Science and scholarship in historical perspective

Abstract

The "making" of the modern world cannot be divorced from the allpermeating influence of the modern natural sciences. Although the Renaissance spirit, aimed at exploring the possibilities of human rationality in an unrestricted way, initially proceeded from the conviction that the human personality ought to be appreciated as both free and autonomous (in the sense of being a law-unto-itself), the successes of the natural sciences ruled th the day for quite some time. During the Age of Enlightenment (the 18 century) Immanuel Kant established the influential separation of "science" and "faith" later on known in the form of the opposition between facts and values. The dominance of positivism and neo-positivism during the first half th of the 20 century continued the legacy of the natural science ideal but slowly but certainly it had to give way to the emerging dominant trends of the th second half of the 20 century particularly the post World War two existentialism, language philosophy, neo-Marxism, the hermeneutical tradition up to the most recent "grand" claims of the postmodernism against "grand met narratives". A brief analysis of the relationship between culture and civilization (with special reference to the views of MacIver) terminates in some systematic perspective on the meaning and the future task of science and scholarship.