his day that it was an “occult force,” and spent most of the rest of
his life trying to come to terms with that unacceptable conclusion.
In the final edition of his great work, the Principia, he said that
the world consists of three things: active force, passive matter and
some semi-spiritual force (which, for various reasons, he identified
with electricity) that functions as an intermediary between the two.
Newton was an expert on church history (physics was a very small
part of his interests) and the framework for his theory of an
intermediary force was the fourth-century Arian heresy, which said
that Jesus is semi-divine, not divine, and acts as an intermediary
between God and man.
After Newton’s death, his papers were given over to the
physicists at Cambridge University. They were appalled by what
they found in them, so they simply gave them back to his family,
which held onto them and never published them.
Around the 1930s, they started selling the material off; [the
British economist John Maynard] Keynes was one of those who
recognized their enormous value. After WWII, some of this stuff
started surfacing at antique dealers, and scholars began to gather it
together and do important analytical work.
Now that’s serious cultural-sociological analysis of some of the
greatest moments of science, and there’s plenty more like it. You
can bring it right up to the present. People do scientific work within
a framework of thought, and their work is affected by cultural
factors, by power systems, by all sorts of things. Nobody denies
that.
What the postmodernists claim to be fighting is foundationalism,
the idea that science is divorced from society and culture and
provides foundations for certain, absolute truth. Nobody has
believed that since the 1700s.
From what I’ve looked at, I find postmodernism very dense,
jargonladen and hard to read.
I do too. A lot of it has the appearance of a kind of careerism, an
escape from engagement.
But they claim to be socially engaged.