Event Title
Science and human nature: How to go from nature to ethics
Start Date
26-6-2010 2:45 PM
End Date
26-6-2010 4:15 PM
Description
This presentation is part of the Beauvoir and Arendt on Science track.
Both Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir address the limits of modern or classical, mathematical science for philosophy in general, and ethics in particular, and they do so in a manner that does not reject modern science, but clearly articulates its limitations. Arendt argues that by using mathematical symbols, the science of the structure of the human mind, scientists were able to free themselves from simply observing natural phenomena; instead, they placed nature under experimental conditions developed by the human mind, replicating cosmic processes but without being able to understand them. Beauvoir argues against “an upsurging as stupid as the Epicurean atom [the clinamen] which turned up at any moment whatsoever from any direction whatsoever.” In mathematical and physical terms, the clinamen corresponds to deterministic chaos, the dynamical system governed by fixed rules but oriented by a strange attractor that makes existence a moment by moment deviation, from nothingness to nothingness, where each new moment is an effect of the past but breaks completely with that past which can then be defined as nothingness. Each argues that human nature, unlike physical nature calls for a past that influences the present and future, a view of time that arises with a logic and ethics of ambiguity.
Science and human nature: How to go from nature to ethics
This presentation is part of the Beauvoir and Arendt on Science track.
Both Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir address the limits of modern or classical, mathematical science for philosophy in general, and ethics in particular, and they do so in a manner that does not reject modern science, but clearly articulates its limitations. Arendt argues that by using mathematical symbols, the science of the structure of the human mind, scientists were able to free themselves from simply observing natural phenomena; instead, they placed nature under experimental conditions developed by the human mind, replicating cosmic processes but without being able to understand them. Beauvoir argues against “an upsurging as stupid as the Epicurean atom [the clinamen] which turned up at any moment whatsoever from any direction whatsoever.” In mathematical and physical terms, the clinamen corresponds to deterministic chaos, the dynamical system governed by fixed rules but oriented by a strange attractor that makes existence a moment by moment deviation, from nothingness to nothingness, where each new moment is an effect of the past but breaks completely with that past which can then be defined as nothingness. Each argues that human nature, unlike physical nature calls for a past that influences the present and future, a view of time that arises with a logic and ethics of ambiguity.