08.02.09

What humanities offers the sciences: dualism

Posted in Booknotes at 1:11 pm by nemo

Review – What Science Offers the Humanities
The plight of the humanities is complex, but if there is one thing that is likely the case it is that scientists can’t diagnose it, nor science groupies either (an important distinction, since the groupies are the ones often doing the damage). An age of scientism is an age of ignorant science jocks, whose success blinds them to their deeper failure.

As the summary above suggests, the opening sections of the book might seem to give the impression that postmodernism is the destructive force to blame for the decline of the humanities. Postmodernism, though, is for Slingerland a symptom of the disease rather than the disease itself. The ailment afflicting the humanities is dualism, the conviction that there are minds and there are bodies – which leads to the conviction that the world of human meaning is separate from the world of existing reality, and must be approached in a different way and studied using different tools. It is this conviction that has led to the humanities turning their backs on the one way forward for their disciplines that would lead them out of their current morass of meaninglessness and irrelevance: an acceptance of the unity of human knowledge, which would mean a union with the natural sciences.

The diagnosis here of ‘dualism’ is laughable. This science fanatic reviewer unwittingly shows the problem in the decline of the Humanities: the imposition of monism on ‘dualism’ (so-called) is bleeding the life out of subjects that are larger than reductionist thought can allow.
Dualism is a problem, no doubt. But if you think you can simply eliminate it, consider the works of Kant.
Beware of those preaching against dualism: free will can’t exist in a post-dualistic scientific reductionism!

What a stupid diagnosis!

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