From: Paul Cockshott (wpc@DCS.GLA.AC.UK)
Date: Wed Nov 09 2005 - 08:15:14 EST
Rakesh Bhandari wrote: > Wasn't astrology what the entirety of Indian cosmology dismissed as? > Perhaps > there was some orientalism in the very charge of astrology to all non > Western > cosmologies. Perhaps they had some validity and surely were often based > on accurate measurements without which what you would call science would > have been impossible. I think Amartya Sen (no postmodernist) may have a > chapter > on this in his Argumentative Indian. > Don't know. But your point does not settle this for me. > Rakesh > This has bugger all to do with west versus east. If you read Ptolemy he is an increadible mishmash of astronomy, astrology and what would now be considered pop-psychology. The unscientific point about astrology is that uses an imaginary symbolic connection between the apparent positions of the planets to explain events on earth: the effeminacy of the inhabitants of asia minor being attributed to the 'influence of Saturn' for example in Ptolemy. There were all sorts of pre-scientific theories about stellar motions which might involve good observations which would later provide the raw material for scientific causal theories to be developed. But to constitute a science you need an epistemological break from the prior ideological explanations of the domain. A separation of the domain from its projected social determinants and its recognition as an autonomous material process. This break is essentially constituted by the Galliean and Newtonian theories of motion. It is obscurantism to bring in the charge of 'orientalism' in the dismissing of pre-scientific cosmologies. -- Paul Cockshott Dept Computing Science University of Glasgow 0141 330 3125
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