions (such as the plough in the VI^e s. or the grinding wheel in the XI^e s.), but it’s only from the XII^e century onwards that we see the major deployment of technological advances, whether in objects (spectacles, clocks, magnets, buttons, compasses, spinning wheels, etc.) or technical processes (black powder, printing, distillation, blast furnaces, wheelbarrows, etc.). Above all, the fact that craft techniques, despite their empirical approach, led to astonishing achievements (cathedrals, machines, etc.), lifted them out of their depreciated position, bringing the liberal and mechanical arts closer together and ushering in the great inventions of the XIV and XV^e centuries (weighted clocks, cannons, flat glass, automata, canals and locks, mining machinery, etc.).

Unsurprisingly, it was during the Renaissance that things really changed. Compared to the “disinterested” science that had survived until then, science would, on the one hand, develop its own instruments and, on the other, take as its object of study the machines developed by engineers, to the point of being able to design them before they were built. Applied science appeared and gradually became an integral part of science.

Beginning with Galileo (1564-1642), Descartes (1596-1650) and Newton (1642-1727) at the end of the Renaissance in the XVII^e century, this fusion of theory and practice would be completed by the end of the XVIII^e century. In the meantime, we will have moved on, as we sometimes read, from Francis Bacon: “We can only triumph over nature by obeying it” (Novum Organon, 1620) to René Descartes: becoming “masters and possessors of nature” (Discours de la méthode, sixth and final part). However, if we read respect for nature and a certain wisdom into the necessary “obedience” indicated by Bacon, Descartes appears de facto no less wise. For a start, he says:

[…… it is possible to arrive at knowledge which is very useful to life, and that instead of this speculative philosophy, which is taught in schools, we can find a practical one, by which knowing the force and actions of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens and all the other bodies which surround us, as distinctly as we know the various trades of our craftsmen, we could employ them in the same way for all the uses to which they are appropriate and thus make ourselves as masters and possessors of nature. [emphasis added]

And he goes on to explain what this means in terms of knowledge that is “useful for life”:

This is not only to be desired for the invention of an infinite number of artifices, which would enable us to enjoy, without any pain, the fruits of the earth and all the conveniences found therein, but principally also for the preservation of health, which is undoubtedly the first good and the foundation of all the other goods of this life.

This aim, ecological before its time, is a wise one. To avoid falling into Heidegger’s error of attributing to Descartes the source of the concept of man’s irrational domination of nature, we need to distinguish between the risk of scientism (science is above all else) and science (progressive knowledge, as useful as it is imperfect), which can only “make us like masters and possessors of nature” with a view to preserving health and life²⁹.

With nature, Yann Arthus-Bertrand (1946) is rather in line with the original Descartes when he says: “Humans thought they had dominion over nature, but today it’s coming back to haunt them” (Legacy, notre héritage, 2020); it’s time to obey it a little more, as Bacon would say.

A final historical element we feel needs to be taken into account is the rejection, especially in the 19th^e century, of religious “beliefs” as opposed to rational, positive knowledge, following the rationalism of Kant, the paragon of this 19th-century episteme (think of the grotesqueness of his “Religion within the limits of simple reason”³⁰.

Scientism, Sources and Deployment

In the light of this admittedly succinct historical survey, we can nonetheless identify the sources of scientism, bearing in mind that since science has undergone considerable change over the centuries, all scientism is dated and inseparable from the state of science at the time.

Disconnection from Reality.

The science of Antiquity and into the High Middle Ages ³¹ could no doubt be anachronistically described as scientistic, since, being essentially theoretic (i.e. aiming for purely speculative knowledge), it remained rather disconnected from natural realities. Such an intrinsic scientism would stem from the disconnection from reality to which today’s theoretical physics seems to have returned. At least, that’s what today’s physicists are saying:

Quantum mechanics forces us to abandon any description of reality other than that of its appearance through empirical phenomena; as a result, “physics’ claim to describe reality in itself must be abandoned”;

Hervé Zwirn (1954)³²;

The physical description is deliberately reductive, i.e. it’s not interested in many things. It refuses to take many things into account because it doesn’t need to. In the quantum conception, a dog is a wave function. What’s more, I don’t think we can separate the dog’s wave function from that of the rest of the Universe, because the quantum conception implies a globality, according to which there is only one wave function, that of the Universe. [Reality is there, and no one can exhaust it, either by naming the dog, or by loving it, or by dissecting it. But I repeat that physics does not need to suppose that this reality exists or does not exist.

Marc Lachièze-Rey (1950)³³

Field theory, quantum mechanics, information theory and dynamical systems theory are all working together to bring dematerialized concepts such as process and information to the forefront of our worldview. […] This is the world of the signal. A world of the objectless, where only signs matter. A culture dominated by multiform information.

Simon Diner ³⁴

This “ontological absence” of the world has become increasingly apparent in physics. We had the ancestral ontology of substance – until Galileo – then the still recent and still material ontology of matter-energy – with Einstein (1879-1955) -; now, physics proposes an “ontology of the absence of substratum” (Simon Diner’s expression). Eddington (1882-1944) declared as early as 1938: “the concept of substance has disappeared from fundamental physics”³⁵; this is because, said Wolfgang Smith (1930), the physical universe is not discovered, but constructed by the modus operandi of physics: mathematics, which “is not there until we put it there”.

Isn’t there an intrinsic scientism in physics today, abandoning knowledge of reality in favor of pure mathematical abstraction?

However, contrary to what has been suggested, we should not equate ancient science with modern science, from the point of view of a lack of interest in reality, in the concrete materiality of things, in favor of pure speculation. This is because reality and speculative thought are defined in very different ways. Modern science renounces knowledge of the real, on the one hand, in favor of abstraction and mathematical reconstruction of a concrete world made unknowable by its constitutive reduction³⁶ and, on the other, in a context of utilitarian effectuations rather than real knowledge. Ancient science, benefiting from philosophical openness, is not so much disinterested in the concrete world as it is aware that it is incomplete: it is not entirely given. As a result, its speculative knowledge can and must take account of reality, metaphysically: the cosmos is clearly part of a metacosm.
So, while modern science may appear scientistic in this sense, ancient science was not. The only reproach that could be levelled against it would be that it serves no purpose, but then wouldn’t that be a compliment: its aim is integral knowledge, which necessarily leads to the contemplation of worlds, rather than the exploitation and destruction of the earth.

Technicism.

What we see of science at the end of and just after the Renaissance is essentially a junction of theory and practice, of the theoretical and the technical, without necessarily seeking to dominate nature in an unconsidered way, as we have seen. If technology subsequently develops, and continues to do so today, in a way that is often inconsiderate of man and the environment, there is no reason to speak of scientism. It is industry and the economic model of exploitation that is the direct source of the excesses, not science as such. Science only becomes guilty of scientism when it is so closely associated with technology that we speak of technoscience. Scientism is a blindness to consequences, an excessive faith in a supposedly virtuous science.

A not insignificant consequence of this technicism is precisely the reigning technocracy – and the bureaucracy that accompanies it, so much so that it can be said that the country (France) is over-administered and under-governed. Plato would have wanted philosophers to govern, but the most radical scientists of the 19th^e century wanted political power to be entrusted to scientists rather than politicians. This political aspect of technicist scientism no longer seems fashionable.

Positivism, Evolutionism, Progressism.

With positivism, evolutionism and progressivism, the XIX^e century was unquestionably the century of scientism, but this scientism was not primarily the preserve of scientists. Saint-Simon, Fourier (1772-1837), Renan (1823-1862) and Comte were philosophers, or thought as such (Comte). Only Charles Darwin and Teilhard de Chardin seem to be scientific scientists, but this is due to ideologies. The prevalence of ideology in science, or at its margins, is a familiar cause, one that has been perfectly denounced and illustrated by the philosopher Georges Canguilhem (1904-1995)³⁷. Until recently, this was illustrated by Stephen Hawking³⁸ or, earlier, Teilhard de Chardin, whose ideologies – or science fiction – have been neatly unmasked by Wolfgang Smith³⁹ !

Without question, evolutionism can be seen as an ideology close to that of progress. The myth of progress is of course less in the minds of scientists than in the minds of the general public. According to historian Frédéric Rouvillois⁴⁰, the idea of progress was formulated as a system between 1680 and 1730. From then on, the idea was established that everything was intrinsically bound to improve, almost naturally and in perpetuity: knowledge, technology, reason, morality, happiness, language and public institutions.

The utopias of the 19th century^e , economic, social, political… would pay the price, even if the notion of progress was challenged as early as the beginning of the 19th^e century by the famous article by Karl Kraus (1874-1936)⁴¹, writing that progress is at most a form, and probably even much less than that, namely a cliché or a slogan, but certainly not a content”⁴². His definition of progress is worth quoting, as it is so relevant today, two centuries later:

progress is the prototype of a mechanical or quasi-mechanical process, self-powered and self-sustaining, which each time creates the conditions for its own perpetuation, notably by producing inconveniences, annoyances and damage that can only be overcome by further progress⁴³.

The secularization of culture can be seen as one of the consequences of the myth of progress, since science will eventually explain everything, and the death of God⁴⁴ gives way to the “superman” that the international cultural and intellectual movement of transhumanism tirelessly promotes.

Thus, this myth is not dead and continues to be denounced in the XXI^e century by historians and philosophers, notably Jacques Bouveresse, with a posthumous edition in 2023: le mythe moderne du progrès⁴⁵. A typical illustration of this persistence of the myth of progress is the fact that, as Georg Henrik von Wright (1916-2003) recently observed, “continuous economic growth is a condition for solving the problems that intensified and rationalized industrial production itself creates”. In other words, progress has remained the self-solution to the problems it poses; progress progresses! as Heidegger would say. It’s enough to label those who denounce the evils caused by progress as anti-progress, to clear the name of progress, the perpetual solution of itself and to itself.

This progressivism is a dangerous scientism, but it’s not really to be found in true science itself.

Rationalist Reduction.

Among the cultural causes of scientism, we should mention the insidious Kantianism in which we have been immersed since the 19th^e century, and which has been associated with the secularization of culture.

This is the fundamental distinction between reason and intelligence, which has endured for more than two thousand years, including in Roger Bacon’s introduction to experimental science. Although the two coexist in the human mind, their functions are quite distinct: reason is a power of reasoning, i.e. of calculation, even a “calculation of ideas”; intelligence is what enables us to understand calculations and reasoning. Above all, if reason operates in the conceptual, intelligence participates in and of the intelligible; it is the reception of meaning – which is unmanageable: we can’t force ourselves to understand what we don’t understand, said Simone Weil (1909-1943)⁴⁶ or “we absolutely cannot think what we can’t think”, said the philosopher (G.E.) Moore (1873-1958)⁴⁷.

Now, Kant (1724-1804), who could not conceive of intellectual intuition, flatly reversed what the entire philosophical tradition had established before him. For him, Verstand, i.e. the intellect, became the lower, operative cognitive activity. It is used to abstract, to give conceptual form to sensible knowledge, and to link it together into a coherent discourse; it is discursive knowledge. Vernunft, reason, on the other hand, has become the higher faculty of knowledge, that of ideas and principles, but it seems to have only “the sense of practical common sense”⁴⁸. Intelligence has lost its sense of being.

The consequences are far-reaching: for Kant, metaphysics has become impossible, and intelligence is no more than an object of study for psychology. Today, we speak of artificial intelligence, when in fact it’s all about artificial reason, mental power, calculations and combinations⁴⁹. Since then, rationalism, the rationalist reduction that imprisons human thought in both science and philosophy, is still the most widespread ideology in the West, and is a major contributor to scientism.

The biologist Richard Dawkins (1941) is a good representative of this scientism, which reduces all knowledge to the rational. It has to be said that his fierce anti-clericalism((Dawkins went so far as to judge paedophilia preferable to religious upbringing (“in one of his regular letters to the newspapers, he suggested that sexually abusing a child in the Church, ‘unpleasant as it is, may cause less permanent damage than bringing them up Catholic'”; Simon Hattenstone, “Darwin’s child”, The Guardian (online), Feb. 10. 2003).) and militantism constitute an ideology capable of altering his judgments.

Scientism based on exclusive rational reduction is rare among scientists. All science is certainly rational, but not always aware of the narrowness (by constitution) of the conceptual field in which it operates. By contrast, Max Planck (1858-1947) was aware of the epistemic closure of science⁵⁰, and the openness (by constitution) of philosophy:

The irrational element inherent in scientific activity lies in this aim for an absolute reality, and its inability to be attained… The metaphysical real world is therefore not the starting point of scientific research, but its unattainable goal.⁵¹).

Thus goes the physicist, who has dealt with matter, from the empire of substance to that of spirit. And so ends our work, and we must place the continuation of our research in the hands of philosophy.⁵²

Science and Scientism, a Conclusion

Rather rare among scientists, who don’t generally consider themselves in charge of interpreting the world, but unfortunately prevalent among a few well-known names in science (Darwin, Teilhard de Chardin, Hawking, Dawkins…), scientism is most often and tacitly in the minds of the times (the episteme of the times) and formalized by philosophers, directly (Renan, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Comte…) or indirectly (Kant…), while it is denounced by philosophers (Bernanos, Ellul, Arendt, Jonas, Illich, Joy, Valenta, Laforgue, Salomon-Bayet, Hoffmann, Sorell, Peterson, Brenner…) and scientists themselves (Eddington, Wittgenstein, Hayek, Fiolle, Fourastié, Russell, Smith…).

At the beginning of the 19th century , although still denounced, ambient scientism seems to have faded, except of course for the Kantian climate of all-powerful rationality – despite the vain efforts of a Derrida (1930-2004) asserting that reason does not exist (his decentering) or of metaphysicians reminding us of the distinction between reason and intelligence, between reasoning and intuition (e.g. Jean Borella, 1930).

If scientists are almost never scientistic, the question remains: is science intrinsically scientistic? From Antiquity to the Middle Ages, science tended to be scientistic, turning its back on reality and confining itself to the theoretical. When it currently indulges in mathematical abstraction, using its modus operandi to construct the world it was supposed to discover, it still is. When, on the contrary, it focuses on a world to be forcibly and inconsistently transformed – so-called technoscience – it still is.

The scientific path seems a very narrow one. On the one hand, it is necessary to study the world and begin by measuring it⁵³, then to model it, but when all quality has been excluded, is it still the same world?

On the other hand, as Plato already indicated: “It is ‘in its very substance’ that the world ‘is endowed with an ‘iconic’ function”⁵⁴; it is, says Plato, “of necessity the image of something”⁵⁵, so that any cosmology can only be “a plausible myth (ton eïkota muthon)”⁵⁶. If, for Plato, “our science of nature remains hypothetical, it is not because of the weakness of our intelligence; it is because of the lack of reality of the object to be known”((Hence, the only knowledge adequate to a deficient being is symbolic knowledge, because it first posits its object for what it is, a symbol, but a real symbol, i.e. an image that participates ontologically in its model. It is this “symbolic realism” (i.e., “it is the idea of symbol that allows us to think the idea of reality”, Jean Borella, Symbolisme et Réalité, ed. 2012, p. 248), which means that “Platonism is not idealism“; La crise du symbolisme religieux, p. 31, n. 47). This is because reality goes beyond physics, and is by definition metaphysical.

So, not to ask the question of an intrinsically scientistic science – and whatever the answer is – simply is to be doomed to scientism.

Footnotes

1. “Hayek (Frederic von) – Scientism and the social sciences. Essay on the misuse of reason. Trad. Raymond Barre”, Revue française de science politique, vol. 5, no. 1, 1955 (pp. 162-163).[↩]
2. Thomas (Tom) Sorell, Scientism: Philosophy and the Infatuation with Science, Routledge, 1994.[↩]
3. Gregory R. Peterson, “Demarcation and the Scientistic Fallacy”, Zygon, vol. 38, no. 4, 2003 (pp. 751-761).[↩]
4. “Science et scientisme”, Raison présente, vol. 171, n° 1, 2009 (pp. 15-27[↩]
5. Scientism and the social sciences. Essai sur le mauvais usage de la raison, Pocket Agora, 1953.[↩]
6. Cf. Allan Bullock & Stephen Trombley (Dir.), The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, London: Harper Collins, 1999, p. 775.[↩]
7. Cf. John Allan Lee (1933-2013), Robert Sternberg (1949-), Zick Rubin (1944-) and also Elaine Hatfield, Susan Sprecher, W.H. Jones, D. Perlman, etc.[↩]
8. Revue de synthèse, t. 134, 6^e série, no 1, 2013, pp. 89-113.[↩]
9. “Ancient Wisdom and Modern Misconceptions – A Critique of Contemporary Scientism”[↩]
10. Its recent republication by Payot (2023) bears witness to the topicality of this reflection.[↩]
11. “Why The Future Doesn’t Need Us. Our most powerful 21st-century technologies-robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech-are threatening to make humans an endangered species.” (“Why the future doesn’t need us. The most powerful technologies of the 21st^e century: genetic engineering, robotics and nanotechnology threaten to make humans an endangered species”), Wired, April 2000. But shouldn’t we also mention : Jacques Ellul (La technique, ou L’enjeu du siècle), Hannah Arendt (Les Origines du totalitarisme), Hans Jonas (Le Principe responsabilité), Ivan Illich (Origine du monde moderne)…[↩]
12. The word “scientiste” is found as “supporter of scientific exclusivism” in Romain Rolland’s Les Loups (act III, sc. 2 ds Quem. DDL t. 12, cf. CNRTL s.v.), where it transposes the English noun “scientist” into French.[↩]
13. Contre la métaphysique (Alcan, 1912), p. 51; Lalande, s.v.[↩]
14. La philosophie moderne (Flammarion, 1919), p. 80; Lalande, s.v.[↩]
15. Modernism, initially applied to the revival of the arts in the first half of the XX^e century, is however used in physics, where the adjective “modernist”, replacing “modern”, qualifies the new mathematics, logic and physics of the early XX^e century. We use it here, pejoratively, in the sense of an excessive infatuation with “progress” and modernity, linked to the concepts of evolution, growth, emancipation, innovation, progress…[↩]
16. Following Auguste Comte, Sommaire appréciation de l’ensemble du passé moderne (1830, L’Harmattan, 2006[↩]
17. Cf. Galileo’s De Motu (1590), following Giordano Bruno’s (1548-1600) Banquet of the Ashes (1584).[↩]
18. Remember that, to do this, Kant will truncate man’s intellect to reduce him to an exclusively rational animal; see “Reason and intelligence, the two sides of the mind”, https://metafysikos.com.[↩]
19. Cf. Exercitationes paradoxicæ versus Aristoteleos (1624), Dissertations in the form of paradoxes against the Aristotelians (Vrin, 1959[↩]
20. Cf. Comte, Discours sur l’esprit positif (1844, Librairie Schleicher, 1909, pp. 5-125.[↩]
21. Epistola de secretis operibus naturae et artis et de nullitate magiae (“Letter on the wonders of nature and the nullity of magic”), c. 1260. E.g. Paris: Chamuel ed. 1893 (archive.org[↩]
22. “Omnis scientia requirit mathematicam“, Opus Majus, t. III, p. 98.[↩]
23. From this point of view, the science of measurement (scientia ponderum) is only one of the many sciences attached to natural science (scientia naturalis), as is experimental science (scientia experimentalis); cf. his Communia naturalium (c. 1260[↩]
24. Opus majus, t. II, p. 169.[↩]
25. Bacon even distinguishes between “general illuminations” (or Principles) by the agent intellect and “special illuminations” (particular and personal intuitions of particular intelligibles.[↩]
26. Pierre-Maxime Schuhl, Machinisme et philosophie, Paris: PUF, 1969, pp. 33-34. Emphasis added.[↩]
27. Jean-Pierre Vernant, Les origines de la pensée grecque, Paris: PUF, 1969, p. 133.[↩]
28. Ibidem.[↩]
29. See the article “Metaphysics of ecology”.[↩]
30. Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft (1793).[↩]
31. from c. 400 to the end of the Carolingian Empire (924), succeeded by the Holy Roman Empire (962[↩]
32. “Les limites de la connaissance scientifique”, M. Cazenave (dir.), De la science à la philosophie : Y a-t-il une unité de la connaissance? (Colloque de Bruxelles), Paris: Albin Michel, 2005, p. 139.[↩]
33. in “discussion”, De la science à la philosophie, pp. 60-61.[↩]
34. De la science à la philosophie, Paris: Albin Michel, 2005, pp. 92, 96).[↩]
35. The Philosophy of Physical Science, Cambridge University Press, 1949, p. 110, quoted in Physique et métaphysique, Jean Borella and Wolfgang Smith, L’Harmattan, 2018, p. 45. Eng. translation: Rediscovering the Integral Cosmos, Physics, Metaphysics, and Vertical Causality, Angelico Press[↩]
36. see the article “Philosophy and science, the epistemic opening and closing of the concept”.[↩]
37. Idéologie et rationalité dans l’histoire des sciences de la vie : Nouvelles études d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences, Paris: Vrin, 1977.[↩]
38. Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, Y a-t-il un grand architecte de l’Univers? translated from English by Marcel Filoche (English title: The Great Design, 2010), Odile Jacob, 2011.[↩]
39. Response to Stephen Hawking, De la physique à la science-fiction, L’Harmattan, 2013 (Science and Myth: With a Response to Stephen Hawking’s The Grand Design, Philos-Sophia Initiative Foundation; 3^rd edition, 2023); Teilhard de Chardin’s Theistic Evolutionism. Une analyse exhaustive de ses enseignements et de leurs conséquences, L’Harmattan, 2023 (Teilhardism and the New Religion: A Thorough Analysis of the Teachings of Pierre Teilhard De Chardin, Tan Book & Pubs, 1988; reed. Theistic Evolution: The Teilhardian Heresy, Philos-Sophia Initiative Foundation, 2023).[↩]
40. Frédéric Rouvillois, L’invention du progrès, 1680-1730 (1996), CNRS, 2011.[↩]
41. “Der Fortschritt” (Progress), Simplicissimus, then number 275-276 of the Fackel (“Le Flambeau“).[↩]
42. Jacques Bouveresse, “Le mythe du progrès selon Wittgenstein et von Wright”, Mouvements 2002/1 (no19), pp. 126 -141, §2.[↩]
43. Summary by Jacques Bouveresse, op. cit., § 3.[↩]
44. Le Gai Savoir (1882), L. III, 125.[↩]
45. Conference of 2001, ed. Agone, 2023. Also Georg Henrik von Wright, The Myth of Progress, Evergreen, 2000[↩]
46. Quoted by Jean Borella, La crise du symbolisme religieux, p. 291.[↩]
47. cf. The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things, Cambridge University Press, 2012.[↩]
48. C. Webb in Lalande, Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie, PUF, 1951, p. 287.[↩]
49. Bérard, “Unmasking ”AI””, https://philos-sophia.org/unmasking-ai/.[↩]
50. See the article “Philosophy and science, epistemic opening and closure of the concept”[↩]
51. Max PlanckL’image du monde dans la physique contemporaine, Gonthier, Paris, 1963 (Das Weltbild der neuen Physik, 1929[↩]
52. “Damit kommt der Physiker, der sich mit der Materie zu befassen hat, vom Reiche des Stoffes in das Reich des Geistes. Und damit ist unsere Aufgabe zu Ende, und wir müssen unser Forschen weitergeben in die Hände der Philosophie“; ibid.).[↩]
53. If Maxwell (1831-1879) did not say precisely “physics is the science of measurement”, he at least greatly contributed to establishing its importance, a fundamental principle now properly integrated into physics and which has largely spilled over to establish itself in all sciences and even to measure human love, as we have seen.[↩]
54. Jean Borella, La crise du symbolisme religieux, p. 40; cf. Plato, Timée.[↩]
55. Timée, 29b; Borella, ibidem.[↩]
56. Timée, 29d; Borella, ibid., p. 41.[↩]