I am at an impasse. At the moment I have a Heidegger book opened to a chapter on “Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics.” I just picked up the book and this jumped out at me. The reason I’m saying this is that I can’t quite figure out what to do for my next move in my research project. So far I want to make a general claim about Hegelian constructivism in the sciences. Ok. There’s that. I want to do it by tracing the trajectory of a strand of Modern Science, specifically ideas centered around Copernican astonomy. This rough tracing of the history of the development in the Modern Sciences (centered around astronomy) would, hopefully, go well with a parallel treatment of the development of Modern Epistemology. I want to avoid glorifying what is known as the Copernican Revolution in philosophy espoused by Kant (although the mentioning of it as important in my project is certainly not out of the question). Right now though it is a question of “where do I go from here?” The Hegelian constructivist theme should be a major thread running throughout the paper, and I’d also like to contrast it with the ideas of other contemporary thinkers. I have begun with Copernicus (as astronomer) himself as my mainly arbitrary starting point (though I do mention previous Western and Islamic progress in astonomy) and have made the move to Giordano Bruno, the Copernican philosopher of the infinite universe who privileges no center. The idea is that “Things fall apart and the center can no longer hold.” Where I go from here is anybody’s guess. I’d like to partially graph on specific parts of the Hegelian dialectic while not overdoing it.
I have 5.5 pages finished out of a paper that must be presented in a 40 minute time slot that includes discussion. The website for this conference is: http://filosofia.uniandes.edu.co/filociencia/eng.htm
