New Documentary: “The Magician’s Twin: C.S. Lewis and the Case against Scientism”

If you had gone one step further and used Amazon’s “Search Inside” feature, you would have seen that about half of the other critics you named are in fact mentioned in the book, at least in footnotes. Reading the book itself may provide further enlightenment.

Thank you for bringing that to my attention. I admit I acted hastily when I didn't see the names I was expecting in the index. I should have known better, too, having seen many books where the indices were a less than fully reliable guide to the contents. I make no promise to read it, but I appreciate that it's a better book than I'd initially thought.Kantian Naturalist

November 19, 2012

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...it’s hard to assess what makes Lewis‘s critique of scientism distinctive, interesting, and important.

Well, yes... I imagine that it would be a little harder than simply reading the index and table of contents. If you had gone one step further and used Amazon's "Search Inside" feature, you would have seen that about half of the other critics you named are in fact mentioned in the book, at least in footnotes. Reading the book itself may provide further enlightenment. That said, I was a little disappointed in the video. I thought it leaned too much towards emotional images and dramatic screenshots of frightening headlines without clearly explaining the difference between science and scientism or exposing the fallacies of scientism. While it made some good points, especially in regard to credulity - the tendency of true believers to blindly accept any idea proposed in the name of "science" - I thought those points were only weakly supported, if at all.sagebrush gardener

November 19, 2012

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I presume that this is based on The Magician's Twin: C. S. Lewis on Science, Scientism, and Society by John West. I perused the index and table of contents, and found it odd that there's no mention of all the other critics of scientism, such as Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Adorno, Dewey, Sellars, Haack, Putnam, Habermas, Feyerabend, Gadamer, and Schumacher. Without that intellectual context, it's hard to assess what makes Lewis's critique of scientism distinctive, interesting, and important.Kantian Naturalist

November 19, 2012

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