ABSTRACT
The thesis of this book is that the Evaluation Machinery constitutes a threat to present-day science and to the scientific tradition as a whole. Notably, the procedures of that machinery obfuscate the menace which science bears inside, and which implies its progressive technicization and de-philosophization. Insofar as those procedures obliterate the awareness of that menace, hence the realization which is the presupposition of an ethical regeneration of science, they can be said to constitute “a threat to the menace”. The Evaluation Machinery’s threat strikes science with a brazenly perfunctory use of the very method science itself in its modern configuration increasingly has been led to adopt, namely, the conception of “models of reality” primarily oriented towards their own empowerment as models. For this reason, to be able to assess the scope of “the threat to the menace”, we must in the first place obtain a sufficient understanding of the fundamental trait which shapes modern science. This, in turn, requires that we go back to the onset of our scientific tradition in Greek thought. The analyses of this chapter will deal, among other things, with the metaphysical foundation of science accomplished by Aristotle, the inauguration of modern science through Galileo Galilei’s mathematical project of the world, the objection to philosophy as a necessity for the physics of Albert Einstein, and the project of the naturalization of consciousness by cognitive neuroscientist Gerald M. Edelman, before finally drawing some consequences from the characterization of technicized science for our diagnosis of the Evaluation Machinery as a seal set on the de-philosophization of science.
