"[...] the moral enterprise of freedom for the enquiring mind"
(Alistair Crombie) -- one has to savor a statement like that and
perhaps re-consider it in the light of the transformation of
conventional espionage by way of an increasing digitization of
surveillance equipment and personal communication. Certainly,
British experimental science with its expansion of the limits of
experience into the infinite and Leibniz' optimistic philosophy with
its dynamism and individualism were a reflection upon the religious
melancholy of Galilei's and Bacon's time. Yet even Bacon's immediate
predecessor, Antonio Possevino, the "Jesuit protagonist of Counter
Reformation" and thereby advocate of institutionalized religion,
recommended "disputations" to further moral development in his
Cultura ingeniorum of 1598 (1606 edition, chapter 34, thanks to
Google Books). While an obvious imbalance of powers can be noted
within the European ideological "superstructure" (a term used by
Robert Boyle), fear as a consequence of imagined guilt, it also
fired an ardent strife for intellectual perfection -- and must be
seen from without conventional European intellectual history to
understand the parallel thrust of both forces.
Thank you for raising the question.
Hartmut
Am 14/03/2012 10:39, schrieb Willard McCarty:
[log in to unmask]" type="cite">A
question from someone well outside the field, though very
interested in its doings.
In his Styles of scientific thinking in the European tradition
(1994), Alastair Crombie says that for Galileo science was “the
moral enterprise of freedom for the enquiring mind … a therapeutic
experience offering perhaps the greatest moral contribution of
science to mankind” (1994: 8). Would it be reasonable to suppose
that for Bacon as well as Galileo science appeared thus because of
the intense religious melancholia and profound distrust of human
nature characteristic of the time, as discusssed e,g, at length by
Jean Delumeau, Le Péche et La Peur (1983), and especially for such
innovative thinkers, such as both men were, at the mercy of
capricious worldly powers, i.e. the papal and Elizabethan courts,
respectively? Could anyone here point me to work along these lines
but specifically focused on such people?
Many thanks.
Yours,
WM
