science, magic, madness

[alice wellintown]

Paul Hazard’s magisterial, widely influential, and beloved intellectual
history offers an unforgettable account of the birth of the modern European
mind in all its dynamic, inquiring, and uncertain glory. Beginning his
story in the latter half of the seventeenth century, while also looking
back to the Renaissance and forward to the future, Hazard traces the
process by which new developments in the sciences, arts, philosophy, and
philology came to undermine the stable foundations of the classical world,
with its commitment to tradition, stability, proportion, and settled usage.
Hazard shows how travelers’ tales and archaeological investigation widened
European awareness and acceptance of cultural difference; how the radical
rationalism of Spinoza and Richard Simon’s new historical exegesis of the
Bible called into question the revealed truths of religion; how the
Huguenot Pierre Bayle’s critical dictionary of ideas paved the way for
Voltaire and the Enlightenment, even as the empiricism of Locke encouraged
a new attention to sensory experience that led to Rousseau and romanticism.
Hazard’s range of knowledge is vast, and whether the subject is operas,
excavations, or scientific experiments his brilliant style and powers of
description bring to life the thinkers who thought up the modern world.
*The Crisis of the European Mind* is the NYRB Classics Book Club selection
for April 2013.

http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/classics/the-crisis-of-the-european-mind/


On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 5:48 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com
> wrote:

> Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the
> subject is the *Book of British Birds*, and you have a rough idea of what
> it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying
> rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional
> atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least
> well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe
> there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth
> understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures
> of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The
> more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it
> tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the
> geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as
> assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy
> old travesty will pass muster. These days, theology is the queen of the
> sciences in a rather less august sense of the word than in its medieval
> heyday.
>
> Dawkins on God is rather like those right-wing Cambridge dons who filed
> eagerly into the Senate House some years ago to non-placet Jacques Derrida
> for an honorary degree. Very few of them, one suspects, had read more than
> a few pages of his work, and even that judgment might be excessively
> charitable. Yet they would doubtless have been horrified to receive an
> essay on Hume from a student who had not read his *Treatise of Human
> Nature*.
>
> http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/terry-eagleton/lunging-flailing-mispunching
>
>
>
> On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 5:43 AM, alice wellintown <
> alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> "...* applied science, purposeful and determined, and pure science,
>> playful and freely curious, continuously support and stimulate each other.
>> The great nation of the future will be the one which protects the freedom
>> of pure science as much as it encourages applied science.*"
>>
>> http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi2876.htm
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 5:40 AM, alice wellintown <
>> alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22105898
>>>
>>
>>
>
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