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    Koestler Arthur - Lunaticii

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    cristi4ugl
    The document provides a review of Arthur Koestler's 1959 book "The Sleepwalkers" which details the history of scientific ideas about the universe. The review summarizes that Koestler traces the evolution of cosmic theories from the Ionian Greeks through Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton. It notes that Koestler focuses on the human and psychological factors involved in scientific discovery. The review also discusses themes in the book around the divide between faith and reason and Koestler's perspective that sees puppets of either God or chromosomes as tragic figures. It concludes that while the book does not impose regular patterns of evolution, it provides an anthropocentric view of humanity facing the mysteries of the universe.

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    Koestler Arthur - Lunaticii

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    cristi4ugl
    791 views2 pages
    The document provides a review of Arthur Koestler's 1959 book "The Sleepwalkers" which details the history of scientific ideas about the universe. The review summarizes that Koestler traces the evolution of cosmic theories from the Ionian Greeks through Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton. It notes that Koestler focuses on the human and psychological factors involved in scientific discovery. The review also discusses themes in the book around the divide between faith and reason and Koestler's perspective that sees puppets of either God or chromosomes as tragic figures. It concludes that while the book does not impose regular patterns of evolution, it provides an anthropocentric view of humanity facing the mysteries of the universe.

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    Koestler Arthur- Lunaticii

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    The document provides a review of Arthur Koestler's 1959 book "The Sleepwalkers" which details the history of scientific ideas about the universe. The review summarizes that Koestler traces the evolution of cosmic theories from the Ionian Greeks through Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton. It notes that Koestler focuses on the human and psychological factors involved in scientific discovery. The review also discusses themes in the book around the divide between faith and reason and Koestler's perspective that sees puppets of either God or chromosomes as tragic figures. It concludes that while the book does not impose regular patterns of evolution, it provides an anthropocentric view of humanity facing the mysteries of the universe.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    791 views2 pages

    Koestler Arthur - Lunaticii

    Uploaded by

    cristi4ugl
    The document provides a review of Arthur Koestler's 1959 book "The Sleepwalkers" which details the history of scientific ideas about the universe. The review summarizes that Koestler traces the evolution of cosmic theories from the Ionian Greeks through Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton. It notes that Koestler focuses on the human and psychological factors involved in scientific discovery. The review also discusses themes in the book around the divide between faith and reason and Koestler's perspective that sees puppets of either God or chromosomes as tragic figures. It concludes that while the book does not impose regular patterns of evolution, it provides an anthropocentric view of humanity facing the mysteries of the universe.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    of 2

    Author: Arthur KOESTLER

    Title: The Sleepwalkers


    Year: 1959
    Published:

    Review by: Laura PETRA


    3rd year Law student, MA student in Psychology

    “...when all the stars were ready to be placed in the sky the First Woman said: I will use these to
    write the laws that are given to mankind for all time. They cannot be written on the water as it is
    always changing its form, nor can they be written in the sand as the wind would soon erase them,
    but if they are written in the stars, they can be read and remembered forever.”
    Navajo creation story, from G. Johnson, Fire in the Mind

    In Arthur Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers (1959), we discover an account of the history of


    science as it is reflected in the evolution of ideas about the Universe. The journey begins with the
    heroic age of the Ionian Greeks, with a dark interlude in the Middle Ages and resuming its track in
    the sixteen century with Copiernicus, Kepler, Galileo and finally Newton. The metaphor that
    pervades the entire chronicle is the image of a pendulum: once removed from its equilibrium state,
    it doesn’t return to its original position, but instead it is propelled in the opposite direction.
    Koestler’s life trajectory follows a similar path: once he disengages from his explicit sympathy
    towards communism through the famous book Darkness at Noon, he focuses on science and
    philosophy (The Trail of the Dinosaur-1955, The Ghost in the Machine-1967), only to orient
    himself towards the end of his life to spirituality and mysticism (The Roots of Coincidence-1972).
    His account is neither detached, nor neutral: he focuses on the human factor and on the
    psychological process of discovery, uncovering both the revelations and the moments of blindness
    to obvious truths that undermine the image of the scientist as a rational, equilibrated, almost non-
    human creature. In his words: “the history of cosmic theories can be called, without exaggeration, a
    history of collective obsessions and controlled schizophrenias, and the manner in which some
    discoveries have been made resemble the conduct of a sleepwalker, rather than the performance of
    an electronic brain.”
    Another theme of the book is the insidious divorce between faith and reason, between the
    mystic and the savant, both driven in life by the need to be protected and freed at the same time, but
    estranged with the passage of time: “the space-spirit hierarchy has gradually been replaced by the
    space-time continuum.” He anticipates the Decade of the Brain, and as an expression of his position
    against a strict Darwinia n evolutionism, his final remark in this book is bittersweet: “If a puppet
    manipulated by God is a tragic figure, a puppet tied to its own chromosomes is grotesque”.
    One peculiarity of this well-documented, memorable journey through the history of ideas
    about the Cosmos is the fact that the author escapes the tendency to see or impose regularities,
    patterns of evolution, which is an inherent temptation of any global vision upon the history of
    science - as George Johnson stated in Fire in the Mind: “Just as nature abhors a vacuum, the human
    mind abhors randomness”. The only constant approach that can be noticed is the importance
    assigned to human factors and to the surrounding context that provides some of their driving forces:
    from this perspective, the universe that Koestler created in his book The Sleepwalkers can be
    considered anthropocentric. And even if one does not embrace all the details and the hypothesis
    offered by this account, the fact remains that the book is a remarkable picture of human nature
    facing the mysteries of the Universe.

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