Republic of the Philippines

MARINDUQUE STATE COLLEGE

Erika M. Ornedo
BS AIS-2A
What is the contribution of Copernicus in the philosophy of science?
 Nicolaus Copernicus was a Renaissance mathematician and astronomer who formulated a
heliocentric model of the universe which placed the Sun, rather than the Earth, at the center.
He is generally considered to be the initiator of the Scientific Revolution.
Do you think thought experiment is still useful in science in the present time?
 Yes, it is still extremely useful .In my opinion, studying science without doing experiments
are just pointless. Theories from textbook are proven or researched by scientists before, but
it’s still play an important role in the education system to enable the students to view the
reality of science theories from the textbook. I believe students also feel bored when the
lesson is only about forcing students to memorize tons of theories, doing experiments could
let the students feel the importance of science in the daily.
Do you think the church should intervene to scientific ideas?

What is Darwin’s contribution to modern science?

 Darwin's greatest contribution to science is that he completed the Copernican Revolution

 Agriculture
Agriculture is just a subset of biology with a business attached, so evolution
affects it at the most basic level. In order to cultivate plants, it helps to know what
makes them suited to their environment and what factors could make them more or
less productive if you begin to modify them through selective propagation. Early
humans began doing this without any concept of evolution, but our modern
understanding of the mechanisms behind changes in organisms has enabled much
more deliberate and targeted modifications.
 Political Science
The theory of evolution has everything to do with biology and almost
nothing to do with politics. Political positions that have tried to make a false
analogy between “survival of the fittest”, etc. and political actions usually result in
falsely supporting someone’s political prejudice. In other words, such false
analogies are destructive. They have been used prominently to support racial
superiority.

The most that can be said is that our political behaviour must have
something to do with our biology. But the specific connection between biology and
human behaviour is controversial and open to many interpretations. Do not be
surprised if the particular interpretation that one espouses simply reinforces that
person’s pre-existing prejudices.
 Republic of the Philippines
MARINDUQUE STATE COLLEGE
SCHOOL OF BUSINESS AND MANAGEMENT
Tanza,Boac, Marinduque

 Religion
Some aspects of evolution can contradict religious concepts, such as a god
having made all the millions species on this planet including humans. And then
leaving a fossil and genetic record of evolution. Perhaps the biggest impact of
evolution, is religion coming up with rebuttals, with such concepts as Intelligent
Design and Creationism.
By looking for other sources and literature, what are the controversies or questions on
Freud’s ideas?
 Untangling the Complicated, Controversial Legacy of Sigmund Freud
By Cody Delistraty

On January 24, 1895, in a letter that was kept unpublished for nearly 90 years, Sigmund
Freud wrote nervously about a dangerous experiment he was planning to embark upon. “Now only
one more week separates us from the operation,” he wrote to his friend Wilhelm Fliess, who would
be performing the surgery. “My lack of medical knowledge once again weighs heavily on me.”

The patient who would be undergoing the procedure, Emma Eckstein, came from a well-
regarded family in Vienna and began analysis with Freud when she was about 27. She complained
of stomach and menstrual issues that made even walking a pain. Freud and Fliess believed that
Eckstein’s suffering was related to her masturbation, which she discussed with Freud during their
psychoanalytic sessions. It was a dubious logical path, but Freud and Fliess’s solution was almost
comically unfounded. “Girls who masturbate normally suffer from dysmenorrhea,” Fliess later
wrote in reference to Eckstein’s menstrual pains. “In such cases, nasal treatment is only successful
when they truly give up this aberration.”

Freud believed that the sexual organs were connected to the nose, and sexual “issues,”
particularly masturbation, were principle causes of neurotic maladies, and that they could
sometimes be solved by nasal surgery. With the exception of Fliess, Freud’s contemporaries
mostly found this theory to be bizarre and potentially harmful; and, as is evidenced by his 1895
letter, even Freud began to think that he might be out of his medical depth. Nonetheless, his
convictions outweighed his doubts.

The operation failed. On March 4, 1895, a little more than a month after Eckstein’s surgery,
Freud wrote to Fliess of the surgery’s complications: “Eckstein’s condition is still unsatisfactory …
she had a massive hemorrhage, probably as a result of expelling a bone chip the size of a Heller [a
small coin]; there were two bowls full of pus.” Eckstein survived, but in sticking to his
scientifically unfounded theory, Freud nearly killed her.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, for nearly a century, nearly every mention of this surgery — and of
Emma Eckstein in general — had been purged from the official collections of Freud’s letters. It
wasn’t until Anna Freud, Freud’s daughter and a staunch protector of his legacy, hired Jeffrey M.
Masson to create a more complete edition of Freud’s and Fliess’s correspondence (an abridged
version had been published in 1954) that the letters began to come to light.

Anna Freud provided Masson access to more than 75,000 documents to complete his task,
but Masson quickly saw that something was awry in the history. “I began to notice what appeared
to be a pattern in the omissions made by Anna Freud in the original, abridged edition,”
he wrote in The Atlantic in 1984. “In the letters written after September of 1897 … all the case
histories dealing with the sexual seduction of children had been excised. Moreover, every mention
of Emma Eckstein … had been deleted.” When he asked Anna Freud why she had deleted certain
sections, she said, according to Masson, that she “no longer knew why” and that “she could well
understand” his interest, but that “the letter should nevertheless not be published.”

“In conversations with other analysts close to the Freud family,” Masson added, “I was given
to understand that I had stumbled upon something that was better left alone.” After bringing these
letters to the attention of Anna Freud, Masson, who had been set to succeed Kurt Eissler as director
of the Freud Archives, was fired.
 Republic of the Philippines
MARINDUQUE STATE COLLEGE
SCHOOL OF BUSINESS AND MANAGEMENT
Tanza,Boac, Marinduque

The hidden history of Emma Eckstein, ideas about repressed childhood memories of sexual
abuse, and nasogenital theories were just the beginning of the unraveling of Freud’s legacy. In the
early 1970s, the so-called “Freud wars” — a virulent academic debate over Freud’s legitimacy —
began with psychiatrist Henri Ellenberger, philosopher Frank Cioffi, and historian Paul Roazen.
“There were plenty of doubters before then,” says outspoken Freud critic Frederick Crews, an
emeritus professor of literary theory at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of the
recent Freud: The Making of an Illusion. “Some of the keenest ones were Freud’s contemporaries.
But only in the ’70s did the whole Freudian edifice begin to crumble.” Crews’s own 1980 essay,
“Analysis Terminable,” in Commentaryand his 1993 follow-up essay in The New York Review of
Books, called “The Unknown Freud,” further made the case that Freud was a fraudulent and
unethical scientist, and together acted as the final bullet in the heart of his legacy.

And yet, although Freudian theories are no longer a part of mainstream science, Freud is still
incredibly well-known, a figure with name recognition on par with Shakespeare. Just think of how
his theories have entered into the contemporary vernacular: Mommy and Daddy issues. Phallic
symbols. Death wishes. Freudian slips. Arrested development. Anal retentiveness.Defense
mechanisms. The psychologist and Freud critic John Kihlstrom has written that “more than
Einstein or Watson and Crick, more than Hitler or Lenin, Roosevelt or Kennedy, more than Picasso,
Eliot, or Stravinsky, more than the Beatles or Bob Dylan, Freud’s influence on modern culture has
been profound and long-lasting.”

The question, then, is how? How does a man whose ideas have been widely debunked by his
successors hold onto this much cultural influence?

Part of the answer is that the link between Freud’s theories and historical and literary trends
gives them an extra dose of gravitas, making his ideas seem like the unearthing of centuries-old
truths. Think of Sophocles’s Oedipus plays or Shakespeare’s King Lear or Hamlet, for instance,
and you’ll see how Freud took the underlying psychologies that had long been a part of
foundational texts and turned them into “science.”

In doing so, he gave scientific license for these ideas to continue to undergird culture. The
theory of the Oedipus complex later showed up in D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers; Freud’s
theories of trauma and pleasure became a critical part of Virginia Woolf’s character Septimus
Smith in Mrs. Dalloway. In literary criticism, Peter Brooks applied Freud’s claims about dream
symbolism to his idea of how all novels are plotted in Reading for the Plot; Harold Bloom used
the Oedipus complex to explore poetic rivalries in The Anxiety of Influence. In the 1940s, literary
critic Lionel Trilling noted the “poetic quality” of Freud’s theories. His theories descended from
“classic tragic realism,” Trilling wrote in his book Freud and Literature, “a view which does not
narrow and simplify the human world for the artist, but, on the contrary, opens and complicates
it.” Freud was a master of words and socio-cultural insights. His genius was to bend science toward
them.

He also had a crackerjack public relations team defending his name long after his death. How
else could his name continue to survive after a statement like this from Crews in Psychological
Science in 1996: “There is literally nothing to be said, scientifically or therapeutically, to the
advantage of the entire Freudian system or any of its component dogmas”? Or after the 1975
statement from Peter Medawar, a medical biologist with a Nobel Prize, calling Freudian
psychoanalysis “the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the 20th century”? Or the fact
that, by 1980, nearly every mention of Freudianism had been deleted from the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders? Over the past century, a team of family members, friends,
and those with “financial” or “emotional” interests, as Crews puts it in The Making of an Illusion,
spent significant time redacting letters, making savvy donations, and writing histories that
portrayed Freud as a noble scientist — liberating humankind from their sexual hang-ups and
repressed memories.

But his reputation is a tautological loop — and one that has proven difficult to escape.
Because Freud is well-known, one reasons that he must also be important; because he is important,
he must have made great and lasting contributions to science and psychology. Freud “is destined
to remain among us as the most influential of 20th-century sages,” Crews writes; but he also argues
 Republic of the Philippines
MARINDUQUE STATE COLLEGE
SCHOOL OF BUSINESS AND MANAGEMENT
Tanza,Boac, Marinduque

that Freud’s apparent importance was more the result of historical trends than anything Freud
himself actually did.

For those who want to protect Freud’s legacy, the most compelling argument might rest not
on Freud’s specific theories but rather on his way of thinking. His innovative marriage of culture
and science opened up a fundamentally new way of understanding the world. “His theories
provided a foundation upon which the most important new knowledge was built,” says Mark Solms,
the chair of neuropsychology at the University of Cape Town and a founding figure of a combined
neuroscientific-psychoanalytical approach to therapy. “The fact that 100-year-old theories are
disproven does not diminish their importance. In this respect, Freud is no different from, say,
Newton.”

“Freud was one of the great ‘master thinkers,’” agrees Samuel Moyn, a professor of history
and law at Yale. “He wasn’t a ‘psychologist,’ so much as the first interdisciplinary theorist of
humanity, straddling the boundary between nature and culture, and all fields of intellectual life.”

“Nobody is that ambitious anymore,” he adds. “Our age prefers specialists, for the sake of
sure results, rather than grander visions that integrate what we know, notwithstanding the risk of
mistake.” Freud, Moyn and his ilk argue, was one of history’s greatest public intellectuals,
someone who was willing to span a dizzying number of disciplines to find answers to humanity’s
most pressing questions — which is why, despite the fact that Freudian theories have been kicked
to the far fringes of science, Freud still deserves the cultural sway he holds.

“Did Freud get some things wrong?” says Lee Jaffe, the president-elect of the American
Psychoanalytic Association. “Sure. But he also got many things right too.” Freud’s theories on
unconscious mental processes, the importance of behavioural ambivalence and conflict, the origins
of adult personality in childhood, mental representations as a moderator of social behaviour, and
stages of psychological development are all still relevant today. Freud also changed the public’s
understanding of sex and desire, perhaps more than anyone else, by equating female desire with
male desire. And, just by placing sexual desire and perversions into a “scientific” context, Freud
freed sexuality from the largely religious context that focused on its moral degeneration or inherent
criminality. His theories, therefore, often allowed people to feel more comfortable with their
sexuality, and to view it as separate from their core identity.

But it’s tricky to claim that the theories for which Freud is best known were all originally
his. The French psychiatrist Pierre Janet, for instance, pioneered the theory of the unconscious
mind. There were also plenty of things that Freud got plain wrong or discovered unscientifically.
His diagnosis and surgery on Eckstein is an obvious oversight that his protectors had long tried to
cover up; more famously, his ideas on dreams have essentially no basis in scientific rigor. “Every
dream will reveal itself as a psychological structure, full of significance, and one which may be
assigned to a specific place in the psychic activities of the waking state,” Freud wrote in The
Interpretation of Dreams. Today, very few would believe in this untestable hypothesis.

Freud often worked backward, finding “scientific” excuses for various behaviors and then
working to “prove” those theories. This logic is also a typical argument against psychoanalysis’s
efficacy — that it works mostly by placebo effect, with people responding simply because they
feel like they’re being listened to, not because of any more scientific explanation. But Jaffe says
the cultural decline of psychoanalysis, a practice Freud helped to bring into the mainstream, is not
due to faulty science or wholesale disbelief in its founder, but, more banally, thanks to economic
reasons. “Psychoanalysis is not quick and often more expensive,” he says, “and we live now in a
time of instant messages and an understandable desire for quick fixes.”

It’s true that with relatively inexpensive medications for anxiety and depression, it’s hard to
continue to justify hundreds of billable hours spent in psychoanalysis. And “simply because it
failed to heal psychosis or because … quicker and more reliable remedies exist,” Moyn says,
doesn’t mean that “psychoanalysis [has] been disproven.” Still, just because something hasn’t been
fully disproven doesn’t mean that it’s correct, and it seems a little too easy to pin the precipitous
decline of psychoanalysis — so in vogue in the middle of the 20th century — on economics.
Changing ideas about its validity have no doubt played a role as well.
 Republic of the Philippines
MARINDUQUE STATE COLLEGE
SCHOOL OF BUSINESS AND MANAGEMENT
Tanza,Boac, Marinduque

Even as Freudian theories and Freud himself have been placed under almost unbearable
scrutiny and criticism, the apparatus has not caved in. Perhaps it’s forever impossible to entirely
discredit Freud, hard as some might try. Even Crews was once a Freudian before he became
disenchanted with Freud’s lack of empiricism and the fact that psychoanalysis permits any number
of interpretations, all of them valid. Crews says that anyone who gives credence to Freud today
does so because they are exempting themselves from a rigorous “evaluation of his claims,”
uniformly granting him “the benefit of the doubt,” and blaming the “evidence of his illogicalities
and ethical lapses” on “the autonomous operations of his unconscious mind.”

“My belief is that if high schools did their job, most high-school graduates would be capable
of seeing through Freud,” says Crews. “It’s a question of asking for the evidential goods to be
produced.” He adds: “I don’t consider myself a radical. My point of view is garden-variety
empiricism.”

It is true that many people seem to want to believe in Freud — to an extent that, if it were
anyone else, would seem crazy. It’s easy to understand the appeal of his story: a seemingly
miraculous worker of the mind valorized by modern culture; a revolutionary public intellectual
who barely escaped the Nazis; an architect of dreams and sexuality, who was, for a time, a walking
and talking Rosetta Stone, unlocking every facet of the psyche. But because he is so beloved, it is
also fair to argue that we’ve been collectively blinded.

After all of the criticism, “‘balance,’ then, is supposedly called for,” says Crews. “But I say
no: just follow the evidence wherever it leads.”

https://www.thecut.com/2017/09/sigmud-freud-making-of-an-illusion-book.html

How can you describe Freudian ideas as a scientist?

If Freud is still alive, what do you think are the major changes he would make to his theory?