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CP 1-3. I was thoroughly grounded not only in all that was then known of physics and chemistry, but also in the way in which those who were successfully advancing knowledge proceeded. I have paid the most attention to the methods of the most exact sciences, have intimately communed with some of the greatest minds of our times in physical science, and have myself made positive contributions -- none of them of any very great importance, perhaps -- in mathematics, gravitation, optics, chemistry, astronomy, etc. I am saturated, through and through, with the spirit of the physical sciences. I have been a great student of logic, having read everything of any importance on the subject, devoting a great deal of time to medieval thought, without neglecting the works of the Greeks, the English, the Germans, the French, etc., and have produced systems of my own both in deductive and in inductive logic. In metaphysics, my training has been less systematic; yet I have read and deeply pondered upon all the main systems, never being satisfied until I was able to think about them as their own advocates thought. END
C. P. Snow will not be a name that resonates with many readers but as Rachel Carson once sounded the alarm on the environment Snow wrote a warning to the academic community which it has studiously avoided addressing. It was a warning against specialization. And more particularly the following: "If scientists have the future in their bones, then the traditional culture responds by wishing the future did not exist".
I would move on to lament the continuation of the problem if things were the same. But they are not.
The Internet has made the notion of the academy as an intellectual island and science as beyond understanding old school.
More and more individuals who can think and read can become self-educated rather in the way that Peirce describes his own development -- covering the waterfront.
Peirce could not do that without merging metaphysics with science. And after a century of resistance to the prompting of science itself, we are finally at a point when the dam has broken and the flood of realizations based on verifiable quantum premises is starting to irrigate the dry soil of binary thinking and isolated disciplines. The result is a rise in holistic awareness of the unity of everything and the porousness of past philosophies that are mired in the dogmas of materialism.
The error which Peirce warns us against is in throwing out the baby of triadic understanding with the bathwater of the past.
Everything that has ever happened is a sign of the way progress happens. We really do live and learn.
C. P. Snow will not be a name that resonates with many readers but as Rachel Carson once sounded the alarm on the environment Snow wrote a warning to the academic community which it has studiously avoided addressing. It was a warning against specialization. And more particularly the following: "If scientists have the future in their bones, then the traditional culture responds by wishing the future did not exist".
I would move on to lament the continuation of the problem if things were the same. But they are not.
The Internet has made the notion of the academy as an intellectual island and science as beyond understanding old school.
More and more individuals who can think and read can become self-educated rather in the way that Peirce describes his own development -- covering the waterfront.
Peirce could not do that without merging metaphysics with science. And after a century of resistance to the prompting of science itself, we are finally at a point when the dam has broken and the flood of realizations based on verifiable quantum premises is starting to irrigate the dry soil of binary thinking and isolated disciplines. The result is a rise in holistic awareness of the unity of everything and the porousness of past philosophies that are mired in the dogmas of materialism.
The error which Peirce warns us against is in throwing out the baby of triadic understanding with the bathwater of the past.
Everything that has ever happened is a sign of the way progress happens. We really do live and learn.
