Exploration #1 2009.01.22

The first part of the homework which I’d like you to do between today and next Thursday’s meeting is to spend some time considering what the world would be like now, in 2009, if science in the modern sense never existed in this world.

The good news is that even without science, we would have an extraordinary amount of knowledge, because we benefit from other empirical/rational knowledge-gathering enterprises. What ways of knowing do you see to be involved in these latter?

Why do we need modern science at all?  And what is it? What makes it different from other knowledge-gathering enterprises, even the ones that emphasize an empirical and experimental orientation?

What wouldn’t we have without modern science? In particular, how would our own self-understanding be different?

A final question concerns science’s inevitability.  Is it just a "given" that an empirical approach has to lead to a full blown scientific approach, as presently understood?