This deeply informative book examines the human cognitive capacities that animate all creative science and that lie at the methodological heart of phenomena-centered science. Douglas Sloan focuses his broad knowledge of education, philosophy, science, and the humanities on various modes of cognition and reveals their profound implications for the future of human culture. In his chapter on science he sheds a clear light on the current scientific enterprise and its diverse approaches—from positivistic scientism and the instrumental conception of science to systems theory, Bohm’s implicate order, and Polanyi’s personal knowledge. He sees three developments as holding rich promise for a genuine connection between scientific knowing and that of the radical humanities and traditional wisdom:

1. “Above all in importance has been the discovery of the multi-dimensional structure of reality in which lower orders with their own relative autonomy are at the same time open to the higher and capable of being determined by the higher.”

2. … “the radical implications of participation remain and are being increasingly recognized. … The intelligibility in the mind of the human being discovers the intelligibility in the universe.”

3. “Newness in knowing—new perspectives, new lines of inquiry, a new grasp of the whole, a new level of meaning—comes only in an immediately participative act of Insight or Imagination.” (pp. 127-130)

This book is for anyone who is interested in consciously incorporating insight and imagination into science without losing the clarity, rigor and exactitude that characterize modern science.

Contents

1. Fragmented Thinking, Broken World
2. Toward the Recovery of Wholeness: The Radical Humanities and Traditional Wisdom
3. Toward the Recovery of Wholeness: Another Look at Science
4. Insight-Imagination
5. Living Thinking, Living World: Toward an Education of Insight-Imagination
Bibliographic Essay
Index