Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy
University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-67288-3
``In the Ptolemaic system, as in the cosmogony of the Bible, man was assigned a central position in the universe, from which he was ousted by Copernicus. Ever since, writers eager to drive the lesson home have urged us, resolutely and repeatedly, to see ourselves objectively in the true perspective of time and space. What precisely does this mean? In a full "main feature" film, recapitulating faithfully the complete history of the universe, the rise of human beings from the first beginning of man to the achievements of the twentieth century would flash by a single second. Alternatively, if we decided to examine the universe objectively in the sense of paying equal attention to portions of equal mass, this would result in a life-long preoccupation with inter-stellar dust, relived only at brief intervals by a survey of incandescent masses of hydrogen. Not in a thousand million lifetimes would turn come to give man even a second's notice. It goes without saying that no one -- scientists included -- looks at the universe this way, whatever lip-service is given to "objectivity". Nor should this surprise us. For, as human beings, we must inevitably see the universe from a center lying within ourselves and speak about it in terms of a human language . . . Any attempt rigorously to eliminate our human perspective from our picture of the world must lead to absurdity.`` (p. 3) [1]
Penguin Books (several editions), Cambridge University Press (1993 "Canto" edition) with a forward by Richard Dawkins, and newly-written introduction by the author
^The true lesson of the Copernican revolution, then, is not the unimportance of man but the marvelous power of man to escape from his sensory experience and see the universe through theory. This is the kind of thought which Professor Hawking has not considered. -- Dru Scott [1]
