International Congress of Arts and Science, Volume 1: Philosophy and Metaphysics
Philosophy
International Congress of Arts and Science, Volume 1: Philosophy and Metaphysics
Conference proceedings; Medicine -- Congresses; Science and the humanities -- Congresses; Technology -- Congresses
certainly have to know theoretically that a few grains of antipyrine
introduced into the organism have an influence on those brain centres
which regulate the temperature of the human body. Yet if the chemist
does not share the interest of the physician who wants to fight a fever,
he would have hardly any reason for examining this particular relation,
as it hardly throws light on the chemical constitution as such. In this
way we might say in general that the relation of the world to us as
acting individuals is in principle contained in the total system of the
relations of our world of experience, but has a strictly accidental
place there and can never be in itself a centre around which the
scientific data are clustered, and science will hardly have an interest
in giving any attention to its details.
This relation of the world, the physical, the psychical, the historical,
and the normative world, to our individual, practical purposes can,
however, indeed become the centre of scientific interest, and it is
evident that the whole inquiry receives thereupon a perfectly new
direction which demands not only a completely new grouping of facts and
relations, but also a very different shading in elaboration. As long as
the purpose was to understand the world without relation to our
individual aims, science had to gather endless details which are for us
now quite indifferent, as they do not touch our aims; and in other
respects science was satisfied with broad generalizations and
abstractions where we have now to examine the most minute details. In
short, the shifting of the centre of gravity creates perfectly new
sciences which must be distinguished; and if we call them again
theoretical and practical sciences, it is clear that this difference has
then no longer anything to do with the philosophical problems from which
we started.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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