Greg Marsh: “The Ontological Roots of Western Science.”

Title: Greg Marsh: “The Ontological Roots of Western Science.”
Location: Bordertown Coffee 325 16th Avenue SE Minneapolis, MN
Description: This gist of my thesis is that ontology is a factor more fundamental than either reason or environment–factors necessary but not sufficient– for determining the likelihood of the natural sciences developing in a given culture. Many advanced cultures demonstrated high rational acumen, proximity to natural resources, and profound scientific potential but none was the locus of a scientific revolution as occurred in the West. With regard to such a revolution, the history of science shows many “false starts” and “near misses.” Such failures, including the post-Aristotelian stagnation of Greek science, were due to prevailing cultural ontologies that undergirded ideas of nature that were conceptually inhospitable to ongoing natural science development. We learn that the dynamism that enabled Western science to overcome the “pattern of false starts and near misses” was the rise, beginning in Late Antiquity, of a cultural context that embodied a scientifically affirmative idea of nature that is rooted in Hebrew/Christian ideas of space and time.
Start Time: 9:00
Date: 2010-05-19
End Time: 11:00