Abstract

The traditional heroic vision of science was strongly attacked from the mid-1960's. But the challenges both to the validity of scientific truth and to the value of scientific achievement had persisted since Bacon, Galileo and Descartes first deployed their methods. The narratives of intellectual decline present science as a dominating power which, in its separation of knowledge from value, divorces man from itself. The renewed hostility to science and the corresponding renaissance of magic and the so called "alternative " sciences now alarm, after a delay of some decades, the scientific communities.