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Ayten brings up an interesting subject:
Ayten Aydin wrote: This topic is important for me for my other study on an
enquiry into seeing
where(at what level) the art and science meet, in a way where the subjectivity and objectivity unite, where the time and space become one entity. I wonder how much all these are relevant to RR's all encompassing philosophy? The beginning of the essay that I referenced for the discussion
about Rosennean approaches in modeling, titled "On the Philosophy of Craft" (p.
297 of Essays...) begins:
Robert Rosen wrote: "Medicine has been called an art and it has
been called a science. Indeed, it must possess elements of both. But
primarily, it is a craft in its practice, and a technology in its aspirations.
It is applied science-- primarily applied biology. In some of its aspects, it is
even rather more applied technology than applied science."
"Science has always had philosophy associated with it; indeed, for
a long time, science was called natural philosophy. The ancient Greeks were
keenly interested in the way the world was put together and how it worked, and
they had laid out the major alternatives in this connection (e.g. atomicity or
infinite divisibility; evolution or special creation) two millennia ago. But
perhaps because the Greeks affected to despise craft and considered technology
to be the province of slaves, there has never been much of a philosophy of
either craft or technology in general."
"Indeed, one would be surprised to find a work entitled "The
Philosophy of the Airplane" or "The Philosophy of the Automobile," and even more
so to find one entitled "The Philosophy of Automobile Repair and Maintenance."
The former involve technologies; the latter is a craft. Although a medical
doctors would surely resent being analogized to a repairman, there are powerful
grounds for doing just this. Indeed, contemporary biological science is
currently locked in the grip of a Cartesian tradition that asserts that organism
IS machine-- nowadays perhaps qualified to read "molecular machine," but machine
nevertheless."
It might interest people to know that my father was of a
temperament usually associated with artists and musicians. He was intensely
creative. I have found that most people tend to visualize scientists in general
as techno-nerds or the natural version of a mechanical engineer. But that was
not the way Robert Rosen could be described at all. He was keenly awake to all
of his senses and had enormous love for music, art, a great single malt scotch
or Armagnac, and incredible food. He appreciated beauty, whether it was the
beauty of a sunset, a Bach fugue, a Michelangelo sculpture, a well-turned
phrase, or a mountain vista. He could also see beauty in the symmetry of some
complicated mathematical proof and he saw it in biology as well. The symmetry of
how organisms are adapted to fit into their ecosystems, the way the organization
of these systems makes such seeming miracles possible; all of that was intensely
beautiful to him.
If he hadn't had the talent in mathematics, physics, and the
more technical aspects of science, he would probably have been a scientific
philosopher or a painter, or perhaps a fiction writer. But he did have that
technical ability as well. He had a friend that he had known ever since
Stuyvesant High School, in NYC. On one of my father's trips, we stayed at
the home of this friend passing through NY. Sitting in the kitchen over
breakfast, one morning, this friend told me that my father had a
combination of qualities that are almost never present in the same mind. This
friend was a very smart man and he knew it; he had his own lucrative
technological business and made a lot of money. But he lamented that,
while he could measure anything, could solve any problem that was put in
front of him, could figure out how to make the machinery work better... he
simply did not have the ability to come up with his own problems to solve.
He didn't have the creative aspect and without it, he said, he could never
change the world. "Your father," he told me (as if I didn't know this already)
"is going to change the world." He had a flair for the dramatic, this guy, and
was disconcerted when I just grinned and shrugged, saying, "Yeah, but he can't
balance his checkbook."
Judith
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