McKone Osteopath

“Powerful as it has proven to be, this bleached-out physical conception of objectivity encounters difficulties if it is put forward as the method for seeking a complete understanding of reality. For the process began when we noticed that how things appear to us depends on the interaction of our bodies with the rest of the world. But this leaves us with no account of the perceptions and specific viewpoints which were left behind as irrelevant to physics but which seem to exist nevertheless, along with those of other creatures. Not to mention the mental activity of forming an objective conception of the physical world, which seems not itself capable of physical analysis. Faced with these facts one might think the only conceivable conclusion would be that there is more to reality what can be accommodated by the physical conception of objectivity. But to remarkable numbers of people this has not been obvious.”

Thomas Nagel, Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, The Limits of Objectivity, The Tanner Lecture on Human Values, Brasenose College, Oxford University, May 1979.

A day out in London.

Bone, not adrenaline, drives fight or flight response | ScienceDaily

“While it is essential to reduce the nervous system to its parts in order to understand its detailed mechanisms, such analyses provide only a partial and, if taken in isolation, a misleading picture of the nervous system, ultimately we are dealing with an immensely structured, integrated and coherent network which is itself a functional unity rather than merely a complicated assembly of individual components… Such holistic concepts are only gradually coming into focus within current neuroscience, and there is much to do before we begin to appreciate neural behaviour in such a scale.”

Gray’s Anatomy, Thirty-Eighth Edition, 1995.

Arthur Hildreth asked Still to explain his thought process when assessing a new patient. “I never notice whether she is beautifully dressed and wears silks and diamonds or covered with homespun cloth,” he replied. “I am listening to her story, and while listening I am seeing in my mind’s eye the combinations of systems which go to make up the whole of that body structure.” Of supreme importance was the way Still visualised - for the perspective of the cell and its requirements for normal function. “ He studied nature always from inside, the heart, and as a subject, not an object;” Ernest Tucker noted.

“Working with mental images activates a different mode of consciousness which is holistic and intuitive. One area where this style of learning is now used practically is in transpersonal education. Experiments with guided imagination indicate that a frequent result is the extension of feelings, whereby the student experiences a deeper, more direct contact with the phenomenon imagined. In this way, a more comprehensive and complete encounter with the phenomenon results, and aspects of the phenomenon otherwise unnoticed often come to light.”

The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe’s Way of Science, 1996. Henri Bortoft (1938 - 2012).

“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident.”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 - 1860)

“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when it’s cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! “Have courage to use your own understanding l!” — that is the motto of enlightenment.”

Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1894) An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? (1784).

What is wrong with this picture?

Goethe, like Aristotle, respects the difference between sense perception and intellection, recognises the role of an intuitive intellect in knowledge, and rejects the dualistic idea that knowledge aims at accurately representing an “external” world hidden behind a screen of representations. Instead, for Goethe, knowledge involves the discernment of the ideal or intelligible principles of sense phenomena by a combination of painstaking observation, experimental variation, and finally, a form of insight that fuses sense perception and intuitive thinking, and whose “object” is the Urphanomen, the ultimate goal of Goethe’s inorganic science.

“…Newton showed himself to be interested less in re-establishing a lost dominion over nature than in uncovering some underlying uniformity and intelligibility that would in turn point to the power and wisdom of God.” Peter Harrison.

Back cover review.

Peter Harrison provides a new account of the religious foundations of scientific knowledge. He shows how the new approach to the study of nature that emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were directly informed by theological discussions about the Fall of Man and the extent to which the mind and the senses had been damaged by that primeval event. Scientific methods, he suggests, were originally devised as techniques for ameliorating the cognitive damage wrought by human sin. At its inception, modern science was conceptualised as a means of recapturing the knowledge of nature that Adam had once possessed. Contrary to a widespread view which sees science emerging in conflict with religion, Harrison argues that theological considerations were vital of importance in the framing of the new scientific method.

“This is a brilliantly written and persuasively argued book, which will be required reading for anybody interested in the influence of religion on early modern scientific method and epistemology.”

David C. Lindberg, University of Wisconsin.