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
Quite similar was the question of classification. Just as we had to take
the responsibility for the staking-out of every section, we had also to
decide in favor of a certain grouping, if we desired to organize the
Congress and not simply to bring out haphazard results. The principles
which are sufficient for a mere directory would never allow the shaping
of a programme which can be the basis for synthetic work. Even a
university catalogue begins with a certain classification, and yet no
one fancies that such catalogue grouping inhibits the freedom of the
university lecturer. It is easy to say, as has been said, that the
essential trait of the scientific life of to-day is its
live-and-let-live character. Certainly it is. In the regular work in our
libraries and laboratories the year round, everything depends upon this
democratic freedom in which every one goes his own way, hardly asking
what his neighbor is doing. It is that which has made the specialistic
sciences of our day as strong as they are. But it has brought about at
the same time this extreme tendency to unrelated specialization with its
discouraging lack of unity; this heaping up of information without an
outer harmonious view of the world; and if we were really at least once
to satisfy the desire for unity, then we had not the right to yield
fully to this live-and-let-live tendency. Therefore some principle of
grouping had to be accepted, and whatever principle had been chosen, it
would certainly have been open to the criticism that it was a product of
arbitrary decision, inasmuch as other principles might have been
possible.
A classification which in itself expresses all the practical relations
in which sciences stand to each other is, of course, absolutely
impossible. A programme which should try to arrange the place of a
special discipline in such a way that it would become the neighbor of
all those other sciences with which it has internal relation is
unthinkable. On the other hand, only if we had tried to construct a
scheme of such exaggerated ambitions should we have been really guilty
of anticipating a part of that which the specialistic scholars were to
tell us. The Congress had to leave it to the invited participants to
discuss the totality of relations which practically exist between their
fields and others, and the organizers confined themselves to that
minimum of classification which just indicates the pure logical
relations, a minimum which every editor of encyclopedic work would be
asked to initiate without awakening suspicions of interference with the
ideas of his contributors.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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