>Carrol writes:
> >Several years ago there was an >interesting discussion on PEN-L >as to
>what
>the German word for >"science" meant in cultivated >German of the
> >second half of the 19th century -- >that is the meaning which would be
> >relevant in examining the claims of >Marx and Engels to be practicing
> >science. I don't remember what >conclusion if any the PEN-L >thread came
>to.
The German word is Wissenschaft, and it mean disciplined, systematic knowledge, thus, Hegel's Science of Logic (the Greater Logic). It didn't have the narrower sense that the word science does for us today, with the implication that it empirically guided quantitative research into natural or social phenomena. However, I think our present discusccoion is not into what Marx or Engels of more or less cultivated late 19th century Germans may or may not have meant, but whether there is any point now in saying that Marxian thinking is scientific in a sense that is meaningful to us today. At least that is what I was going on about.
>
>Like a ghost something like the full thread title has come back to LBO
>Talk.
>
>I suspect that what we so easily call 'scientists' today are really mostly
>just technicians. They do experiments under supervision with about as much
>thought as a lab technician gives to your urine specimen. And if you go
>back
>far enough they were alchemists and apothecaries.
>
I'll tell my brother-in-law, a UCLA neurochemist, that he and his graduate assistants are mindless grunts, he can take it from you, eh? Actually my old physics prof, when I last asked him, he, how's science, said, How should I know? All I do is write grants,
>I'm going to re-read the Magic Mountain this year and let you know if I get
>any insights from Thomas Mann.
Insights aplenty, but into science? You might do better reading Einstein and Heisenberg. . . . .
jks
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