Fall, 1998 - Dr. Ess

These comments are reproduced here by permission of the author, Saul Fisher.

Additional comments should be addressed to the authors of the web page and/or Charles Ess (cmess@lib.drury.edu)

1. To start off, the students have amassed a very impressive amount of data and put it in prose which is admirable given the constraints of a semester's work (I take it I have the timeframe correctly). They also seem to have mastered not just the timeline but its conceptual significance (how certain events in the history of philosophy and science build upon or turn back past events). This is also admirable given the short duration of the learning experience (one semester or a portion thereof). It is additionally impressive that the display of information was sufficiently well-thought out that this mastery of the material comes across (basically, through the use of a hypertext-timeline).

2. One note on the graphics: it is very off-putting and distracting to have constantly moving graphics, such as the students used in their bullets. The pedagogic value is low, the graphic value is negligible, and the annoyance factor for anyone trying to read the text is high. It is difficult enough to read text on a computer screen without such distractions.

3. There are a variety of historical glitches which are undoubtedly a result of the rather narrow time constraints on learning, processing, and presenting this material. This is acceptable in a first cut--and in a student project--but a publically-presented website should meet the same standards as other publications, electronic or print. To cite one example, the students make the following claim on their Galileo page:

and they then go on to attribute to Descartes a grounding of scientific thought in authority and objectivity, as follows:

Whatever else one might say about Copernican 'instrumentalism', it seems grossly inaccurate to say that Copernicus or whomever may have held such views believed that those views undermined or should undermine the authority and objectivity of science. Maybe that's what Bellarmine or others in the Church would have wanted, but granting this interpretation concedes them altogether too much.

4. Another history of philosophy and science point: It is highly contentious to baldly state that "Einstein based his theory upon the philosophy of Immanuel Kant", particularly given that the underlying intentions are wholly different. They explain a bit later: "It seems, in Relativity Theory, that the truth of any observation (at least temporal observations) depends upon the framework(s) of the observer. In this case, the framework consisted of the observer's placement and his/her relationship to other moving objects. Absolute space and time does not exist, at least in a realist/correspondence sense." That much might be construed as a latter-day version of Kant's views, especially if you drop out talk about observational 'truth'. But then it is harder to make sense of their last sentence, regarding realism and correspondence. The problem is that they have run together a realist view of science with a correspondence theory of truth, and then attached the amalgam view to spacetime relativism (the 'modern analogue' of Kantian conditions for the possibility of knowing, e.g., geometry). Whew! There is certainly an intellectual heritage here but the presentation on the webpage is too brief and too misleading.

5. It is somewhat insensitive to locate Einstein ethno-historically as a German thinker. He was, of course, German in some compelling ways: he was born there, he always was more comfortable speaking German than any other language, his thought in physics and in elements of his philosophy owes a great deal to German thought and a German education. Maybe if history were a bit different we could legitimately include him among the great German thinkers. But he is rather among the great cosmopolitan (European, if you like) Jewish thinkers, a strong Zionist in his own way, and a refugee from Nazism. Even if one does not understand Jewish ethnicity or nationalism, it is a foul bit of business to categorize Einstein as German ever since the Germans declared him not to be.

6. One other note on Einstein: do the students have license to use the rather famous photo they have reproduced (or any of the other representations)? Copyright presents a problem for publically available websites, even of an educational nature.

7. On the whole, though this website works well as a hypertext presentation, I do not see much in the way of graphic representation of ideas. Maybe the students think of hypertext as a form of graphic representation, but that seems a bit of a stretch to me and in any case would require some defense.