History of Russian Philosophy From the Tenth Through the Twentieth Centuries Book

The History of Science by Peter Whitfield is a brief overview of science history that goes badly off the rails.

By way of evidence one has to point no further than the authors repeated use of the terms ‘western science’ (to presumably describe methodological naturalism) and ‘non-western science’ (to describe ... ?? I don’t know, maybe things you feel to be true in your gut?). It’s pure spiritual gobbledygook.

Here’s the thing, there is no such thing as ‘western science’ or ‘non-western science’ or ‘Jewish science’ or ‘Buddhist science’ or ‘Atheist Science’ … there’s only ‘science’. Science is a methodology / process that is used to ensure our feelings, biases and intuitions don’t lead to an erroneous conclusion. Science produces evidence with which to test a proposition … either that evidence supports that proposition or it doesn’t. Over time, as experiments are replicated, the evidence may converge to provide closer and closer approximations of the truth. Scientists utilize methodological naturalism in this endeavor because it works as opposed to super-naturalism which has not been shown to exist. Whatever Whitfield has in mind when he refers to ‘non-western science’ is nothing more than magical thinking.

The author also floats the easily discredited idea that science, like religion, is a system of belief. Of course, it’s not. Science is true whether you believe in it or not. It is based on evidence and is used because it works. And unlike religion, it discards old ideas when evidence demonstrates them to be false. When a scientist says they ‘believe’ the sun will rise tomorrow, it is fundamentally different from say, a belief in an afterlife. The rising of the sun is based on an understanding of the cosmological laws of the universe and empirical evidence. Whereas the other is decidedly not.

I wasn’t able to find any information about Whitfield, other than he is the former director of Stanford’s International Map Centre in London. I was unable to determine if he has an ideological axe to grind or is just a sloppy thinker with a poor understanding of science. In the end he does present some history of science, but his editorializing as he does so is crap.