SCIENCE AND THE DEMISE OF PHILOSOPHY Please note: I have left this article mostly as it was in 1990 or thereabouts (only briefly eliminating references to 'spirituality' and the supposed 'soul'. Since then I have gone though another sea change in relation to these issues and this does not represent my views today. A more accurate view is found in the up-dated first chapter (click)

"... the progress of science has been accompanied by the retrogression of man. Because of its practical triumphs, there grew up an almost mystical faith in the omnicompetance of science. Not only could it transform man's life, it could enable him to know the universe, not only could it render man practical service, it could give him ultimate truth."1

What started as 'natural philosophy' in Greece and became the various sciences was originally stimulated by a strange mixture of common sense and abstract imaginings. The common sense factor represented a revolt against superstitions about how most good and ill fortune was caused by the direct action of a hierarchy of Gods. It began by trying to explain events by what we can observe with the aid of our five senses.

Mathematics was introduced early on, and also very abstract metaphysical ideas, which extended and refined the naturalistic way of thought until one arrived at the position that observable reality is not always as it appears after all.

The basic thrust of the revolution in thought that science heralded was aimed at testing ideas by observation and ordering them accordingly, whereas philosophy tended more to organise observations according to ideas and reasoning. When philosophy degenerated largely into the theological dogmas of the Middle Ages when reason became too speculative and became divorced from observation, modern science arose as its counterpart. That the hypothetico-deductive method of science has subsequently been enshrined as the only way to truth, not least by uncritical mainstream philosophy of science, shows independently thinking persons how great is the need of a radically regenerated philosophy of understanding. Such philosophy has to point out how the inadequacies of prevailing physical empiricism as an instrument of truth can be overcome.

What passes as 'philosophy of science' in the chief literature and most universities nowadays operates under much the same cloud of unknowing. The failure to grapple with science's blind spots and unproven ontological assumptions shows the dependency of philosophers of science on science itself. The resulting weak role of 'handmaidens' who applaud progress as scientific and gather the aftermath to analyse the methods and principles that might have been employed is a sorry comment on the 'love of wisdom'. Foremost in analysing in depth various forms of scientific discourse and in showing how scientific communities try to monopolise truth as a means to obtaining and establishing social power, was the French philosopher and social historian Michel Foucault. He came to view all science as an expression of the will to power.

Human experience is far too easily hypostatised by words. Due to this in quite a large part, the great systems of philosophy of both the distant and recent past are presently seen to have each their own peculiar limitations. Human life and society are ever changing and surprising us, showing up the deficiencies and mistakes of the past and not least of many past thinkers. Much of what philosophers once presumed to know was shown to be false, in so far as they made assertions about the nature of the relations that pertain in the natural or social world. Observation was often sufficient to refute many old philosophical dogmas. Analytic reason is another method of counteracting false ideas, successfully practised in mutual criticism by many philosophers throughout history.

In this century philosophy has made great advances in the art of analysis, both conceptual and linguistic. Some variants of the philosophy of language help clarify our understanding and resolve problems that arose due to incorrect thinking, others analyse the meanings and usages of words and propositions most precisely, virtually to the point of absurdity. Yet modern semantics, pragmatics and the philosophy of language in general have demonstrated the preconceptions that language itself engenders. Because of the detachment of words from whatever they refer to, their generalised or abstract symbolical nature, mistakes in applying them are far more widespread than is evident without thorough training. Wittgenstein has probably been the most penetrating analyst of the misuse of language and its many ways of 'bewitching intelligence'. No science can manage without language, and even the most mathematicised sciences rely for their interpretation on normal language at some point or other. Here one strikes the richest source of hidden and confused scientific preconceptions about mankind and reality.

THE RELATIVE ABANDONMENT OF CRITICAL THINKING

Most current philosophy has unfortunately abandoned broad-based critical investigation and evaluation of science in theory and praxis and instead mainly embraces the subservient role that Bertrand Russell and A.J. Ayer prescribed for philosophy as a handmaiden to science. On that view, science carries out the discovery of truth and philosophy assists by improving the tools when they are too awkward for the job... the tools being chiefly concepts and language. The role is to serve scientists in their empirical endeavour to discover reality by providing logical and analytical help where called for, chiefly in unravelling subtle conceptual confusions caused by the misuse of language. Philosophers are thought to be historians-cum-linguistic analysts who can plug holes in the leaky pipelines of scientific theory and their occasional attempts to raise the level of debate to something more sublime are disregarded in sovereign manner by most scientists. With a few notable exceptions, such as in eco-philosophy1 and in some studies in ethics or the philosophy of law, philosophers remain largely blind to the various and considerable limitations of the sciences - and consequent dangers to mankind of the scientific world view.

As Jürgen Habermas pointed out with great perspicacity "The sciences have retained one thing from philosophy: the illusion of pure theory"2. This untenable belief in the sheer neutral objectivity of scientific knowledge is used by scientists to justify their washing their hands of all consequences of their professional activities. Meanwhile, the abandonment of metaphysical insight as 'unscientific' - constantly urged by scientists - has further brought about a degradation in their own self-understanding in numerous ways, and also that of those who are dazzled or blinded by science. All this has contributed strongly to the removal from education of the urge to practice philosophy in the original sense of seeking the truth and acting rightly. The decline in interest in sublime ideas is a symptom of the same malaise. The hard-data sciences have become the model of knowledge, rather than those thinkers, poets, playwrights and authors whose works were once were the touchstone. The rise in academia of positivism and logical empiricism in this century is largely due to the desire for knowledge productive of technology and material advances. Logic has meanwhile usurped the place of metaphysic, while even investigative and creative reason have largely been blinkered so as to concentrate it overwhelmingly upon the observable world and the sensory data it provides.

Most funded philosophy today confines itself to the safe study of its historical classics and of established systems of ideas. While this has value, great shortcomings are also evident in such academic philosophy. The historical bias tends strongly to result in the drying up of creative experience itself in the academic world, where mental life easily becomes a past-oriented, bookish surrogate for the life of action. Philosophy suffers from similar institutional constraints and pressures to the sciences. These are reasons why philosophy departments today have so widely become toothless camp-followers of science and technology, helplessly observing the dissolution of values and what is acceptable in 'spiritual' culture in a scientifically-advanced world environment of technical artifice, industrial greed and warmongering researches. As the many journals of philosophy and academic publications make patently evident, the remainder are largely either historians of previous thinkers' past glories or conceptual and linguistic hair-splitters.

The demise in institutionalised philosophy is related to 'the academic syndrome'. This consists in the narrowing of interest to limited or regulated 'fields' of phenomena and a variety of constrictions on the scope of vision in interpreting them dictated more by one's school of thought than by genuine discovery and insight. The doctoral fate of knowing too much about little is often more dangerous than a little knowledge of many things. Terminological complexity is a sign of it, as is the obsession with self-justificatory documentation and orthodox methods of argumentation. Logical argumentation easily becomes a fetish, and defending a thesis or standpoint by disputative pro-arguments, while omitting contra-arguments rather indicates a seeker of knowledge trying to justify a belief already held than an actual possessor of it. This one-sided attempt to persuade rather than present standpoints and evidence for and against neutrally for evaluation is too frequently seen in science. The ideal of objectivity as 'distance from the field' is realised through confinement to the proverbial armchair under whatever largely unventilated climate of collegial opinion prevails within the same ivory tower-block, without much other relevant experience-inducing stimuli than books, meetings and seminars.

THE META-CRISIS OF THE SEPARATE SCIENCES

Already in 1942, the Oxford philosophy don, Professor C.E.M. Joad, summed up the contemporary situation, as quoted above. This tradition of critical evaluation of the assumptions and achievements of science was continued by one of Britain's major philosophers, A.N. Whitehead, such as in his Science and the Modern World. Yet Whitehead's analyses and warnings seem to have gone unheeded and unnoticed compared to his colleague Bertrand Russell's often naive positivistic enthusiasm. Great efforts were made to turn empiricism into a tenable philosophy by the positivistic and logical empirical schools... efforts that have ended in complete failure. Widely heralded as the greatest exponent of the ideas of positivism, not least by Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein had to deny that he was a positivist and set out to show how his work demonstrated the untenability of positivistic tenets as philosophy and had been almost universally misinterpreted by his colleagues. His work definitively demonstrated that the attempt by positivists and empiricists to abolish metaphysics by the use of metaphysical arguments was self-defeating, not least because the had to have recourse to metaphysical assumptions in the process. In short, positivism is philosophically untenable.

The demise of positivism, and along with it its watered-down version known as logical empiricism, left science without the basis of any consistent or universal philosophy. An incomplete and crippled 'scientific philosophy' stands shakily with one remaining crutch, faith in the empirical method. Logical empiricism is what remains of philosophy in the service of scientism, but it adequate only within the premises of science, really only as a theory of method. Its only 'metaphysic' is the assumption of the exclusively physical nature of reality. Science appears now to seek within itself for its own 'metaphysic', chiefly jointed together out of diverse speculations of bio-geneticists and astrophysicists. Some speculate loosely over the fact that the universe has produced a species which conceives of the universe as such and whether this was somehow purposive or accidental. Without an inclusive ontology, epistemology, ethic or meta-science, however, all this remains amateurish as philosophy, however professional it may be as physics. Consequently, a majority of natural scientists either know little of philosophy or else misunderstand it, still backing neo-positivistic ideas. Many scientists who address the public exhibit a lack of insight and self-reflection that indicates a vacuum in the preoccupation with physical scientism.

One historical consequence of positivism was not the suppression, not only the arbitrary rationalistic metaphysics against which it was a positive reaction, but also of the proper development of meta-scientific thought along with the growth of each science. General meta-science too, which aims to elucidate the principles of knowledge and understanding that goes 'beyond science' and which is the main subject of this book, has been hindered by the widespread survival of a scientistic philosophy of science. This occurs largely because the sciences eschew critical and dynamic thought about their deepest fundaments and real aspirations, while avoiding those supra-empirical principles that nevertheless are implicit in science and function in all human understanding. In present-day philosophy of science, one mostly argues fine technical points about methods and types of conclusions that the sciences can consider valid, and thus one tends only passively to monitor inexhorable developments in science uncritically. Contemporary theorists in the philosophy of science are cautious in the extreme as critics and mostly seem blithely oblivious of fundamental distortions in science's self-image, and in many of its claims. Any telling body of major research is lacking in the sociology of scientific knowledge or its effects on society. Philosophers of science seem unwilling seriously to consider many charges levied against the role of science as a social institution and an intellectual panacea.

Present-day philosophy of science has indeed very largely geared itself irreversibly to science and scientific progress. Philosophers do offer a forum for ethical issues raised by scientific advances, but this discussion is mostly based on the premise that scientific progress is all important. The great majority of academic philosophers today share basic interests with scientists in making their living from research grants and paid positions where their roles and public images are unavoidably interconnected in various ways. Academics are overwhelmingly collegial supporters and apologists for science. The scientific establishment and our latter-day 'intellectuals' produced by the battery teaching methods of modern universities are physicalistic and atheistic in outlook... but fortunately such widely-embraced Weltanschauung have come and gone many a time before.

Wittgenstein wrote of the "wretched effects that the worship of science and the scientific method has had upon our whole culture". He was especially concerned with aesthetics, moral behaviour and religious beliefs, on which areas of life science has nothing to say and, because of the scientific method, cannot ever have anything to say. Nonetheless, scientists have argued and propounded on these subjects, engendering superficial confusions and distortions in addition to the difficulties that these questions already present.

PRECONCEPTION, CERTAINTY AND RESERVATION

The backbone of scientific enquiry should be the attitude of reservation of judgement. Scientists recognise, at least theoretically, that even their most well-tried theories tend to have to be modified or even rejected as researches proceed. Modern philosophy of science insists on the changing nature of scientific theory or its empirically-based 'truths' as an unavoidable historical fact, but also as something that in principle must be so. Yet the spirit that informed the best of European philosophy and science, openness of mind and reservation of final judgement, does seem to be losing ground to self-righteous scientific certainty.

Science bases itself only on what has been observed in the past. It cannot be certain of future events, for these are unobservable and beyond measurement, even though they may now and again prove calculable in advance. The best it can do is predict on the basis of what happened in the past and then simply "wait and see", as was the maxim of the founding fathers of British empiricism, Locke and Hume. The results of science may turn out to hold true against future observations, but no guarantee of their certainty can ever be given. In principle, the best science can offer is approximations, predictions of the likelihood of an event coming true.

Now, the human mind cannot avoid relying on 'preconceptions' for any of its investigations. When carrying out scientific research, for example, the meaning of what one is doing and why is provided by the mind's acquaintance with an immense network of circumstances, facts, reasonable assumptions, values, motives and so on. Though not themselves the object of investigation, its preconceptions - this 'fore-knowledge' - consists in a necessary and ineradicable set of extra-scientific considerations which surround and inform the research work, thereby making it meaningful. Such general common sense and other considerations are part of the context that makes any kind of research activity understandable, useful and somehow applicable to life and society.

Yet when fore-conceptions are held too rigidly in the face of testimonies, claims and even facts, knowledge suffers. To put aside traditional ideas that support standard scientific method and open oneself up to new conceptions, however imprecise, irrelevant or unproven at first, is a prerequisite to scientific progress in beginning to understand some of the many and huge 'blank areas' in scientific knowledge. Too rigid preconceptions lead to wrong pre-judgements (that is, mental prejudices).

Instead of trying to detract from the ideas of challengers, the attitude of adding to them in a spirit of mutual investigation should be preferred. New insights can arise from the synthesis of an uninterrupted exchange of views in the spirit of Socratic dialogue. Yet this is very seldom actually exhibited convincingly in public or in scientific conferences by the supporters of science.

In the arid situation left by the rise of scientism and the corresponding decline of original philosophy, many scientists fall back on common sense as their world-view. While positivism and neo-positivism failed dismally to provide any consistent philosophy to underpin scientific physicalism, common sense has been elevated to the level of philosophy since G.E. Moore, at last in the view of some thinkers.

We often have to rely on common sense in life, which means on the evidence of the senses, usually in so far as this is experienced commonly. Learning common sense is a necessary part of life because it ensures that we share the perceptions of others and learn to benefit from ordinary people's experience. Scientific investigation, which starts from common sense naturalism, arrives back at a contrary conclusion: we cannot trust our senses to tell us the true nature of reality. This is still also where the physical sciences of today meet their final limits in the attempt to establish the truth by physical experimentation. Their outgoing search for reality reveals the emptiness of physical appearances and eventually dissolves the very belief that reality is nothing but physical nature. Science brings its followers to the limits of the materialistic fallacy, and philosophical insight must begin all over again.

What is the truth of reality is clearly not only a scientific concern, but also a philosophical challenge. The solution can never be a matter of bigger research budgets, more sophisticated instruments or better-trained brains. Lacking the capability of giving authoritative leadership on ethical issues or the broadest and deepest of intellectual questions, science must relinquish its self-appointed role as sole custodian of truth to a more universal and inclusive understanding.

Reason obviously cannot be limited strictly to what is already accepted as known. That would mean also sticking to any false ideas and assumptions that may have been involved all along. The idea of truth has now commonly been reduced to whatever is observable. But what cannot be observed would then have to be false. Reason does not even go against truth when it invents or imagines what is not observable, because this is the way almost all knowledge progresses... even science tries to predict what will be. The making of the atomic bomb alone shows the crucial role of reason in creating new observables... the vast explosion in the atmosphere, the mushroom cloud, radioactive fallout. That reason as used in science is only very successful under limited conditions, such as in experimental set-ups, does not reduce its importance or validity, but simply indicates the existing limits of what is known and on the capacity of how much can be encompassed.

Einstein's famous breakthrough was one of reason advancing well beyond the facts, one which rejected accepted facts but took account of certain other facts as its premises. It's essence was a pure form of reason, the mathematical. It took long for scientists to catch up with its new ideas, even theoretically, and it was even longer before instruments were developed for the sort of observation that made relativity testable by crucial experiments. Much the same is true of most seminal advances in science nowadays. Yet the great mass of scientific work is - by comparison - plodding empirical mental footwork, such as collecting and collating fact after fact, all governed by major 'established' theories over which the individual scientist has no real influence except in rare instances.

It is reason alone that enables one to distinguish, isolate, describe, compare and organise observations. It can invent practical methods of behaviour and effective decision-making. Reason also goes well beyond this in analysing, comparing and applying values, developing rational norms of behaviour, even as far as evaluating the scope and validity of entire world-views and in regulating and synthesising the entire understanding. When reasoning is extended well beyond analytic tasks towards such very large-scale synthetic operations, it is famously prone to error, which is why scientists are supposed to be very cautious about broad generalisations and world-views. Nonetheless, the demands of life require that such embracing evaluations be made and far-reaching policies be formed. This surely calls for a discipline which would help to guide and regulate such extended reason with a scope that goes far beyond what science can inform about.

Only thought which combines the ideal philosophical approach of stringent consistency with wide comparative study and properly self-reflected legitimacy is in a position to evaluate the sciences, their assumptions, methods, consequences for human principles and morality. The sciences, however, can cast no light upon strict philosophy, for such makes no physical-empirical claims of itself. No observation can prove or disprove the truths of what can be called 'genuine philosophy', which aims less at facts or theories than at supra-factual or holistic insights arising in very wide-ranging forms of understanding. Such meta-science both monitors the sciences and go beyond their epistemological limitations. Unfortunately, though, philosophers have increasingly withdrawn from their rightful task of developing a truly critical philosophy of science, one rooted not only in methodological technicality but also in human values and concern for continuous examination of the role of science in civilisation.

The more advanced forms of philosophy of science and meta-scientific research can help one fix the actual limitations of the scientific mentality in each of the major fields of research. It is held that science is so vast that no-one can have a complete overview of its scope in general review of its principles and practices through the ages and throughout the modern world. I found that this applies only to sub-theories, applications and the host of empirical details of science, so that an overview is attainable. By growth of understanding within a variety of model scientific fields combined with intellectual intuition it is possible to comprehend the multiplicity of scientific theories as necessarily-limited products of one type of mentality or approach to reality.

The approach of holistic understanding is limited to no theory and differs qualitatively from scientific method. It is, and always has been, an essential in the further understanding of the nature of humanity and the cosmos. This is not strict scientific understanding because it is not reproducible in experimental studies.

Even in strict science, reproducibility is often falsely claimed. The requirement of scientific method (i.e. hypothetical-deductive) is that research findings can be reproduced by independent researchers. Most medical research is natural scientific, but well-regarded medical findings often fall short on reproducibility. In several scientific areas by some estimates, from about 50%—90% of published papers are based on studies and experiments showing results that cannot be reproduced. In psychology, a worst case, the University of Virginia repeated 100 psychological experiments of which only 40% were reproduced.

SCIENTISTIC CERTAINTY OR INTELLECTUAL TOLERANCE?

All the foregoing calls for increased vigilance to ensure an attitude of tolerance by scientists towards others' views. As often in the past, future events may prove that other traditions than those accepted in science have been right where science was mistaken, have held the more fruitful hypotheses and have had more beneficial effects for humankind.

Anyone who has spent a few decades among academics and researchers will know that radical changes of opinion are almost unheard-of and public admissions of error hardly ever take place. Reason and even evidence are often given a second-place to prestige. Thus, it is not surprising that the Nobel laureate and great physicist Max Planck said, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." This is surely true in some respects, but even this generalisation is surely too sweeping, which illustrates our point about scientists often being just as fallible as other human beings.

When hypotheses based on perceptions and ideas that conflict with accepted wisdom or undermine dearly-held theories do achieve proper peer evaluation and experimental testing, there is often what seems an almost inherent tendency still to observe in accordance with the mental constructs one already holds about the whole state of affairs. Where very delicate experiments are required, often dealing in their initial developmental stages with very weak or barely perceptible changes, the slightest preconceived bias can weight the scales. Such appears to have occurred with many of the control experiments on cold fusion, as introduced by Fleischman and Ponds, quite apart from the blatant political-financial opposition by those scientists whose interests are threatened by such a discovery.

There is a very powerful tendency to black-or-white thinking when scientists are confronted by reported facts that originate from outside the scientific sphere, especially from philosophy or religion. Most events that are rhetorically classed as 'psychic phenomena' or the like are not approached open-mindedly, however many otherwise reliable persons can attest to them. Pronouncements are nonetheless made about them by scientific pundits, working on the flimsiest of indirect evidence and the heaviest of prejudicial bias with quite irrelevant 'explanations'. The idea that differing versions of the truth can be equally valid is not much liked by scientists, lawyers or logically-minded philosophers and theologians. It smacks of relativism and even solipsism. Their basic view is that 'truth' must be the same for everyone. Rational philosophy holds sacrosanct the principle that an assertion must either be true or not true. There can be no 'in-betweens', no relative truths, nothing that is true for you but not for me. The water that feels chill to me and warm to you must have its fixed, objectively-measurable temperature. Since at least the time of Socrates one has held very good reasons for this too, for otherwise we could say that almost anything could be true, dependent on taste or whim. This sort of objective measure is what science wishes to apply to everything and even, paradoxically, to subjective experience, which will be discussed later as being a largely futile and mistaken aim.

An attitude that assumes there can be but one true account of any subject would seem to obviate any radical kind of tolerance towards differing views or incompatible versions of the cosmos and human life. Such a rigid view breaks down when one understand that and how different but entirely incompatible systems of thought can account just as adequately as one another for the same phenomena, as in the way that many languages can describe the same things by different words and syntaxes.

As soon as we pass from questions of fact to questions of value, there are even clearer grounds for tolerance of others' views. Science never can itself answer any moral questions, for its hypothetical-deductive experimental method can never provide any measures of good or ill, nor test what is right or wrong (i.e of whether one ought or ought not act in some given way). At best it can only provide evidence to help decide factual questions (i.e. whether something is the case [true] - or contrariwise [false]). Remaining as neutral as possible on all matters of values (i.e. of right or wrong), so the 'truth' or rightness in any ethical issue will always remain outside the competence of science as we know it.

Tolerance of the views of others implies that one respects holders of views one does not accept or like and one is not aggressively critical. Unfortunately, there are self-appointed defenders of science in various societies of sceptics and rationalists who shun no verbal means of attacking others viewpoints, especially religious tenets, even to the extent of trying to blacken the character of persons holding. Representatives of these groups are unfortunately given press and world media coverage far beyond any justification that their own work might provide.

Perceptions and insights that arise in transcendental modes of consciousness that various philosophers through the ages have experienced, often in contemplation or 'inspired' meditation, are still discredited at virtually every official institution of so-called higher learning. Right enough, one may argue that these are really ineffable experiences and beyond the comprehension of the logical and even the rational mind and do not belong to the realm of worldly education. Nonetheless, rejection by persons without such experience, or without any kind of controlled investigation, of what actually is experiencable speaks more of intellectual insecurity than understanding.

The love of wisdom rather than merely of knowledge still exists peripherally among Western intellectuals. This requires that one moves beyond the technical, logico-rational mentality to a value-sensitive and ethically-based holistic approach. Traditionally, attaining wisdom more or less meant gradually learning to know the self through insight gained by living experience into its multifarous nature. Moreover, such understanding is not some theory divorced from one's activities and lifestyle, one actually takes the consequences of what one learns by applying the ideals of unity and wholeness in practice to daily living. When such character developing understanding as this occurs today, it is hardly ever thanks to our educational systems, more likely despite them. If self-knowledge has ever been part of a university's agenda, which I must doubt, everything certainly bends in the other direction today. The slogan 'know thyself' receives much formal academic lip-service but is ignored in actual life. Understanding is not necessatily knowing the truth of a matter, but of reaching out to include all relevant issues however far research has or has not advanced therein. It is a means of comprehension, bringing together often disparate, even contradictory and paraxdoxical viewpoints so as to discover how wider sense can be made of a theory and the issues it engenders.

(Update:) I was formerly for some considerable time very concerned about the denial of the existence of the self in the sense of a personal I. It is ignored or disbelieved - certainly by most natural scientists - to the extent that even serious discussion of the matter cannot get anywhere (apart from in isolated theological seminars). One may have a panoramic tour of second-hand ideas about it, from Socrates onwards, the inertia of which reiterated beliefs are extremely difficult and tortous to navigate. In the humanities, very many accept - whether implicity or outright - the validity of ideas like ego bing distinct from true selfhood. Such confusions I have come to be based on an inadequate investigation of the ideas of self as a fixed, unchanging identity (or soul). The term sould had, indeed, no empirical or clear inward phenomenal datum. This can be appreciated by reading the works of Baggini. Wholly oriented towards investigating and changing the material world, science rejects practical self-understanding and personal experience, which is almost unavoidable due to its exact methods and its necessary criteria of validity. Unrepeatable situations and experiences are beyond generalising methodology and are relegated to the category of 'anecdote'. Hence, science is very largely incapable of investigating, understanding or dealing with human purposes, such as reactions to innumerable challenges and issues about the meaning of life. Science relativises values and makes a private matter of them, thereby tending always to undermine them and with various consequences for a moral and good society. Discovery of new truths about the human psyche and destiny will remain beyond its scope until the extent of ignorance about this is better appreciated and much wrong physicalistic thinking about the constitution of the human being is more widely discredited. One hope for the future is promising, the advances in neurological technology and the research into the human mind it is developing. If science is to develop beyond the study of physical reality by physical means - and chiefly for material and economic ends - the crisis seems unlikely to be overcome.

Footnotes:



1. God and Evil. C.E.M. Joad. London. 1942, p. 114.

2. Knowledge & Interest trans. in the journal 'Inquiry Vol 9. 1966', p. 298.

