Modern Science democratized… or Barbaric …
I have been reading Michel Henry’s Barbarism and Phillip Ball’s Curiosity at the same time, Henry’s book is an attack on scientism which he defines in terms of Galilean science, the matheme. It is simply by chance that I am reading Phillip Ball’s work which corrects Henry’s false universalism of science as a matheme. This is done by referring to the actual history of science rather than accepting the Galilean official history (is this a continental rewrite of the histories of science I wonder). What’s missing and what became obvious in Curiosity is the democratic lineage of empiricism, the equality of proofs and the sheer everydayness of empirical science. A tendency which Ball identifies as being first documented and developed in Roger Bacon and Francis Bacon’s work. The difference between Galileo and Bacon is well put in this brief sentence on ranci Bacon by Ball “…The important point, however, was not the details but that is is a quasi-mechanical step-by-step approach process, so that anyone could conduct it, without recourse to genius”
“Our method discovering the sciences merely levels men’s wits and leaves little to their superiority since it achieves everything by the most certain rules and demonstrations” Francis Bacon - The Novum Organum democratizes science and by default the universe.
