File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1998/lyotard.9812, message 43


Date: Mon, 07 Dec 1998 11:49:51 -0500
From: Ed Atkeson <edatkeson-AT-earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: Eagleton


> I'm glad you said this. Lyotard seems hold science in high regard. I notice E.O. Wilson in his last book Consilience, spends quite a few pages decrying postmodernism because it sees science as just one worldview among many, like in the Eagleton quote.

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>>> Hugh Bone:
>>> Some say science began with riddles posed at banquets of the ancient Greeks; a love of problem-solving.  
--------------
this is a pretty idea. 

>>> Science seems to limit itself to observing and relating entities in the so-called "real" world.
------------------
What about this:  Science has stepped into a postmodern space, but not
in the way Eagleton states, or the way Wilson objects to. 
    Foundation assumptions of knowledge, such as the very number of
dimensions in reality, are being called into question. S. Hawking talks
about what things would be like if the "arrow of time" were reversable! 
(it is, of course, we just aren't capable of seeing it that way) Imagine
reality mapped out on ten Cartesian planes! 
    Our way of seeing has coevolved with a particular reality, so our
view is limited, blindered. Coming to this realization, we have to
qualify all scientific knowledge as belonging only to our own unique
view. Our knowing is circumscribed, but not lessened in importance or
validity, and science has to draw a larger, postmodern, circle for
itself. 
(?) Ed Atkeson

...let's see, that would be almost the entire Cartesian airforce.


   

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