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user-inactivated  ·  3161 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Neil deGrasse Tyson: pedantry in space

    The reality – that Bruno believed in magic, worshipped the ancient Egyptian god Thoth, and was executed not for heliocentrism but for denying the divinity of Christ – is ignored, because that isn’t Fucking Science Love.

This is an odd point for a post criticizing Tyson for promoting disenchantment. Also renaissance hermeticism was a step between scholasticism and the Enlightenment. Newton was an alchemist too. Magic can be dismissed as woo now, but it was at least as plausible as scholasticism when Bruno was doing it, and encouraged people to actually study nature because studying nature could tell them everything. Being a magician in the 16th century doesn't contradict being a protoscientist, and outright implies being a freethinker.

I don't buy the broader criticism either, an interest in how the physical world works is not "I Fucking Love Existing Conditions". Imagining how gravity might be different accomplishes exactly nothing. But that argument was boring before the Sokal affair, and even Bruno Latour thinks foisting critique into science was counterproductive now.