The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

by F.S.C. Northrop

Paperback book on Logic of the Science and the Humanities.

Genres: Science, Philosophy

402 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1947

Reviews

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Re-read: Back in the 1960s, I studied The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities by F.S.C. Northrup. I learned that our fundamental challenge and my task was to begin each moment newly with the immediacy of experience. Based this comprehensive selection of Northrup's writings, I started to observe the difference in the source of concepts from intuition and concepts from postulation. I uncovered the descriptive theories from normative theories in sociology and history. I accepted inferred unseen actors in the nature of things as trustworthy awareness. What a great refresher course is rereading Northrup during my retirement.

[Jimbo · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent book for teaching the blindness of our very 20/20 eyesight....

[versarbre · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up this book from the book shelf randomly but then couldn't stop -- amazingly relevant and clarifying for an ethnographer thinking about her own inquiries. F.S.C.N. begins with considering methods/principles for inquries, and placed analysis of a problem at first. Obviously, reading on, he already has in mind practical problems such as ideological conflicts between liberal democracies and communist Russia (after all, WWII just ended!), world-peace making, etc. and thinks seriously about making inquiries of social theories more reliable. The distinction between concepts by intuition and concepts by postulation is very helpful. It is delightful to see him moving from deductive thinking & inductive thinking in natural sciences cases to social sciences/humanities issues at ease, although ethnographers who buy the ontological argument shall disagree with him that "different cultures in most cases see nature the same." It is unexpected that he parallels pure scientific empiricism to impressionistic art and then introduces, say, Chinese philosophy ("East", also mentioning Buddhism here) here. At the end, FSCN also proposes a new definition of consciousness, not as a faculty or property of the mind, but thinking about humans as conscious being because of their material qualities. In addition, he suggests that the unbridgable ideological conflict between the two poles might be resolved by taking science philosophy more seriously because after all both sides laid faith on science. (Good distinction that one is based on pre-Kantian empiricism, the other based on post-Kantian historicism.)

[Mark Underwood · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit dated... Wish he were still around to produce a new version. Hard to choose the right use cases for essays like this.