The Reenchantment of Science

Postmodern Proposals

Edited by David Ray Griffin

Subjects: Philosophy
Series: SUNY series in Constructive Postmodern Thought
Paperback : 9780887067853, 190 pages, May 1988
Hardcover : 9780887067846, 190 pages, July 1988

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Table of contents

Introduction to SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought

David Ray Griffin

Preface

1. Introduction: The Reenchantment of Science

David Ray Griffin

2. The Cosmic Creation Story

Brian Swimme

3. Postmodern Science and a Postmodern World

David Bohm

4. The Postmodern Challenge to Biology

Charles Birch

5. The Laws of Nature as Habits: A Postmodern Basis for Science

Rupert Sheldrake

6. Religious World Modeling and Postmodern Science

Frederick Ferré

7. Ecology, Science, and Religion: Toward a Postmodern Worldview

John B. Cobb, Jr.

8. The Postmodern Heresy: Consciousness as Causal

Willis W. Harman

9. Parapsychology and Postmodern Science

Stanley Krippner

10. Of Minds and Molecules: Postmodern Medicine in a Psychosomatic Universe

David Ray Griffin

Notes on Contributors and Centers

Index

Describes the move from modern, mechanistic science to a post-modern, organismic science.

Description

This book describes the move from modern, mechanistic science to a post-modern, organismic science. David Ray Griffin gives voice to a revisionary postmodernism, based on the work of Whitehead and Hartshorne that contrasts with the relativistic, nihilistic postmodernism of Heidegger, Derrida, and Wittgenstein. The book brings together some of today's most creative thinking about science.

Griffin's introductory essay summarizes the way in which the mechanistic view led to the disenchantment of science and the various reasons for the reversal of this process in our time. The essays on physics, cosmology, biology, ecology, psychosomatic medicine and parapsychology bring out the various dimensions of the reenchantment of science: the replacement of modern dualism and reductionism with an ecological, organismic paradigm; the priority of internal relations to external; the casal power of experience; the presence of experience, purpose, and intrinsic value throughout nature; influence at a distance; the laws of nature as habits; the presence of a divine whole in all the parts; and the history of the universe as a self-creative, meaningful story. This book gives a powerful voice to this emerging movement's proposals for a postmodern science, spirituality, and world order.

David Ray Griffin is Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the School of Theology at Claremont.