The following is the first of a two-part series.
Can the debilitating effects of Scientism – identifying knowledge solely “with science” – be overcome? To answer that question, Simone Weil’s treatment of her three historical categories – Greek Science, Classical Science and Contemporary Science – can be compared to Don Ross’s conception of ‘Scale Relative Ontology’ – how we “track the world” depends upon the cognitive scale used to measure it – in Every Thing Must Go. Scale Relative Ontology can then be used to identify the cosmological dimension, ‘the common sense world’, and a scientistic stance. Given a comparison between these three dimensions in each case, implications for her spiritual philosophy can be explored.
Introduction
Can the debilitating effects of Scientism – identifying knowledge solely “with science”[1]– be overcome? Simone Weil’s three ways of characterizing science historically will be compared to the three dimensions, released through interpreting Don Ross’s conception of Scale Relative Ontology (SRO from now on); how we “track the world” depends upon the cognitive scale used to measure it as Ladyman and Ross put it (ETMG from now on).[2] However that phrase SRO may be used in a different way in this paper from what he may have intended originally.[3]
Herein, SRO will be cast as responding to the ontological question ‘What is there?’, not by claiming that one can’t say what there is nor by claiming that one can only say what there is. Rather, the idea is forwarded that how that question – ‘What is there?’ – is answered will depend on the scale at which ontology is to be interpreted. In this way it can be shown how the rise of Scientism undermines spiritual awareness, as that doctrine appears to be legitimated by contemporary interpretations of scientific activity – as Simone Weil anticipated[4] – whilst indicating how that undermining might be overcome. SRO’s stance derives from the idea that “— one’s ontological characterization of one and the same particular may vary depending on the sorts of questions one is attempting to answer”[5] even if Chakravartty is applying that remark for the micro-level.
Elsewhere three such scales have been identified[6]: i) the contemplative or cosmic dimension exercised, for example, in Von Schelling’s speculations; ii) priority ascribed to the ‘common sense’ or everyday dimension concerned with ‘middle sized objects’ articulated, for example in Hegel’s philosophy; iii) the theoretical or scientific stance interpreting reality through the micro-level, adopted by Ladyman and Ross, following Peirce’s early footsteps, in Every Thing Must Go. These three scales or measuring perspectives can then be considered in view of Simone Weil’s treatment of her historically grounded categories: her characterizations of Greek Science, Classical Science and Twentieth Century Science. These three dimensions are required given our awareness that even if the ‘common sense’ or everyday perspective can be appropriately expressed in ordinary language, the latter “— is ill-adapted for reflecting differences of level—”,[7] whether cast in terms of measuring perspectives or Simone Weil’s historical categories.
Simone Weil’s Historically Grounded Categories
One objection to this endeavour has to be considered at the outset. Isn’t Simone Weil’s characterization of the contemplative or cosmic dimension different from the cosmological as interpreted by Ladyman and Ross where “there are no mountains” just as “— there are no cats” at the quantum level?[8] Firstly, the former cosmic dimension, within our present culture, is increasingly interpreted scientistically. Indeed some scientists might claim that the cosmological provides a ground for or even replaces the former. Secondly, as will be appreciated herein, Simone Weil claims, as do Ladyman and Ross, that the cosmic dimension – just as the cosmological – must be distinguished from the ‘common sense’ or everyday perspective.
Meditations on Greek Science
Consider Simone Weil’s treatment of her possibly mistaken praise for Thales in her 1930 dissertation “Science and Perception in Descartes”. Here she converts Descartes’s cogito from “I think therefore I am” into “I can, therefore I am”. But what is significant about this diploma-monograph is her somewhat dogmatic claim that “Thales discovered geometry,” which was “history’s greatest moment”. Accordingly, we learnt “that the realm of pure thought is the sensible world” in the light of “a more careful kind of perception,” even if, for Plato, geometrical figures enabled reasoning about abstract ideal entities so that what was perceived was mere appearance.[9] Hence the knower is cast as seeking “— a transformation of the soul” through an understanding of the sensible world determined by a model whereby “— science, art and the search for God were united” even if “— they are separate for us.”[10] Thereby she can assert “Science, art and religion are connected together through the notion of order of the world, which we have completely lost.”[11]
So, even in the medieval age, the perceived world was haunted by a conception of something transcendental “— expressed in the language of myth, and poetry, and image; the images consisting not only in words but also in objects and actions.” But that perceived world is subject to necessity, and it is through necessity that access is granted to the Divine: “The blind necessity which constrains us, and which is revealed in geometry, appears to us as a thing to overcome, for the Greeks it was a thing to love—.”[12]
Whether or not Simone Weil correctly characterizes the “enigma” of Greek Science, she emphasizes the “— idea of equilibrium” as being “at the centre of Greek thought”. So injustice in Aeschylus’s Iliad is “a rupture of equilibrium” requiring disequilibrium elsewhere to restore a balance. Motion and change generally were seen as disequilibria so that for Archimedes immobility was “the sign of equilibrium”. Natural phenomena become cast as a “succession of disequilibriums” correcting each other providing “—a mobile image of equilibrium”.[13]
This first dimension in the development of scientific activity closed, for Simone Weil, during the time of the Renaissance ushering in the idea of Classical Science. But the earlier and Classical Science conceptions still emphasized order, but whereas Greek Science stressed a possible connection between “order and the condition of order”, for Classical Science the issue shifted to that between “— desire and the conditions of its accomplishment”. Yet both conceptions were concerned with the necessities of time and space, with obstacles which for Greek Science can lead to something transcendent – God cast as “the perpetual geometer”[14] – whilst for Classical Science, obstacles are to be overcome through humans creating order.
The Universe’s Representation through Classical Science
According to Simone Weil, Classical Science was based on an analogy between the conditions of work or labour and the laws of nature. In that case algebraic formulae could be regarded as “— a mechanical device involving a relation between distance and force” thereby physics – physical sciences’s language – could be interpreted as the application of mathematics rather than mathematics as indicating something beyond itself. But that earlier sense of science was still inherited in that sensible world so that it could be understood as something objective, in need of representation, thereby underpinning the idea of a connection “— between scientific thought and the rest of human thought”. But the human being is now seen as a worker rather than a knower in the Greek sense, facing necessity in regard to obstacles encountered without regard to any influence “— behind the phenomena of nature”; no supernatural agency then behind the natural.[15]
Given, however, any kind of work’s measurement, the notions of the “— function of distance and force”, mass and velocity, these could be captured in the idea of energy. And given that humans remain in relation to the perceived world, that natural world is still accessed via the senses. Yet these distinctions are imposed upon that world, leading to the division of different forms of inquiry even if that world is represented through encountered necessities which remain “totally indifferent to our desires.”[16] Indeed, the whole stance of this science might be captured in Kant’s words: the inquirer in applying reason “— must not be content to follow, as it were, in the leading strings of nature, but must proceed in advance—” so compelling “— nature to reply to its questions.”[17]
But just as Classical Science encompassed the importance of Greek Science through the role of necessity but without the notion of something of value transcending or behind it, so her sense of the New Science inherits algebraic formulae’s significance in the inquirer’s activity whilst abandoning the analogy between the conditions of work or labour and natural laws. That latter analogy was expressed by each formula being “— made to correspond to a mechanical device involving a relation between distances and forces, which the formula expressed.”[18]
The Foundation of a New Science in the 20th Century
For Simone Weil, the development of science represents a decline as it advances. Two features are lost: not only concern for some supernatural consideration, but also the analogy between human labour and the laws of nature; we are left with a kind of instrumentalism: “Theories spring up as it were at random, and there is survival of the fittest. Such a science as this can well be a form, of élan vital, but certainly not a form of the search for truth.”[19] Hence the slogan: ‘shut up and calculate’.[20] Yet a relation is sustained “— between algebraic formulas void of meaning on the one hand, and technology on the other.”[21] The human element is thereby eliminated from science[22] whilst, ironically, we have scientists who “— are naturally the first to pass off their opinions as if they were the deliverances of an oracle.”[23] Their position as scientists seems akin to that held by thirteen century’s priests.[24]
In this context she focuses upon Max Planck’s claim, namely that “— every hypothesis – as a factor in the picture of the external universe presented by the physicist – is a product of the freely speculating mind—” so that for the physicist “(e)very measurement first acquires its meaning for physical science through the significance which a theory gives it.”[25] For her, his claim justifies her idea that “the experimental device is always an imitation of a purely theoretical system, even in the case where the system has been reconstructed after a setback, in the light of experiment.”[26]
But her real concern was the acceptance of just what worried Carl Schmitt writing after the Great War, namely the 20th century’s fetish for an anti-religious ideology of technicity: the idea that all problems can be solved by technology,[27] utility replacing a concern for the truth.[28] But unlike Plato’s premonitions in his Republic’s ninth book, it is not just one nation state – Ancient Greece – which is vulnerable, but the whole human race! Humans become victims of their own rhetoric!
Another danger looms in an ongoing scientistic development and its arguments concerning differing accounts of its findings: a person through “— the accumulation of experimental facts and by the increasing perfection of telescopic and microscopic instruments” may be lost “among a complexity of facts” where no necessity can be discerned, either because either a great deal would have to be embraced “or a great deal less. The former is impossible since a person’s mental capacities are “subject to the same limits while technique progresses and facts accumulate.”
So s/he must be satisfied with the latter[29] initiating a vulnerability to propaganda. And if it is to be claimed the former is not impossible, if alive today, she could argue that any coherence between mathematical advancement and an empirically understood world is coming undone. Not only are physical or even cosmological hypotheses being determined by the kind of mathematical questions posed by investigators, but complex methods and sophisticated techniques along with complicated instrumental tools and instruments, which may as yet not have been constructed, are required for testing scientific theories. Not only can we appreciate the way cosmological speculations transform physics, but a dependence is induced upon mathematics as a method for verifying physical possibility.[30]
It might be said she misunderstood Planck’s stance regarding Quantum Theory because of her reliance on texts written for a lay public.[31] Nonetheless, she was led to condemn his achievements in advancing her view that the new science, like Classical Science before it, rejected any concern for a sense of value.[32] Yet Paul Dirac, for example, the first scientist to predict the existence of anti-matter, once made the case for the beautiful in scientific theorizing.
It is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment. — It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one’s equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress.[33]
But for Simone Weil, very few scientific inquirers “— penetrate sufficiently deeply into science for their hearts to be stirred by beauty.” Nor did Planck’s new science satisfy her central normative requirement: the scientific inquirer’s “— true aim is the union of his own mind with the mysterious wisdom eternally inscribed in the universe.”[34] Indeed, scientific investigation itself might be one form of religious contemplation! And that stance revealed her deep desire to reconnect thinking in the West to those spiritual roots she detected within Ancient Greek thought.
Simone Weil’s Characterizations of Science: Consequences
Now, even if her characterization of the New Science was over hostile – even though she acknowledged the recognition of the infinitely small within Quantum Mechanics, the effect of observation upon observed phenomena and Niels Bohr’s advocacy of the Complementarity Principle[35] – that hostility did indicate issues that still prove relevant for us today: that scientific advancement, even if has not caused, it has certainly been accompanied by the undoing of supernatural concerns; the reification of the idea of progress; the ideology of technique dominating over other considerations; the obsession with utility and commodification liquefying a sense of anything transcendental, even if she did not realize how that liquidation would be legitimated by the entertainment industry. Her stance can be summarized in table 1 below before some flesh can be put on the notion of Scale Relative Ontology.
Her rejection of the new science, however, has serious consequences. Not only are the discoveries at the cosmological level – as a result of more sophisticated instrumentation – ignored, the relief of physical dysfunctions to improve the human condition as well as the wide-ranging application of Quantum Theory side-stepped, but the possibility that anything at the micro-level could be revealing as to the nature of ultimate reality dismissed. To support such a dismissal, if alive today, she could point to at least five undecided ways of understanding Quantum Theory in response to the Copenhagen interpretation: Fuchs and Schack’s Quantum Baysianism; the Broglie-Bohm standpoint; Everett III and Deutsch’s Many Worlds Interpretation; Susskind and Witten’s String Theory; Smolin and Rovelli’s Loop Quantum Gravity account.
The only aspect of the new science which Simone Weil would acknowledge was its technological application. That meant that anything significant about the micro-level would be subsumed through its application to what can be called the ‘middle-sized’ perspective. The distinctions between her three different conceptions of science are illustrated in the table 1 below, but attention must now be brought upon the significance of SRO.
Simone Weil’s Distinctions between Different Conceptions of Science
| Kind of Science→ | Greek Science | Classical Science | 20th Century Science |
| 1. Status of the human being | Knower aware of the distinction between Necessity & the Good. | Worker, given an analogy between work/labour & the laws of nature. | Replaceable Specialists who seek epistemolog- ical ‘high priests’ status. |
| 2. Form of Thought | Thales invented geometry; inquiries arise from, but not limited by, thought. | Geometry becomes algebraic, related imaginatively to an objective world. | Meaningless algebraic formulae relate to a developing technology. |
| 3. Constituting Material for Inquiry | An Objective Sensible World | Figures and images represent the World via figures & images for a Measuring mind | A freely speculating mind creates a picture of an external world |
| 4. Epistemolo- gical Concern | Knower as seeking ‘the soul’s transformation’ | No concern for the transcendental dimension | No grasp of the sheer complexity of the facts |
| 5. Focus | Objective World related to a mind revealing a Mind- orientated reality | Mastery of nature where Necessity must be subject to human control | Transcendent- alism & human/nature analogy denied |
| 6. Concept of Order | Equilibrium between order and the conditions of order | Relationship between human desire & conditions of its achievement | Experimental theories & devices are driven by a theoretical system |
| 7. Significant Activity | Contemplation where mathematics indicates something transcendental | Working where physical science becomes applied mathematics. | Experimenting where physics provides no certainty for metaphysical claims |
| 8. Relationship to the Good | Aspiration towards Beauty and the Good; no opposition between religion & the arts & culture: interdisciplinary | No concern for Unity nor for Value Claims. | Instrument- alism driven by Utilitarianism. |
Table 1
The Relevance of Scale Relative Ontology (SRO)
SRO’s significance is generated by Ladyman and Ross’s claim that “— to take the conventional philosophical model of an individual as being equivalent to the model of an existent mistakes practical convenience for metaphysical generalization.”[36] That particular claim constitutes one of the foundations for process philosophy itself. So Hartshorne, for example, considered the proposition “John spoke and was silent”. To claim that at one temporal moment a single subject John spoke and at another he was silent commits the spatialization of time fallacy, as elucidated by both Bergson and Whitehead. It is the actuality of John-at-time -t¹ who spoke, not John and another actuality John-at-time-t² who is silent. John, regarded as an existent, is an abstraction from what is concrete experience.[37]
But what is important is that claims made about individual existents pertain to our language use in relation to what can be relevant for us practically at a common sense level, constituting a ‘middle-sized’ perspective. Such individual existents do not exist either at the cosmological – Simone Weil’s cosmic or contemplative level – nor at the micro-level. So, like Schelling, for example, Simone Weil sustains the claim that “Reality and existence are two things not one.”[38] Again “Existence cannot be proved, it can only be observed as a fact. But the more perfect has more reality than the less perfect. And reality for a man consists in his existence on this earth.” But she goes further: “Nothing which exists is absolutely worthy of love. We must therefore love that which does not exist.
But this object of love which does not exist is not devoid of reality, is not a fiction. For our fictions cannot be more worthy of love than we are ourselves, who are not.” She would, however, sustain Schelling’s priority for intuition: “The discursive intelligence which grasps relationships, the one that presides over mathematical knowledge, lies on the boundary between matter and spirit. It is intuition alone which is purely spiritual.”[39]
Hegel’s idealism opposes Schelling’s stance since it focuses upon the ‘middle-sized’ perspective – the everyday level – rooted as it is in the perceived world. He does distinguish between the object (das Objeckt), existing independently of the mind, from what is cognized as the mind’s object (der Gegenständ),[40] but there is no knowledge of the former save through the latter, that is to say, through cognitive awareness as opposed to Schelling’s concern with the aesthetic perspective.
The object (das Objeckt) may provide “— empirical constraints on claims to know” but it can never be known as it is safe through its mediator (der Gegenständ) expressed in discursive form. Any such form itself is grounded on “standard, norms or values” underpinning a specific notion of reality, forwarded within a specific culture, by “various cognitive and other domains” prevailing in some given historical, place or time.[41]
Necessity, for Simone Weil, is represented by this stance: “Necessity is an image, an imitation of Reality (πò őν). What is real in perception and distinguishes it from dreaming does not lie in sensation, but in the necessity which is contained therein.” To ask “Why these things and not others?” generates Hegel’s response: “It is thus.” That response does not imply support for his stance: “We know through intelligence that what intelligence does not apprehend is more real than what it does apprehend.” Again: “The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made a subject of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be a subject of contemplation.”[42]
If we do regard an object through this middle-sized perspective, such as a table upon which I am writing, for example, on the one hand it “— has extension; it is comparatively permanent; it is coloured, above all it is substantial —.” Yet, not only is it not real as a substantial entity at the cosmic level but it is not substantiated either at the micro-level: “Sparsely scattered in that emptiness are numerous electric charges rushing about with great speed, but their combined bulk amounts to less than a billionth of the bulk of the table itself.” Yet this latter conception of the table – Eddington’s “scientific table” – supports the paper I have been writing on whereas scientific inquiry had convinced Eddington that only his “scientific table” is known as an existent: “What sort of thing is it that I know? The answer is structure.”[43]
For Ladyman and Ross – at the micro-level – the table supporting my paper “— is probably a real pattern. Strictly speaking here there is no scientific table at all because there is no single candidate aggregate of real microscopic patterns that is best suited to be the reductive base of the everyday table.” They argue, then, the case for ‘real patterns’ so that, scientifically, “— to be is to be a real pattern.” For a scientific experimenter, information is encoded in structures about some event or given entity, tendered as real patterns: a given pattern may be cast as “— just any relation among data.” There is, then, no foundational level: “— the real patterns criterion of reality is the last word in ontology.” So “— its real patterns all the way down.”[44]
Like Hegel too, Ladyman and Ross are hostile to the idea of intuition: “What counts as intuitive depends partly on our ontogenetic cognitive make-up and partly on cultural specific learning.”[45] They also express scepticism regarding the claim which they say is Platonist, namely that “— the boundaries of the real are the limits of what is mathematically coherent.” Yet some form of Platonism might be compatible with their idea of “— thinking of the stuff of the physical universe as being patterns rather than little things.”[46]
But because Simone Weil regards the new science, such as this, as merely endorsing instrumentalism – “The disappearance of scientific truth appears to our eyes as the disappearance of truth, thanks to our habit of mistaking the one for the other”[47] – she has no means of pursuing possibilities raised by a different kind of Platonism such as can be found in Process Philosophy. But what really blocks that access? Moreover is there some other factor or factors than her dismissal of Planck’s contribution?
Before turning to such questions, it is important to note that Simone Weil does endorse not only some form of tripartism in explaining the nature of reality, but also in rendering pride of place to physics over the other sciences. Not only was physics given a special status because of its place in scientific development but also because of a Newtonian conception of the world that resulted in that development, not to speak of the fact that physical forces were thereby identified. Progress was then made “— in unifying physical forces and the physical treatment of force, work, and energy”[48] which she identified in her treatment of Classical Science.
Yet might it not be said that biology, for example, might be more significant in the world of what Simone Weil labeled as the New Science? The development of Quantum Biology, however, tells a different story in the way scientists have been able to interpret the mystery of photosynthesis to elucidate how chlorophyll accounts for the greenery of many plants. Within a millionth of a millionth of a second, the photons arising from sunlight can be transferred amazingly quickly to “— the molecular bonds of their organic compounds” understood through such notions as quantum superposition, tunnelling and entanglement, central concepts in understanding quantum explanations.[49]
Yet consider Unger’s interesting hypothesis, forwarded by Whitehead: for a traditional conception of physics “universal truth is revealed locally” whilst cosmology focuses on understanding “part of nature” in relation to “an understanding of the whole universe and its history.” So cosmology “— displaces particle physics as the more encompassing and fundamental study of nature.”[50]
Noel Boulting studied under Richard S Peters at the London Institute of Education to obtain his academic diploma in the Philosophy of Education and under David Hamlyn and Stuart Brown at Birkbeck College, London, to obtain his first degree in philosophy. He has taught philosophy for the Extra-Mural Department, University of London; Philosophy of Education at Trent Polytechnic and Educational Studies at Mid-Kent College of Higher and Further Education as well as created and taught philosophy courses at Great Falls University, Montana. He is author of On Interpretative Activity: A Peircian Approach to the Interpretation of Science, Technology and the Arts (Brill, 2006)
[1] Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (London: Heinemann, 1972), 4.
[2] J. Ladyman, D. Ross et. al, Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 199.
[3] D. Ross, “Pattern Reality, Causality & Scale Relativity” Real Patterns Workshop, Verdon-Smith Room, Royal Fort House, Senate House, Bristol University, (9 October 2018).
[4] Simone Weil, “ Classical Science and After; Reflections on Quantum Theory; Scientism – A Review 65-70; Fragment: Foundation of a New Science” On Science, Necessity and the Love of God trans. R. Rees (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 65-70.
[5] Anjan Chakravartty, A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 84.
[6] N.E. Boulting, “Scale Relative Ontology and Scientism” Philosophica 46 (2015): 102-107.
[7] Simone Weil, “ Classical Science and After; Reflections on Quantum Theory; Scientism – A Review 65-70; Fragment: Foundation of a New Science” On Science, Necessity and the Love of God trans. R. Rees, 54.
[8] J. Ladyman, D. Ross et. al, Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized, 199.
[9] Simone Weil, “Science and Perception in Descartes” Formative Writings 1929-1941 ed. trans. D.T. McFarland & W. Van Ness (Amherst: Massachusetts University Press, 1987), 32-33.
[10] Simone Weil, “ Classical Science and After; Reflections on Quantum Theory; Scientism – A Review 65-70; Fragment: Foundation of a New Science” On Science, Necessity and the Love of God trans. R. Rees, 48.
[11] Simone Weil, The Notebooks of Simone Weil, vol. I & II trans. A. Willis, 248.
[12] Simone Weil, “ Classical Science and After; Reflections on Quantum Theory; Scientism – A Review 65-70; Fragment: Foundation of a New Science” On Science, Necessity and the Love of God trans. R. Rees, 13 & 21.
[13] Ibid., 45, 14, 15 & 14.
[14] Ibid., 21.
[15] Ibid., 22, 5, 30, 6.
[16] Simone Weil, “ Classical Science and After; Reflections on Quantum Theory; Scientism – A Review 65-70; Fragment: Foundation of a New Science” On Science, Necessity and the Love of God trans. R. Rees, 7, 81, 10.
[17] Immanuel Kant, “Preface to the Second Edition (1787)” in Critique of Pure Reason, trans. J.M.D. Meiklegohn (London: Everyman’s Lib., 1964), 10.
[18] Simone Weil, “ Classical Science and After; Reflections on Quantum Theory; Scientism – A Review 65-70; Fragment: Foundation of a New Science” On Science, Necessity and the Love of God trans. R. Rees, 22.
[19] Simone Weil, The Need for Roots trans. A. Willis (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 247.
[20] Jim Baggot, Quantum Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 124-5.
[21] Simone Weil, “ Classical Science and After; Reflections on Quantum Theory; Scientism – A Review 65-70; Fragment: Foundation of a New Science” On Science, Necessity and the Love of God trans. R. Rees, 33, 22.
[22] Simone Weil, The Notebooks of Simone Weil, vol. I & II trans. A. Willis, 196.
[23] Simone Weil, “ Classical Science and After; Reflections on Quantum Theory; Scientism – A Review 65-70; Fragment: Foundation of a New Science” On Science, Necessity and the Love of God trans. R. Rees, 58.
[24] Simone Weil, The Need for Roots trans. A. Willis, 229.
[25] Max Planck, Where is Science Going (New York: Norton, 1932), 92.
[26] Simone Weil, “ Classical Science and After; Reflections on Quantum Theory; Scientism – A Review 65-70; Fragment: Foundation of a New Science” On Science, Necessity and the Love of God trans. R. Rees, 33.
[27] Carl Schmitt, “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations (1929)” in The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 81-5, 80.
[28] Simone Weil, “ Classical Science and After; Reflections on Quantum Theory; Scientism – A Review 65-70; Fragment: Foundation of a New Science” On Science, Necessity and the Love of God trans. R. Rees, 64.
[29] Ibid., 80.
[30] L.R. Kfia, “The Ontological Status of Mathematical Entities” The Review of Metaphysics XLVII no. 1, no. 185 (Sept. 1963): 19.
[31] Simone Pétrement, Simone Weil: A life (London: Mowbrays, 1976), 448.
[32] Simone Weil, The Need for Roots trans. A. Willis, 247.
[33] cf. P.B. Medawar, The Art of the Soluble (London: Penguin Books, 1969), 107.
[34] Simone Weil, The Need for Roots trans. A. Willis, 243, 250.
[35] Simone Weil, “ Classical Science and After; Reflections on Quantum Theory; Scientism – A Review 65-70; Fragment: Foundation of a New Science” On Science, Necessity and the Love of God trans. R. Rees, 65-70.
[36] J. Ladyman, D. Ross et. al, Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized, 229. their italics.
[37] Charles Hartshorne, “Whitehead and Ordinary Language” Whitehead’s Philosophy (1972): 180.
[38] Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks trans. R. Rees (Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2015), 311.
[39] Simone Weil, The Notebooks of Simone Weil, vol. I & II trans. A. Willis, 374, 220, 509.
[40] M.J. Inwood, A Commentary on Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Mind’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2010), 319n. 15.
[41] T. Rockmore, “Analytic Philosophy and the Hegelian Turn” Review of Metaphysics 55, no. 2 (December 2001): 351, 366.
[42] Simone Weil, The Notebooks of Simone Weil, vol. I & II trans. A. Willis, 410, 242, 245.
[43] A.S. Eddington, The Philosophy of Physical Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939), 147.
[44] J. Ladyman, D. Ross et. al, Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized, 253, 227-8, 278, 228.
[45] Ibid., 10.
[46] Ibid., 234, 237.
[47] Simone Weil, “ Classical Science and After; Reflections on Quantum Theory; Scientism – A Review 65-70; Fragment: Foundation of a New Science” On Science, Necessity and the Love of God trans. R. Rees, 63.
[48] Ibid., 42.
[49] Jim Al-Khalili, The World According to Physics (Princeton University Press, 2020), 151.
[50] Roberto Unger & Lee Smolin, The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time: Part I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 212.
