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Every college student should be able to answer the following question: What is the relation between science and the humanities, and how is it important for human welfare?
public intellectual and political leader
Only fluency across the boundaries will provide a clear view of the world as it really is, not as seen through the lens of ideologies and religious dogmas
Cf jordan b. Peterson sighting kant that god's murder leaves a vacuum and that tgis lead to the death of millions under stalin and mao's ideology
A balanced perspective cannot be acquired by studying disciplines in pieces but through pursuit of the consilience among them.
inevitable.
If so why should the author bother to speak out at all.
speaking out gives the advantage of preparation and planning for problems before they do damage and in that way demad focus
The enterprise is important for yet another reason: It gives ultimate purpose to intellect. It promises that order, not chaos, lies beyond the horizon.
I.e. That the world can be understood and this is comforting bec the unknown is scary And maybe dangerous and bec understanding facilitates control and safety
legatees.
fired
Put into action
they gave Europe additional cause to doubt the sovereignty of reason.
Its dream of a world made orderly and fulfilling by free intellect had seemed at first indestructible, the instinctive goal of all men.
Condorcet’s principal scientific accomplishment was to pioneer the application of mathematics to the social sciences,
Essay
Sounds like psychohistory.
the concept that social action might be quantitatively analyzed and even predicted was original to Condorcet.
negligence
Naivete ?
his arguments contributed to the abolition of slavery by the National Convention.
Condorcet believed in the natural rights of men,
Condorcet was a polymath with a near-photographic memory,
belles lettres,
Literature for its own sake
taste for synthesis
fit into a coherent whole the principal ideas representing, if any such collection can legitimately be said to do so, the position of the late Enlightenment.
nurtu...
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a perfectibilist: The quality of human life, he insisted, can be improved indefinitely.
both anticlerical and republican,
During his stay on the rue Servandoni, Condorcet wrote his masterwork, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind.
Pascal had compared the human race to a man who never dies, always gaining knowledge,
His vision for human progress makes little concession to the stubbornly negative qualities of human nature. When all humanity has attained a higher level of civilization, we are told, nations will be equal, and within each nation citizens will also be equal. Science will flourish and lead the way. Art will be freed to grow in power and beauty. Crime, poverty, racism, and sexual discrimination will decline. The human life span, through scientifically based medicine, will lengthen indefinitely.
reason was supposedly the defining trait of the human species
Cf origins podcast this point debated bet lawrence krauss and jordan b peterson
Might its idealism have contributed to the Terror, which foreshadowed the horrendous dream of the totalitarian state?
Again cf JB peterson citing kant for a possible explanation
They tried to avoid metaphysics even while the flaws and incompleteness of their explanations forced them to practice it.
?
what counts most in the long haul of history is seminality, not sentiment. If we ask whose ideas were the seeds of the dominant ethic and shared hopes of contemporary humanity, whose resulted in the most material advancement in history, whose were the first of their kind and today enjoy the most emulation, then in that sense the Enlightenment, despite the erosion of its original vision and despite the shakiness of some of its premises, has been the principal inspiration not just of Western high culture but, increasingly, of the entire world.
The grand architect
Francis Bacon.
first notices
Bias
to begin the work anew, and raise or rebuild the sciences, arts, and all human knowledge from a firm and solid basis.
Cf descartes meditations. I wonder which came first and if there was influence
induction, which is the gathering of large numbers of facts and the detection of patterns.
founded the philosophy of science.
Lord Chancellor.
targeted by a circle of determined personal enemies
imprisoned
Shorn at last of the burden of public ambition, he spent his last days totally immersed in contented scholarship.
He proposed a shift in scholarship
toward engagement with the world.
The repeated testing of knowledge by experiment, he insisted, is the cutting edge of learning.
Bacon elaborated on but did not invent the method of induction as a counterpoint to classical and medieval deduction. Still, he deserves the title Father of Induction,
Collect their common traits into an intermediate level of generality. Then proceed to higher levels of generality,
“The human understanding,” he wrote, “is no dry light, but receives an infusion from the will and affections;
To that end, Bacon advised us to use aphorisms, illustrations, stories, fables, analogies
I tgought he was wrning against bias and personal interpretation contrary to how someone else might perceive the same observation, esp if one falls prey to a falacy of the mind as below but even without that
he argued for the full employment of the humanities, including art and fiction, as the best means for developing and expressing science.
archetypes in mythic narratives,
herald of adventure.
