Research Catalog

Title

Varieties of scientific experience : emotive aims in scientific hypotheses / Lewis S. Feuer.

Author

Feuer, Lewis S. (Lewis Samuel), 1912-2002.

Publication

• New Brunswick, N.J., U.S.A. : Transaction Publishers, [1995]
• ©1995

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xx, 445 pages; 24 cm

Summary

• Lewis S. Feuer shows that the gestation of the hypotheses of original-minded scientists, such as Darwin, Einstein, or Bohr, is in large part a subconscious process. Scientists try to project upon the world structural laws that, beside fitting the given physical realities, will also realize their own emotional longings among alternative worldviews. Repeatedly, too, in examining the standpoints of philosophical figures ranging from Spinoza, Descartes, Kant, and Mill to contemporary figures such as Einstein, Lovejoy, and Hook, Feuer illumines how sociological antipathies project themselves into scientific divergences. Feuer delves into the bearing of emotive beliefs such as pacifism, socialism, anti-Semitism, upon the formation of concurrent worldviews, often fixations of scientific belief, held with the same passion in science as in religion.
• Feuer conveys his own sense of the torments no less than the triumphs of science; even the crucial verification in 1919 of Einstein's theorizing took place on an island where once unspeakable cruelties had been visited upon thousands of small Jewish children. The volume suggests how sombre backgrounds of scientific discovery may have been omitted in the more usual view of science and scientists as imbued only with a liberal spirit.

Subject

• Science > Philosophy
• Religion and science
• Religion and Science
• 02.02 philosophy and theory of science
• Naturwissenschaften
• Philosophie
• Aufsatzsammlung
• Wissenschaft
• Wetenschapsfilosofie
• Wetenschapssociologie

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Noumenalism and Einstein's argument for the existence of God -- Teleological principles in science -- God, guilt, and logic: the psychological basis of the ontological argument -- Sociological aspects of the relation between language and philosophy -- The principle of simplicity -- The Genetic fallacy re-examined -- The Reasoning of Holocaust theology -- Confronting evil and its unreason -- The Philosophical method of Arthur O. Lovejoy: critical realism and pscyhoanalytical realism -- Lawless sensations and categorial defenses: the unconscious sources of Kant's philosophy -- The Dream of Benedict de Spinoza -- The dreams of Descartes -- Anxiety and philosophy: the case of Descartes -- Spinoza's thought and modern perplexities: its American career -- John Stuart Mill as a sociologist: the unwritten ethology -- The Sociobiological theory of Jewish intellectual achievement: a sociological critique -- Causality in the social sciences.

ISBN

• 1560002239
• 9781560002239

LCCN

95001470

OCLC

• ocm31936980
• 31936980
• SCSB-2059309

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library