Philosophy without science

pp. 294-305

in: Joseph Agassi, Science and culture, Berlin, Springer, 2003

Abstract

It takes training to open up to the enchantment of pondering the world through different people" s eyes and it takes training to benefit from this experience. This is the benefit from reading a diary, a correspondence, and even an account of the table talk of a public figure. Biographies — especially autobiographies — facilitate this practice. They may be good reading as art or as stories, especially stories of great deeds seen through the eyes of a participant. They may also display role models. Bertrand Russell has noted the importance of the role models in Plutarch's famous Lives. Somerset Maugham said the same of Kipling's fiction. Intellectual biographies may offer all this and more. They may satisfy the wish to learn about lives of great thinkers. (Outstanding examples here are Ruth Borchard on John Stuart Mill and Constance Reid on David Hilbert.) Their correspondences or autobiographies may supply details about admirable ideas. (Outstanding examples here are many correspondences — between the Mozarts and between the Van Goghs, between Malthus and Ricardo and between Kelvin and Maxwell — as well as autobiographies, such as those of Mill, R. G. Collingwood, and Buckminster Fuller.)