Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘Science’ occupies a contested and philosophically charged position that cannot be reduced to either uncritical celebration or wholesale rejection. The central tension is epistemological: science is widely acknowledged as the West’s dominant lodestar for truth, having displaced religion in that role, yet multiple voices within the corpus insist that this displacement is incomplete and, if taken as absolute, actively distorting. McGilchrist argues at length that science is necessarily provisional, alive, and uncertain — a source of genuine wonder when properly understood — but that its pathological form banishes wonder and narrows understanding. Jung draws a sharper boundary: science is phenomenological in character and cannot establish religious truth, which belongs to a categorically different order of experience. Giegerich’s Hegelian reading goes further still, positioning Jungian psychology as simultaneously ‘sublated science’ and ‘sublated religion,’ a dialectical achievement that cancels, retains, and elevates both. Romanyshyn’s Diltheyan frame distinguishes natural-scientific explanation from humanistic understanding, arguing that the life of mind requires interpretive methods irreducible to causal analysis. Snell traces the very birth of scientific thinking to structures latent in Greek language. Together these voices map a field in which science is neither enemy nor sovereign but a partial — and therefore dangerous when absolutized — mode of engaging reality.
science which has taken over from religion as the lodestar of our age … science alone holds out the promise of stable knowledge on which we can rely to build our picture of the world.
McGilchrist identifies science as the West’s ascendant authority on truth, a cultural role inherited from religion, and proceeds to interrogate whether that promise of stable knowledge is warranted.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
science which has taken over from religion as the lodestar of our age … science alone holds out the promise of stable knowledge on which we can rely to build our picture of the world.
Duplicate locus of the same thesis establishing science as modernity’s epistemic sovereign, the starting point for McGilchrist’s critical examination.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
Science is, or should be, a source of wonder that opens out our understanding of the world … the same is true of anyone who accepts only science. For it can also become a tool that banishes wonder, stunts imagination and narrows down understanding.
McGilchrist articulates a dual valuation of science: indispensable at its best, destructive when totalised, the difference lying not in science itself but in the quality of mind brought to it.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
Science is, or should be, a source of wonder that opens out our understanding of the world … it can also become a tool that banishes wonder, stunts imagination and narrows down understanding.
Parallel locus of McGilchrist’s defence of science-in-principle combined with critique of science-as-ideology.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
science is, and must be, alive, provisional and uncertain, not, as many non-scientists are led to assume, laid out cold on a slab.
McGilchrist argues that science’s genuine character is one of living inquiry under uncertainty, and that its popular image as settled fact is a distortion that disempowers rather than empowers understanding.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
science is, and must be, alive, provisional and uncertain, not, as many non-scientists are led to assume, laid out cold on a slab.
Duplicate locus emphasising science’s inherent provisionality as both its epistemic virtue and the corrective to its ideological abuse.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
There is no conflict between religion and science … Science cannot establish a religious truth. A religious truth is essentially an experience, it is not an opinion … Our science is phenomenology.
Jung demarcates science as phenomenological in method and therefore constitutively incapable of adjudicating religious experience, which belongs to a different — and non-negotiable — order of reality.
, Collected Works Volume 18: The Symbolic Life, 1976thesis
JUNG’s psychology is both sublated religion and sublated science. ‘Sublation’ is the translation of the Hegelian term Aufhebung in the threefold sense of a) negating and canceling, b) rescuing and retaining, c) elevating or raising to a new
Giegerich positions Jungian depth psychology as a dialectical achievement that has both cancelled and preserved the positivities of scientific and religious thinking, raising them to a higher logical status.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
Faith, like true science, is not static and certain, but a process of exploration that always has in sight enough of what it seeks to keep the seeker journeying onward.
McGilchrist draws a structural analogy between faith and science as modes of directed, open-ended inquiry, countering the assumption that science deals in certainties where faith deals in mere belief.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
Faith, like true science, is not static and certain, but a process of exploration that always has in sight enough of what it seeks to keep the seeker journeying onward.
Parallel passage linking the epistemological character of genuine science to that of genuine faith as co-exploratory rather than adversarial modes.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
We explain Nature, while the life of mind or spirit is understood … the laws that apply to the natural sciences do not apply to those human sciences, like art and history, which require different ways of knowing.
Drawing on Dilthey, Romanyshyn argues that the methodology of natural science is categorically inapplicable to human-science inquiry, where understanding rather than causal explanation is the proper cognitive goal.
, The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind, 2007supporting
science is technical perception, and it extends vital perception in a circumstance that supposes a preliminary elaboration … Technical excess is profitable for the development of the sciences.
Simondon reframes science as an elaborated form of perception mediated by technical operation, locating it within a continuum of psychosomatic engagement with the world rather than above or outside it.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting
Greek is the only language which allows us to trace the true relation between speech and the rise of science; for in no other tongue did the concepts of science grow straight from the bo
Snell traces the origin of scientific thinking to specific linguistic structures in ancient Greek, arguing that the conceptual apparatus of science is not universal but historically emergent from a particular language-world.
, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953supporting
the mode of the thought, or the type of a science, is determined by the grammatical categories which are employed in the manipulation of the words.
Snell argues that the form and type of any scientific inquiry is shaped by the grammatical structures through which its practitioners think, linking the origins of science to the discovery of logical relations in language.
, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953supporting
myths … have not been, and can never be, displaced by the findings of science, which relate rather to the outside world than to the depths that we enter in sleep.
Campbell argues that scientific findings and mythic truths address incommensurable domains — the outer world versus the interior depths of psyche — and that science therefore cannot supersede myth as a guide to inner life.
, Myths to Live By, 1972supporting
the findings of science were more or less entirely socially constructed … not at all a position … that I would support, though I would not support the idea that they were always wholly immune from social construction, either.
McGilchrist steers between naive scientific realism and postmodern social constructivism, maintaining that science’s findings have genuine but not absolute independence from cultural context.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
the findings of science were more or less entirely socially constructed … not at all a position … that I would support, though I would not support the idea that they were always wholly immune from social construction, either.
Parallel locus of McGilchrist’s nuanced rejection of both naïve realism and total constructivism regarding scientific knowledge.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
the West’s sense of its own superiority shifted seamlessly in the early nineteenth century from its religion to its science … these ‘priests of nature’ did not honour nature herself so much as the human capacity to control nature.
McGilchrist historicises science’s cultural ascent as a substitution of one dogmatic authority for another, whose animating ethos is dominion over nature rather than wonder before it.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting
It is both a useful tool, and it is an evil – how necessary depends on what you want science to do for you … if you want to und
McGilchrist applies his hemispheric framework to evaluate the abstraction central to biological science, arguing that its value or disvalue depends entirely on the cognitive purpose it is meant to serve.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
It is both a useful tool, and it is an evil – how necessary depends on what you want science to do for you.
Parallel locus of McGilchrist’s context-dependent evaluation of scientific abstraction within biology.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
My purpose is to explain in simple terms how the new science of mind emerged from the theories and observations of earlier scientists into the experimental science that biology is today.
Kandel positions neuroscience as the fulfilment of a progressive scientific programme to explain mind through biology, representing the practitioner’s confident endorsement of science as the path to self-knowledge.
, In search of memory the emergence of a new science of mind, 2006supporting
the fun of doing science is to explore domains of knowledge that are relatively unknown. Like anyone who ventures into the unknown, I have at times felt alone, uncertain, without
Kandel reflects on the personal phenomenology of scientific practice — uncertainty, solitude, intellectual exhilaration — offering a lived counterpoint to idealised or purely methodological accounts of science.
, In search of memory the emergence of a new science of mind, 2006aside
Can Astrology Ever Become an Empirical Science? Astrology, the algebra of life.
Rudhyar raises the question of whether astrology can meet the criteria of empirical science, framing the issue as one of reformulation rather than rejection of scientific standards.
16. Science and Western Thought
Pauli’s essay title signals an engagement with the cultural and philosophical embedding of science in Western intellectual history, relevant to the corpus’s broader interrogation of science’s claims.
, Writings on Physics and Philosophy, 1994aside
the Greeks had a predilection for explaining qualities in terms of spatial shapes … Basically this is the same scientific approach as we find in the modern sciences: the reduction of sense impressions to a mathematically intelligible form.
Snell identifies a continuity between Greek proto-scientific thought and modern science in their shared drive to translate qualitative experience into mathematical form.
, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953aside