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
Almost every practical science can be shown in this way to apply a
number of theoretical sciences; it synthesizes them to a new unity. But
better, we ought to say, that it is a unity in itself from the start,
and that it only overlaps with a number of theoretical sciences. If we
want to classify the practical sciences, we have thus only the one
logical principle at our disposal: we must classify them in accordance
with the group of human individual aims which control those different
disciplines. If all practical sciences deal with the relation of the
world of experience to our individual practical ends, the classes of
those ends are the classes of our practical sciences, whatever
combinations of applied theoretical sciences may enter into the group.
Of course a special classification of these aims must remain somewhat
arbitrary; yet it may seem most natural to separate three large
divisions. We called them the Utilitarian Sciences, the Sciences of
Social Regulation, and the Sciences of Social Culture. Utilitarian we
may call those sciences in which our practical aim refers to the world
of things; it may be the technical mastery of nature or the treatment of
the body, or the production, distribution, and consumption of the means
of support. The second division contains everything in which our aim
does not refer to the thing, but to the other subjects; here naturally
belong the sciences which deal with the political, legal, and social
purposes. And finally the sciences of culture refer to those aims in
which not the individual relations to things or to other subjects are in
the foreground, but the purposes of the teleological development of the
subject himself; education, art, and religion here find their place. It
is, of course, evident that the material of these sciences frequently
allows the emphasis of different aspects. For instance, education, which
aims primarily at self-development, might quite well be considered also
from the point of view of social regulation; and still more naturally
could the utilitarian sciences of the economic distribution of the means
of support be considered from this point of view. Yet a classification
of sciences nowhere suggests by its boundary lines that there are no
relations and connections between the different parts; on the contrary,
it is just the manifoldness of these given connections which makes it so
desirable to become conscious of the principles involved, and thus to
emphasize logical demarcation lines, which of course must be obliterated
as soon as any material is to be treated from every possible point of
view. It may thus well be that, for instance, a certain industrial
problem could be treated in the Normative Sciences from the point of
view of ethics; in the Historical Sciences, from the point of view of
the history of economic institutions; in the Physical Sciences, from the
point of view of physics or chemistry; in the Mental Sciences, from the
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