Philosophy and Method in the West & India

Sarukkai, Sundar. “Philosophy and Method,” in Mapping Scientific Method: Disciplinary Narrations, edited by Gita Chadha and Renny Thomas (London; New York: Routledge, 2023), pp. 85-103.

This is an interesting essay which I nonetheless consider to be an elementary introduction to the question. Sarukkai broadens the usual terms of debate in the anglophone world (characterized as a restrictive focus on Western philosophy) to include Indian philosophy in the mix, which resonates with the phenomenological tradition in the West. Sarukkai suggests the complementary nature of focusing on the subject-object relation by addressing the approaches of phenomenology and science respectively. Of interest in particular is the Nyāya 16-step process as a model for philosophical method.

The narrowness Sarukkai confronts is most characteristic of analytical philosophy. Sarukkai’s broadening of the base of discussion is welcome, but his pluralism has limitations. He accepts the now-conventional categories of analytical and continental philosophy as givens. He mentions Marxism and Critical Theory in passing, but his entire discussion bypasses Hegel, Marx, and the Frankfurt School, which would lend themselves to an overview of disparate methods and schools of thought from a decidedly different perspective.

And there is the question of the nature of method and the manner of its applicability, an issue that applies also to critical thinking in general. Interpretation is not algorithmic or formalistic; it requires non-mechanical judgment of specific content even with the cognizance of general principles.

See also my bibliographies:

Indian Logic & Argumentation: Selected Bibliography

Argumentation & Controversies: Selected Bibliography

Thinking Critically About Critical Thinking: A Guide

Philosophical Style: Selected Bibliography

Philosophy of History of Philosophy & Historiography of Philosophy: Selected Bibliography

My Martin Gardner testimonial

The Martin Gardner Centennial was in 2014 and I commemorated it on this blog. I also submitted my own testimonial to the official web site and linked to it in this post:

Martin Gardner Centennial & Testimonials

Now I'd like to reproduce my contribution here:

Martin Gardner Testimonials: Testimonial 55: Ralph Dumain

As a teenager I discovered Martin Gardner in the 'Mathematical Games' column of the June or July 1967 issue of Scientific American, having innocently bought it at the corner drugstore on account of my boyhood interest in science. That column featured John Horton Conway’s game Sprouts. From then on I was hooked on Gardner’s columns and related books.

In his June 1968 column Gardner proposed a problem concerning Baker’s Solitaire, and followed up with readers’ solutions in subsequent issues. My name appeared with several others in the September 1968 issue. These acknowledgments were not included when the column was anthologized in Mathematical Magic Show: More Puzzles, Games, Diversions, Illusions and Other Mathematical Sleight-of-Mind from Scientific American in 1977.

Gardner’s columns radiated from the base of recreational mathematics to encompass quite a range of topics. Gardner stimulated my interest in the related hobby of abstract strategy board games, but that was only the beginning. Through Gardner I learned about the artist M.C. Escher, the 19th-century fad of four-dimensional space, anamorphic art, Raymond Llull (the godfather of the ars combinatoria), and numerous other fascinating topics reaching into obscure corners of intellectual history.

Gardner’s literary efforts were wide-ranging, but his other major claim to fame was his contribution to the 'skeptics' movement, decades before that movement was formally organized. I read Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science not long after I discovered Gardner. I returned to this book several times over the decades. I was never fully convinced of Gardner’s criteria for the demarcation of science and pseudoscience. In addition to dealing with obvious crackpots, he delved into fringe areas where rationality bleeds into irrationality, such as Alfred Korzybski’s General Semantics, William Reich’s radical psychoanalysis and orgonomy, and Marshall McLuhan’s theory of the media. Still, the range of Gardner’s examples supplied a background I could draw upon throughout my adult life. This book can be said to have stuck with me, but I will forever be indebted to Gardner for all the wonders to which I was introduced via his work on recreational mathematics.

Like so many others I felt a serious loss when Gardner died. I paid tribute to him in my Reason & Society blog, in my podcast of July 19, 2010, and in my web guide to Board Games & Related Games & Recreations. Though my priorities have shifted over the decades, I can still say that Martin Gardner enhanced my life in a particular and unique way. He will always be remembered fondly."

         — Ralph Dumain, librarian and independent scholar, Washington, DC (22 May 2014)

Wicked Company: Holbach's salon, Diderot, & friends

I started reading A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment by Philipp Blom. Blom asks why Voltaire and Rousseau are buried in the Pantheon while Holbach and Diderot are in unmarked graves in a rural church whose priest won't even acknowledge their existence. The book is a celebration of the Radical Enlightenment, particularly Holbach's salon. Unlike other nonbelievers who replicate the life-denying morality of Christianity. Holbach and Diderot, says the author, valorize pleasure and the affirmation of life in a meaningless universe.

Don't take my word for it. Here is the publisher's blurb:

The flourishing of radical philosophy in Baron Thierry Holbach's Paris salon from the 1750s to the 1770s stands as a seminal event in Western history. Holbach's house was an international epicenter of revolutionary ideas and intellectual daring, bringing together such original minds as Denis Diderot, Laurence Sterne, David Hume, Adam Smith, Ferdinando Galiani, Horace Walpole, Benjamin Franklin, Guillaume Raynal, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

In A Wicked Company, acclaimed historian Philipp Blom retraces the fortunes of this exceptional group of friends. All brilliant minds, full of wit, courage, and insight, their thinking created a different and radical French Enlightenment based on atheism, passion, reason, and truly humanist thinking. A startlingly relevant work of narrative history, A Wicked Company forces us to confront with new eyes the foundational debates about modern society and its future.

Imagination, logic, & life

Here is an email I wrote for a group several years ago, just retrieved:

10 February 2005

Imagination & logic, the shape of life & the shape of thought

While scooting about town yesterday, I ran several complete narratives through my head. Typing, however, is much slower, and I've been burning all my candles at all ends, so I'll have to content myself with summarizing what I'm not going to say.

(1) A narrative tentatively titled "Street Life Monadology" is an autobiographical review of the summer and fall of 1979, illustrating the juxtaposition of philosophical reflection and everyday life, and sometimes the unplanned coincidences between the two.  However, except for the entertainment value, I see no advantage in posting it here, because there are no generalizable conclusions to be drawn from it. My aim would have been to show the close relation between philosophizing and everyday life and my own driving motivations of the time, but in fact this is not the story that will do it, and the appropriate stories to be told would require even greater effort to reconstruct.

(2) I wanted to write up my perceptions of the effects of the philosophical culture of analytical philosophy on people I've known, to illustrate its debilitating effect on imagination and creativity. Which is not to say that I disavow the specific products that issue from this work—as much of it is stuff that interested me in the past—but I'm interested in what could be called philosophical culture, or the milieu that molds minds in a particular way, which is where I see the problem. This is by no means to validate its dishonest and hypocritical competitor, irrationalism. In any event, each is indispensable to the other.

(3) One problem with the association of life and philosophy is the unavoidability of being held hostage to a limited set of available ideas which at some point in time are attractive because they resonate so well with what is going on in the times, and individually. Only with time, more knowledge, and good fortune, is it possible to see that the shapes of both life and thought at an earlier stage of development were contoured in different ways than one suspected at the time. This is one reason to be wary.

(4) While I thought I saw the handwriting on the wall in the late '70s, as I always think I do, I could not see the shape of thought from a sufficiently wide angle. I only met Aant Elzinga, who does historical science studies in Sweden, in the 1980s, in another stage of my existence, and he gave me a few of his papers. But I didn't absorb the lessons even then. I wish I had read the following paper back in 1978 when he wrote it, and when I had no clue about the perspective contained therein, but he only sent it to me two years ago:

The Man of Science in a World of Crisis: A Plea for a Two-Pronged Attack on Positivism and Irrationalism.

________________

"The hidden harmony is better than the visible." — Heraclitus

Freethinker: a question of definition & taxonomy

Written September 23, 2010 at 2:31 am

A discussion is now in progress [Were Frederick Douglass and Langston Hughes Freethinkers?: You be the judge] as to who is to be classified as a "freethinker". There are standard dictionary definitions, but the implications are hardly unambiguous. Here are some links that delve further into the implications of this term.

"Freethought Revival" / Susan Jacoby
http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Secular-Philosophies/Freethought-Revival.aspx

Is "Freethinker" Synonymous with Nontheist?
Jeffery Jay Lowder
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/features/2000/lowder1.html

Rationalism  - It's Meaning and Implications
By Aparthib Zaman
http://www.mukto-mona.com/Special_Event_/rationalist_day/rationalism_aparthib.htm

Different Drummers: Nonconforming Thinkers in History.
Teacher Resource Section: Freethought and Religious Liberty:A Primer for Teachers
http://www.teachingaboutfreethought.org/booklets/bookfree.pdf

I am not satisfied with any of these approaches. My inclination is to tailor my taxonomy historically rather than to apply a single taxonomy to all times & places. By this I mean I see freethought as a historical cone, that takes in a wider spectrum in the past and excludes more and more unacceptable positions as we approach the present. But I have doubts that I can apply this principle authoritatively.

[See also:] Freethought by Amnon H Eden
 http://www.eden-study.org/freethought.html#WhatIsFreethought

David N. Myers on history vs theology in German-Jewish thought

David N. Myers, The Problem of History in German-Jewish Thought: Observations on a Neglected Tradition (Cohen, Rosenzweig, and Breuer). The Samuel Braun Lecture in the History of the Jews of Prussia. Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press. 2001.

While I'm finding Myers' work on the history of alternative Jewish nationalisms (with a focus on cultural Zionism) interesting, I'm finding myself irritated with this essay from the beginning. Myers ponders the opposition between self-authorizing, self-insulating theology and an historicism which undermines it.  Myers aims to show that this tension is not limited to Christianity or to Islam but has a substantial history in Jewish thought. Several instances are cited, for instance Baruch Kurzweil's war on the "Jerusalem School" for its unforgivable tendency "to lower Judaism from its absolute validity to a state of relativism." Moreover,

If the perverse fascination with mysticism went hand in hand with historicism, there was another partner in what Kurzweil considered the unholy trinity of secular modernity: nationalism. Where mysticism sought to subvert the normative tradition, nationalism aimed to "normalize" Judaism by removing its veil of uniqueness. In this regard, it was an ideal partner for historicism. Kurzweil was well aware that, in Europe, nationalism and historicism were close and mutually affirming allies from the early 19th century on. More often than not, historical scholarship had been called upon to tell the story of the nation. Nationalism, for its part, provided not only intellectual inspiration, but also an institutional home for historicism in the form of universities, learned societies, and large collaborative projects.

Myers finds this fascinating.

Making sense of Baruch Kurzweil's contentious battle with Jewish historicism is a fascinating challenge. One can readily point to a number of intersecting explanatory layers: his iconoclastic personality; his personal animosity and inferiority complex toward the Hebrew University (where he sought and failed to gain a professorial appointment); his ambivalence toward Zionism, and
particularly Zionist claims to intellectual or spiritual rejuvenation; his attention to the moral caesura occasioned by the Holocaust; and his uncommonly keen awareness, especially for a non-historian, that historicism was in the throes of crisis in postwar European intellectual culture.

While I too am drawn to solve historical-ideological puzzles, I am far from fascinated at the starting gate. Let's see where Myers takes us. He puts Kurzweil in abeyance while he takes us on a historical journey beginning in the 12th century. Judah Ha-Levi and Maimonides disdained history. But 18th century Enlightenment paved the way for 19th century historicism, which involves a new conception of mundane causality and context. This was bound to cause conflict between Jewish thinkers imbued with historicist prerogatives and traditional transcendentalists. But Myers is not so much interested in the fussy traditionalists as in "Jewish figures who, regardless of their adherence to traditional ritual, were deeply and unapologetically immersed in a secular intellectual world, had absorbed the impact of historicism, and sought to protest against it—from within." One example is Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch's opposition to Heinrich Graetz. Nietzsche, too, railed against historicism, and he was an influence on Jewish thinkers. Debate raged in Christian theological circles as well. And then there is the neo-Kantian movement. Hermann Cohen found historicism suspect, opposed Zionism, and argued against Emst Troeltsch.

The discussion of various figures continues until we come to a sustained discussion of Franz Rosenzweig, who was convinced he found an escape route from relativism, ultimately taking refuge in religious faith, with a great affinity to Christian theologians. He also chafed against Zionism, fearing the descent into time.

In this [1919] lecture on "The Spirit and Epochs of Jewish History," Rosenzweig declared that the Jewish people refused to succumb to time, indeed, refused to be reduced to a scheme of periodization. On the contrary, the "Jewish spirit breaks the shackles of (historical) epochs" and "walks undisturbed through history."

Myers moves on to Isaac Breuer, who sought to "overcome the emptiness of bourgeois life", but on an entirely different basis than, say, the Frankfurt School. To say the least: "Breuer's premise led him to conclude that the Jews, unlike other peoples, were not subordinate to the normal forces of nature or human will." Yet he believed in teaching history.

How Myers could sustain interest in this drivel is beyond me. Well, there's one obvious basis of interest:

Breuer was a steadfast believer in the existence of a Jewish nation and a fierce opponent of the idea of a secular Jewish state. Throughout his life he waged battle against Zionism, whose impious disregard for Torah rendered it "the most terrible enemy that has ever risen against the Jewish nation."

This does not mean that Breuer wanted to stay out of Palestine.

In his summation, Myers evinces a sense of regret and in some way sympathizes with the impetus to "resist the powerful pull of historicism" even while being irrevocably drawn toward it. But so what? None of this metaphysical folderol yields the slightest understanding of one's historical situation. Whatever Myers thinks is historicism is not historical materialism, which is excluded from consideration, and the resistance to secular historical consciousness is a denial of reality utterly opposed to any scientific, that is intellectually honest and non-delusional, comprehension of history and society. Ultimately, there is going to be a draw-down between Jewish thinkers who do not function within the confines of "Jewish thought", i.e. all the intellectual innovators who really matter, and a retreat into a specifically Jewish metaphysics, however permeated with the influence of Christianity and German philosophy. Myers is lost; he wants to say something, but he really has nothing to express other than regret over where he finds himself deposited in history.

James Hervey Johnson's "Superior Men": the old atheism & the new

Today's topic is the pervasive historical amnesia permeating debates over the "new atheists" both within and without the atheist/humanist milieu. I recently picked up this old booklet Superior Men, by James Hervey Johnson, published in 1949, which evidently is the same as the linked text. It's this sort of material--good or bad--that the critics of the "new atheists" leave totally out of account, as if there never was any past other than a "civilized", genteel intellectual tradition that the "new atheists" have somehow degraded. Au contraire, public atheists today are meek & tame compared to firebrands of the past, and certainly no less "cruder" or bellicose than some of them.

The Case Against Religion (originally, ''Superior Men'')

James Hervey Johnson was the successor of Charles Lee Smith, founder of the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism and editor of The Truth Seeker. This publication had a reputation for anti-Semitism. In any case, this is a subculture that has been ejected from historical memory in contemporary debates.

Edgar Saltus: The Anatomy of Negation (1)

Saltus, Edgar. The Anatomy of Negation. Rev. ed. London: Brentano's, 1889. (First ed., 1886.) Other copies of the 1886 edition are downloadable from Google books, including this one. Plain text file downloadable from Ebooks.

Edgar Saltus (1855-1921) was an acclaimed writer in his day who has dropped out of history. Still, there are those who wish to rehabilitate his reputations. See, e.g. Edgar Saltus: Forgotten Genius of American Letters? by Jason DeBoer. Several works by Edgar Saltus are available at Project Gutenberg. For another take on the type of writer Saltus was, see Edgar Saltus’s Imperial Orgy. You can also get a substantial preview of Edgar Saltus: The Man
By Marie Saltus.

Saltus prefaces The Anatomy of Negation by claiming it to be a historical compendium of anti-theism. It is not really a thorough history nor is it limited to atheism, but it could best be considered an historical narrative of skeptical and heterodox thinking, told from a rather equianimous point of view. Saltus considers the first thinker to break from religious thinking to be Kapila in ancient India. There is also an extensive account of the Buddha, and Lao Tzu to round out chapter 1. Saltus moves from China and India to ancient Greece and Rome. Lucretius is the star of the Roman saga.

Chapter 3 gives us a history of Christianity. Deep into this chapter, the skeptic Montaigne makes his appearance (103ff).

Chapter 4 takes off with the saintly Spinoza, who gets a good 10 1/2 pages. Then there is a lengthy treatment of Voltaire, followed by LaMettrie, Maupertuis, d'Holbach, Diderot, and d'Alembert.

With chapter 5 we encounter German idealism--Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and a passing mention of some of the Young Hegelians. Clearly Saltus does not understand Hegel. He gives far more attention to Arthur Schopenhauer.

Studies in a Dying Culture now on ThinkTwiceRadio

You are invited to listen to my Internet radio show newly named "Studies in a Dying Culture," on "Think Twice Radio", recorded in the awesome metropolis of Buffalo, New York. The latest program was recorded on 19 July: Episode 3: "A Dying Culture, Raggedy Poets, a Farewell to Martin Gardner, and the Historical Trajectory of Secular Humanism".

Episode description:

This episode begins with an introduction and explanation of the show's new title, "Studies in a Dying Culture," borrowed from the title of a book by Christopher Caudwell in the 1930s. Ralph next reads his poem "Raggedy Poet Society", a poem about the elder generation's attempt to express itself at a time when it has become culturally obsolete. Next comes a tribute to the recently deceased writer Martin Gardner, best known for his publications on mathematical recreations and on fringe "science" and extraordinary knowledge claims. The balance of this show is devoted to setting the historical stage for the evaluation of the ideologies of the atheist/humanist/skeptical movement(s) in the USA and current controversies dividing different factions of atheists and humanists.

The theme of this radio show, borrowed from my blog also titled Studies in a Dying Culture:

What is to become of critical culture in this dumbed-down millennium? We aim to provide historical, social, and philosophical perspective.

Read the Introduction to my blog for a somewhat fuller explanation. See my Christopher Caudwell bibliography for more information on the author of Studies in a Dying Culture (1938) and Further Studies in a Dying Culture (posthumous publication, 1949), wherefrom my upbeat title originates. Now is not a replay of the 1930s, but we too approach a civilizational crisis.

The bulk of Episode 3, setting the stage for an historical perspective on atheism, freethought, humanism, and skepticism, begins at 13:15.

The 26 minute mark is where discussion of the history of "humanism" and "atheism" in the USA in the 20th century begins.

At 40 minutes I ask: why these humanist manifestos, and I say a few words about the historical context probably relevant to each.

At the 44 minute mark, I question Paul Kurtz's Neo-Humanist Statement of Secular Principles and Values: Personal, Progressive, and Planetary and his Institute for Science and Human Values newly founded in the wake of the recent crisis within the Center for Free Inquiry. Fred Mohr adds some remarks on programs presented at CFI and the perspectives of Kurtz and other CFI members presented in these encounters.

Anthony Collins, Freethinker

Anthony Collins' classic work published in 1713,  A Discourse of Free-Thinking, is downloadable from Google books or archive.org.

For a detailed outline of Collins' life and work, see:

Anthony Collins (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Collins was also a pioneer viz. the notion of emergent properties!

Of course, don't forget the Wikipedia article on Anthony Collins.

You can check for other books by Collins, but I found this one I don't recall seeing featured in brief bios:

A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (1729).

Kwame Nkrumah's ideology: sources & contradictions

McClendon, John. "On Assessing the Ideological Impact of Garveyism on Nkrumaism: Political Symbolism Contra Theoretical Substance," APA Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience, vol. 2., no. 2, Spring 2003, pp. 61-72.

A positive spin on Nkrumah's cited influence from Marcus Garvey is often cited, but Nkrumah's final rejection of Garveyism is almost always conveniently omitted. McClendon searches for the root of Nkrumah's world view. He goes back to Nkrumah's early engagement with Christianity, evolving from Catholicism to Protestantism, and an inherent tension with African traditionalism even when the two coalesce. McClendon claims that Christianity is ineluctably tied to European imperialism, but find that what it shares in common with African traditionalism is philosophical idealism.

Doctrinaire Christianity, as the cultural expression of Western imperialism, insists on not only conferring the religious judgment that African traditionalism is a form of animistic paganism but also levies the imperialist (cultural) judgment that African traditionalism is primitive. The cultural imperatives inscribed in the Christian missionary movement works hand in glove with the political economic aims of Western imperialism. The common aim continues, for both the Christian missionary and the colonial mercenary, in terms of absolute rule over Africa. Thus colonial domination includes spiritual, cultural and above all political economic control. In light of these contradictions, Nkrumah, as a formally educated (or Western trained) African, attempts to find suitable philosophical resolution wherein the affirmation of African identity is on African rather than Western terms.

And:

The import of Nkrumah’s sustaining of African traditionalism resides in its function as the basis of African humanity. The very nature of being human is mediated through the particularity of African traditional culture. Universality, on these terms, cannot be abstracted from particularity. The particular is always an instance of the universal for Nkrumah. [. . . . ] Though Nkrumah explains this humanist aspect of African traditionalism later in Consciencism; as we shall see, it is an integral part of his worldview from his start as a student in Ghana.

Nkrumah considers African traditionalism to be intrinsically humanist and socialist as opposed to Christianity, and effectively anti-imperialist.

McClendon also seeks to know why Nkrumah would resort to Ethiopianism. The answer can be found in its opposition to anti-African redemptionism which imposes itself on African culture, a stance inherited from 19th century black nationalism. Garvey's adherence to redemptionism proves a sticking point for Nkrumah.

Garveyism serves as buttress for Nkrumah’s assault on cultural imperialism and, in turn, Marxism-Leninism provides a theory of anti-imperialism. Together they expand his nationalism beyond African traditionalism because they engender an appropriately suited nationalism i.e. a modern nationalism capable of confronting and combating national oppression and colonialism. Therefore, the content of Nkrumah’s socio-political philosophy is fashioned by a dialectical relationship between his African nationalism (at substance African traditionalism) with the critical infusion of Garveyism and Marxism-Leninism.

Crucial to Nkrumah's development was his decision to study in the USA instead of Britain. It was an expression of his anticolonialism, yet Nkrumah found himself neck-deep in American apartheid. Furthermore, Nkrumah was irritated with the pervasive bias of Western education. At Lincoln University, Nkrumah was able to imbibe the highest achievements of Western thought and to pursue African history at the same time in association with Black American scholars.

Nkrumah also held Western education amenable to amalgamation with traditional African culture.

These are the roots of Nkrumah's future Consciencism.

My thesis that Nkrumah’s nationalism is in substance African traditionalism is not to claim that his nationalism is reducible to traditionalism. Nkrumah in dialectically incorporating Western culture into African traditionalism recognizes therein the omnipresence of cultural crisis. Nonetheless, the task of forging a modern nationalism can only come by virtue of this crisis, the necessary birth pains for a new African civilization.

Others, such as John H. Clarke, never understood or appreciated Nkrumah's attempted synthesis.

In the USA, Nkrumah was directly connected to the Garvey movement. But the Garveyite movement appears to have inspired Nkrumah only on an emotional and symbolic level, while Nkrumah was intellectually influenced by Marxism. It is also noteworthy that the long time domination of pan-Africanism by Americans, redolent of redemptionism, eventually shifted to a greater dominance of an African leadership. And Nkrumah could not accept Garveyite redemptionism, nor his compromises with imperialism, not to mention Garvey's pro-capitalist and fascist ideology.

McClendon addresses Appiah's notion of intrinsic racism, associated with nationalism, and questions whether this is applicable to Nkrumah's conception of Pan-Africanism, as Appiah charges. But "Appiah fails to recognize the import of Nkrumah’s distinction regarding Black and African nationalism."

COMMENT: McClendon's contextualization of Nkrumah's developing ideology is eye-opening. It's been decades since I read Consciencism, but it never occurred to me to pursue it in this fashion. My memory has dimmed, but as I recall, the book opened with a concise, exceptionally articulate argument for materialism, followed by a lame attempt to make modern socialism congruent with traditional African society. I also think that one edition of the book includes an appendix giving a vacuous and pretentious argument for African liberation using the symbolism of set theory. And the very notion of coining a new philosophy just to call it African struck me as even pettier than the crypto-nationalism of big-time communist dictators like Stalin and Mao. Consciencism is not a real philosophy but an ideology with a philosophical component in it, i.e. the materialist component. But McClendon's essay explains how such an ideology came to be.

Science, Jews, & Secular Culture

My knowledge of intellectual history was pretty sketchy when I first encountered David A. Hollinger, in 1980 at a lecture he delivered on John Dewey, at a time when I became most suspicious of the irrationalism seemingly engulfing academia. That was long ago and far way. Then, in July 2001 I read this collection of essays:

Hollinger, David A. Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Contents:
Preface
Ch. 1 Introduction 3
Ch. 2 Jewish Intellectuals and the De-Christianization of American Public Culture in the Twentieth Century 17
Ch. 3 The "Tough-Minded" Justice Holmes, Jewish Intellectuals, and the Making of an American Icon 42
Ch. 4 Two NYUs and "The Obligation of Universities to the Social Order" in the Great Depression 60
Ch. 5 The Defense of Democracy and Robert K. Merton's Formulation of the Scientific Ethos 80
Ch. 6 Free Enterprise and Free Inquiry: The Emergence of Laissez-Faire Communitarianism in the Ideology of Science in the United States 97
Ch. 7 Academic Culture at the University of Michigan, 1938-1988 121
Ch. 8 Science as a Weapon in Kulturkampfe in the United States during and after World War II 155
Index 175

See also: Publisher's description, and:

Gad Freudenthal . "Review of David Hollinger, Science, Jews and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History," H-Judaic, H-Net Reviews, March, 1997. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=4116869069768.

Here is what I wrote about the book on 31 July 2001:

This book purports to fill in a gap in US intellectual history, on a generation of intellectuals that came to fruition in that interval sandwiched in between those legendary constructs known as "The Fifties" and "The Sixties" and not limited to the cohort of the "New York Intellectuals" or to people in high-profile areas in the humanities. The question is, what was the influence of secular Jewish intellectuals on academia and American intellectual life, helping to redirect the intellectual consensus away from Protestant hegemony and Catholic influence, towards a secular cosmopolitan ideal? This fellow has a number of interesting things to say in his introduction alone. He begins his first chapter with the contrast between the fascist T.S. Eliot's views (including his anti-Semitism and scandalous alliance with the segregationist Southern agrarians) and the Jewish secular cosmopolitanism he proposes to discuss.

There is also a curious footnote down the line claiming that contemporary multiculturalists are unaware of . . . the ethnopluralists of the immigrant generation [of a century ago]. . . .

Three of these essays, which I have just re-read, reveal implications for the value and limitations of the idealization of science. While this book does not explicitly mention freethought or humanism, obviously the valorization of the "scientific method" in the atheist/humanist literature must be related to the overall intellectual history regarding the purported value system of science. This material must be factored into an historical perspective on the ideology of secular humanism. I will comment on the relevant essays, citing their original journal publication.

First, a note on chapter 2:

Hollinger, David A. "Jewish Intellectuals and the De-Christianization of American Public Culture in the Twentieth Century," in New Directions in American Religious History: The Protestant Experience, ed. D. G. Hart & H. S. Stout (New York, 1996).

Also accounted for here is the general influence of the 1880-1924 mass immigration of various European ethnic groups, including the role of Catholicism in the WASP / immigrant /Jewish / secularization nexus. Hollinger claims that Jewish intellectuals exerted significant leverage and that they inspired progressive Protestants in the secularization process. The footnotes are especially valuable, esp. on the historical, sociological, and political dimensions of religion in the USA.

Hollinger, David A. "The Defense of Democracy and Robert K. Merton's Formulation of the Scientific Ethos," Knowledge and Society, 4 (1983): 1-15.

Merton's seminal 1942 essay "A Note on Science and Democracy" was inspired by the fight against fascism, but it was depoliticized with successive reprintings and citations. Merton, conscious of the Nazi hostility to democracy and science, formulated fundamental principles of the scientific enterprise: universalism, communism (i.e. common, public ownership of scientific knowledge, vs. secrecy), disinterestedness, and organized skepticism. Merton's emphasis on institutionalization of these values was a significant innovation, in contradistinction to other thinkers' linkage of science and democracy--e.g. Sidney Hook. Merton was also familiar with the work of the British Marxists on science, e.g. J. D. Bernal. Reference is also made to the formulations of Mark A. May at the April 1943 "Conference on the Scientific Spirit and Democratic Faith." Note also C. H. Waddington's 1941 The Scientific Attitude. How democracy related to socialism and particularly the USSR was a matter of dispute. Hollinger summarizes Merton's innovations (book, p. 91)., among which I will single out the notion of the "scientific community".

Hollinger, David A. "Free Enterprise and Free Inquiry: The Emergence of Laissez-Faire Communitarianism in the Ideology of Science in the United States," New Literary History, 21 (1990): 897-919.

The popular presentation of science in the USA was as a detached, individualistic enterprise until the explosion of a sociological conception of science in the 1960s. Vannevar Bush's writing on science in the 1940s was imbued with the language of individualism, reflecting the still-dominant discourse of laissez-faire capitalism and the popular characterization of science of earlier decades. The entanglement of the scientific research enterprise with big government in the wake of World War II would ultimately undermine this characterization. Bush saw the potential danger of centralized planning during the war as a threat to basic research.

Alfred North Whitehead saw science as driving history. Hans Reichenbach and the logical positivists fostered an individualistic conception of science. John Dewey, however, was unhappy with the notion of isolating science and society, but he was not equipped to grapple with the planning issue. The British Communists of the 1930s (Bernal, J. G. Crowther, et al) were advocates of planning, but they were as idealistic about science in their own way as others and their ideas were compatible with the notions of Dewey and Merton. Michael Polanyi opposed Bernalism and the practice of science in the USSR. (Note his essay "The Autonomy of Science".)

The notion of the autonomous scientific community can be traced from Merton to Polanyi to Edward Shils. Through this notion, laissez-faire and government-funded planning could be harmonized. The advancing notion of a virtuous, autonomous scientific community (a model of democracy in itself) was the precursor to the science studies of the '60s--enter Don K. Price and Thomas Kuhn.

Hollinger, David A. "Science as a Weapon in Kulturkampfe in the United States During and After World War II," Isis, 86 (1995): 440-454.

"Science" was an ideological weapon in the anti-fascist ideological struggle, outside of a strict concern for scientific method in the conduct of science itself. Robert K. Merton and Mark A. May linked science and democracy, in opposition to reactionary American Catholic intellectuals and Mortimer Adler. Other leading intellectuals, including John Dewey, contributed to the ideological struggle. Note the ties of the Catholic Church to fascism and the anti-Semitic dimension of the notion of a Christian culture. The anti-fascist orientation expanded to incorporate Soviet communism into the notion of totalitarianism. Popularizers of the scientific spirit included Margaret Mead and James B. Conant. Conant, however, did not idealize the scientist. Conant did not advocate an imitation of the actual practices of the scientific community (in which individual behavior was incorporated into a system of institutional checks-and-balances) but rather a cultivation of the independent scientific spirit of inquiry among the general population.

Even William H. Whyte's 1956 The Organization Man preserved an individualistic notion of the scientific spirit. Hans Reichenbach rigidly separated fact from value, (note his work The Rise of Scientific Philosophy, 1951,) but once the value of democracy was presumed, everything else was to follow strictly logically, i.e. on the basis of scientific method. Richard Hofstadter and Walter Metzger also promoted the morality of science in the struggle with McCarthyism.

In 1959 C. P. Snow was to enjoin the battle by highlighting a prevalent hostility in the humanities to the sciences in his controversial work The Two Cultures. Snow attacked literary modernism in particular as fostering political reaction and declared science as democratic and anti-racist. This was initially a British controversy, but humanistic intellectuals in the USA also grappled with the issues, but in a changed social context, in which traditional barriers--particularly anti-Semitism--were coming down in academia.

By the early 1960s the end of ideology and modernization theory were prominent themes. In this period seminal works on the historiography and sociology of science and the knowledge industry were produced. Hollinger mentions several individuals but devotes special attention to Don K. Price, Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper, and Merton. Popper, still fighting the old battles against totalitarianism and irrationalism, was unremittingly hostile to Kuhn and the sociological perspective. Merton, in a politically quite different context from the 1940s, became an inspiration to a new generation of sociologists of science.

Kuhn alone survived as a major voice in the "postmodernist" dispensation to come, and Michel Foucault provided ammunition for the anti-scientific revenge of the humanists reversing Snow's accusations and turning them against the scientists.

Hollinger does not avow a wish to return to the past, nor that the ideas of the 1940s through mid-'60s should survive unmodified, but while "science alone is not a sufficient foundation for culture", the heroic cosmopolitan scientific ideals of this now-eclipsed era would have to constitute the common language of any multicultural utopia.

I hope it is evident that the importance of work like Hollinger's cannot be gainsaid. These ideas in philosophy, sociology, the public advocacy of science, and related intellectual pursuits also interpenetrate the sphere of activity of freethinkers and secular humanists, who have much to learn from this history, and from intellectual history as an actual discipline. Atheists and humanists have advocated the scientific method for several decades, without specifying what it is and how it is to be applied beyond the natural sciences to all spheres of human knowledge and action, and without differentiating and accounting for the distinction between a set of scientific ideals and the actual institutionalized practice, politics, and economics of science. In this way the atheist/humanist movement itself becomes ideologically opaque.

Note also that white Christians and ex-Christians are not the only people in this society to be taken into account. A "Christian" nation has always been and must always be an anti-Semitic nation, and no infusion of Christian Zionism will ever make it otherwise, whichever political opportunists may wish to turn their heads. Nor can the tokenist fictitious construct of a "Judaeo-Christian tradition" obscure the underlying nastiness of a theocracy based on either of these components.

Failure of Nerve

In Defense of Science: Secular Intellectuals and the Failure of Nerve Thesis
by Stephen Weldon
Religious Humanism, vol. 30, nos. 1 & 2, winter/spring 1996, p. 30-39.

On the history of the science-religion warfare thesis, with reference to Sidney Hook, Paul Kurtz, and intellectual historian David Hollinger.

Contemporary secular humanists are almost unanimous in their opposition to anything called a religion, yet that was not always the case; secular humanism arose out of an influential religious tradition. During the first part of this century, radical Unitarians, members of Ethical Culture societies, and Reform Jews attempted to create a world view that was consonant with modern scientific knowledge, and they explicitly characterized their view as "religious." It was only during and after World War II that a growing number of humanists began to disavow that label, reserving it for supernaturalistic views.

In 1943 Sidney Hook applied classicist Gilbert Murray's notion linking a failure of nerve to the decline of Hellenic civilization to a perceived irresponsible retreat to superstition at his own historical moment when the fate of democracy hung in the balance. Isaac Asimov's celebrated 1941 science fiction story "Nightfall" also expresses this fear. Paul Kurtz evinced a similar concern in the 1960s and '70s, alarmed at a rising tide of irrationalism, including occultism, pseudoscience, and New Age thought. He was followed by the popularizers Jacob Bronowski and Carl Sagan. It is no accident that the preponderance of these militant humanist intellectuals were Jewish.