What happened to science?

[xoxoxoBruce]

An article by Christopher Beckwith about how science, once the center of higher education, got pushed to the fringe.

With the rapid merging of the college and the universitas guild underway in the 13th century, the nascent universities and the Church set the scientific works of Aristotle, along with the works of the Classical Arabic scientists and their Aristotelian commentaries, as the standard core curriculum for all bachelor’s degree students. In other words, all college students, whatever their eventual specialization, learned science (in the Middle Ages it was called “Arts”) as the foundation of their education. The adoption and wide use of the recursive argument method went along with science.

Over time, the medieval scientific approach to the world spread throughout European culture. But the scientific mindset was not limited to scientists, physicians and theologians, its most famous practitioners. In the Renaissance even painters were obsessed with ‘scientific’ perspective and chiaroscuro; poets wrote sonnets using the ‘scientific method’; and musicians scientifically analyzed the structure of music. This pervasive ‘scientific’ attitude is — or rather, was — a distinctive, unique characteristic of Western European culture both in Europe and in the many colonies founded by Western Europeans around the world. Scholars today seem to have trouble with it, but that is because in the twentieth century the movement called “Modernism” (in my 2009/2011 book Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present) destroyed the European ‘high’ art tradition, along with much else. The destruction of Modernism continues down to the present day, but it remains more or less completely unnoticed by historians. I must ask, what is their problem? Has not enough been destroyed yet, or what?

As a result of Modernism and its offspring (including the equally uncritically-examined hypermodernist dogma known as ‘Postmodernism’), philosophers of science nowadays can no more define science than artists or aestheticians can define art, musicians or musicologists can define music, and so on. This suggests that to some extent, at least, they do not know what it is that they are supposedly doing. It should be no surprise to learn that most do not know why they are doing it either, or what it means, or much of anything else about it. It seems not to have occurred to anyone to explain how and why this has happened, what is wrong with it, and what (if anything) can be done to fix it. Is this a “Duh…” moment in history? An “Oh, well…” moment? Or a “Gosh!” moment?

The article isn't as heavy as it might sound.