1st Edition

The Crisis of Progress Science, Society, and Values

Edited By John C. Caiazza Copyright 2016

    This book is about the concept of progress, its separate varieties, its current rejection, and how it may be reconsidered from a philosophical and scientific basis. John C. Caiazza's main emphasis is on how science is understood as it has a direct impact on social values as expressed by prominent philosophers. He argues that progress is at a standstill, which presents a crisis for Western civilization.

    Caiazza presents historical examples, both of scientific inquiry and social and cultural themes, to examine the subject of progress. Beginning with the Whig model and progressive political values exemplified by Bacon and Dewey, he also examines other variations, the Enlightenment, cosmopolitanism, and totalitarianism. Technology, argues Caiazza, also has a stultifying effect on Western culture and to understand the idea of progress, we must take a philosophic rather than a scientific point of view. Modern cosmology has inevitable humanistic and theological implications, and major contemporary philosophers reject social science in favour of ancient concepts of virtue and ethics.

    In the end, Caiazza writes that time is an agent, not a neutral plain on which scientific and historical events occur. We can expect technology to keep us in stasis or become aware of the possibility of transcendence. This book will be of interest for students of scientific history and philosophy.

    1 Introduction: History and Impact of the Idea of Progress
    On Progress, Its Variations, and Rejection
    The Entanglement of Science and Social Values
    Three Themes

    2 Whig History and the Progressive Society
    Whig History and Critical History
    Evidence of Progress in Science 1: Discovery—Spectrography
    Evidence of Progress in Science 2: Theory—Mendel's Laws
    The Separation Thesis: Modern Science Departs from the Medieval World-View
    Leaving Aristotle, One Science at a Time
    The Projected Ideal Ends of Science
    Bacon's Prophetic Vision in the New Atlantis
    Science-Inspired Social Norms—Dewey's Progressivism

    3 Enlightenment Progress and the Cosmopolitan Society
    Enlightenment Variation of Scientific Progress
    Duhem's Continuity Challenge
    Duhem's Philosophy of Science and the Continuity Thesis
    Cultural and Social Criticism
    Koyre's Infinity Defense of Enlighted Science
    Causality and Mechanical Reason
    Kant on Diminished Reason and the Cosmopolitan Social Ideal

    4 Progress by Reduction and the Totalitarian Temptation
    Reduction in Full
    Reduction and the History of Science
    Anti-Reductionist Views
    Hobbes and the Totalitarian Temptation
    Reduction and Atheism

    5 Historicism, Relativism, and the Open Society
    From the Philosophy of Science to the History of Science
    Deep Patterns: Vico
    Global Wholes: Kuhn
    Historicist Idealism and Its Critics: Scheffler
    Meaning and Science History: Popper
    Historicism and Popper's Contentless "Open Society"
    The Open Society, Right and Left

    6 Where We Are Now: Technology and Culture
    Techno-Secularism
    Technology and Cultural Stasis
    Science Itself
    Digital Fantasy Replaces Lived Reality
    The Electronic Ego

    7 Philosophy, Progress, and Cosmology
    Modern Science and Philosophy in Contrast
    Three Examples of Scientists Doing Philosophy (and Theology)
    Is Not Naturalism a Philosophy?
    The Law of Diminishing Reductive Returns
    The Philosophic Timeline of Scientific Progress
    Wittgenstein, Toulmin, and Natural Theology

    8 Cosmology and Human Existence
    Cosmic Role of the Observer in Postmodern Physics
    Scientific Cosmology and Human Existence
    Two Concepts of God: Scientific and Religious
    Recent Science Reveals the Permanence of Natural Human Differences
    The Limits of Social Science—Nussbaum
    The Recovery of Ancient Virtue—MacIntyre

    9 Conclusion: Crisis, Time, and the Choice
    Crisis in Progress and Social Values
    Agentic Time
    The Nature of the Crisis: Pascal or Nietzsche?

    Index

    Biography

    John C. Caiazza