The Elusive Synthesis

This collection of essays ranges from phenomenological descriptions of the beautiful in science to analytical explorations of the philosophical conjunction of the aesthetic and the scientific. The book is organized around two central tenets. The first is that scientific experience is laden with an emotive content of the beautiful, which is manifest in the conceptualizxation of raw data, both in the particulars of presenting and experiencing the phenomenon under investigation, and in the broader theoretical formulation that binds the facts into unitary wholes. The second major theme acknowledges that there may be deeply-shared philosophical foundations underlying science and aesthetics, but in the 20th century such commonality has become increasingly difficult to discern. The problem accounts in large measure for the recurrent debate on how to link science and beauty, and the latent tension in the effort to tentatively explore what is often only their intuited synthesis.