Science with conscience
29
Sep
A tiny virus challenged us and put us in front of a serious pandemic,
a volcano that erupts and whose end even volcanologists and geologists still see as unpredictable.
The great mark of contemporary science is the end of certainties, the uncertainty principle first announced by Heisenberg and then certified by research in particle physics and astrophysics, Karl Popper developed the principle of falsifiability for science and Gödel’s Paradox says that no axiological system can be complete and consistent at the same time.
This should return us to humility, the Enlightenment does not mean that science has triumphed, but that it has discovered its limits and that it must give space to ethics and a humanism that completes man beyond his rationality.
Edgar Morin wrote “Science with a conscience”, presents a double challenge: it points out the ethical and moral problems that contemporary science has, whose multiple and prodigious powers of manipulation impose on scientists and citizens, and in a certain way, the entire humanity problem. political and private control of the discoveries.
According to Morin, the concepts of progress and knowledge that are related must be reordered, so progress is not reduced to the organization of economic development, and knowledge is not restricted to providing information, but also to overcoming theoretical social structures that condition their configuration to a way of thinking.
He clarifies on pages 9 and 10 that “the classic dogma of separation between science and philosophies, the sciences of this century all encounter fundamental philosophical questions: “what is the world? the nature? life? The man? reality?) and that the greatest scientists since Einstein, Bohr and Heisenberg have turned into wild philosophers.” (MORIN, 2005).
Remember in the preface also the precept of Rebelais: “Science without conscience is only the ruin of the soul.” (p. 9).
MORIN, E. Science without a conscience. Editing revised and modified by the author. (Translation by Maria D. Alexandre and Maria Alice Sampaio Dória). 9th Ed. Rio de Janeiro: Bertrand Brasil, 2005.
