If education is concerned with preparing for life in our environing world, and if science is directed to attaining understanding regarding that world, then science should be a significant component of education in our time. However, Eastern and Western approaches have increasingly questioned that scientific knowledge stands in any simple correspondence to a clearly external and environing world. This can lead to more sophistication in notions of reason and rationality. This is the burden of Part I.

However, understanding science in terms of the life world brings out the extent to which science is a human construct. If guided by well-founded values this enables science to be a constructive force. Bereft of this, however, the result can be a skepticism in which science is only pragmatically related to the world. In this case it provides no guidance, but is only a tool to be used for human purposes, even those seriously misguided and destructive. This is the concern generated by Part II.

Hence, the concern of Part III is to find purpose and direction for thought processes left dangerously adrift by loss of contact with the world. This points to the needs to reestablish the relation of science to reality in its full breadth, from the physical to the human and from the social to the divine, and to reformulate on this basis the character of education in the physical and human sciences, and even in the humanities.

It is not incidental to this endeavor that during this last half century the major cultural development has been the recognition of the dignity of the person. While this may have been more obvious in the fields of values and rights, so central a cultural advance in recent times could not but effect as well the field of science and its philosophy. Thus, in retrospect it seems to have been inevitable that the major conceptions of science, based upon either empiricist or idealist philosophies, would be surpassed by the effort to discover the proper role of persons and then of culture as molding the physical, social and spiritual world in which we live. Some touchstones of this effort as it regards science and its philosophy are the subject matter of the chapters in Part I.

In the West, where empiricism and idealism had rules, science and its content had been seen as identical with nature. Professor Wan-Chuan Fang focuses upon a key step taken by W.V. Quine when he identify the two dogmas of empiricism namely the analytic/synthetic distinction and reductionism, and then showed that neither dogma could be justified. This implied that empiricism itself was an ideology in the sense of a limited view which imposed a reductionism upon science and indeed upon all knowledge. It then became possible and indeed most urgent to open the horizon, at least in principle and initially, to the missing dimensions, particularly to the role of the subject in the constitution of scientific world views. This was done, through the critique of scientific knowledge by Feyerabend and the work of Thomas Kuhn on the role of paradigms and their shifts in the structure of scientific revolutions.

Professor Fang brings this issue into relief by introducing Donald Davidson's claim that the work of Feyerabend and Kuhn introduced a dualism. On the one hand, there was the incommensurable, that is, not inter-translatable, schemes or systems of concepts developed by scientists; on the other hand, there was the neutral or uninterpreted context supplied by nature and waiting to be organized. As it is but a short step from this to the question of the relation between the schemes developed by the sciences and the content of nature which these schemes proposed to interpret, there reemerged the classical issue of subject and object, man and world. For some centuries the attempt was to reduce all to one or to the other. This resulted in the empiricist reduction of man to matter, on the one hand and in the totalitarian oppression of man by idealism and materialism, on the other. It is time for a basic rethinking, and the daily reminders of this by the environmentalists help us to appreciate the continued urgency of the issue.

Is this question of the relation between schemes and their content to be found in Eastern thought? As this is a matter of well articulated scientific schemes, the answer probably is in the negative. However, there is in Buddhism a particularly strong affirmation of the role of the subject. The paper of Lin Chen Kuo on "The Magic of Consciousness: An Inquiry into the Concept of Object in Yogacara Buddhism" deftly turns the tables by shifting the question from the justification of the subject, as it has been for the half century in the West, to a challenge instead to justify the object. This raises the question of the extent to which the object is a construct of the subject and hence of the way in which this work of the subject can be guided in order to be fruitful in our world.

Vincent Shen responds by following another route, generally connected with H.G. Gadamer. This distinguishes between scientific and hermeneutic reasonableness. He identifies the contribution to be made by scientific rationality with its ability to analyses. In comparison Chinese thought is seen to have both limitations and potentials for a contribution to today's concerns. The limitations include: that it did not develop a technical organization for gathering experience and drawing out its implications; that it did not develop a logico-mathematical structure for discourse (some would relate this to the autographic nature and structure of the Chinese language, in which case a response would require deep cultural adjustment); and that Chinese culture did not develop effective interaction between the empirical and the intellectual levels.

Instead, Chinese culture evolved a quite different and basically more humane concern. This was not for analytic detail regarding particulars, but for a synthetic vision of the whole. In this the human and the self were never peripheral, but always central. Thus Chinese culture should have riches to contribute today to the new hermeneutic concerns, especially for the practice of the human sciences. This points also to the need for a metaphysical and religious context to which Profs. Shen and Hang will return at the end of this volume.

Part II takes a dialectical step emphasizing the constructivist role of the subject and bringing to light problems which result from the recognition of the role of subject in the philosophy of science. The paper of Roland Fischer suggests that science no longer be looked upon as a statement about the world in which we live, but as a process to be carried out. This brings to the fore the importance of argumentation as interweaving reflection and points to the important role of contradiction in critical doubt and questioning.

In this attention to the activity of the scientific thinker, however, something dramatic has happened to the object. The product is no longer a unified science in the sense of offering a unified view of the world as sought by Descartes, nor is it even Carnap's unified science in the sense of cooperation by scientists all of whom are committed to the apply the same method to the study of the same reality. Indeed, truth and reality are no longer spoken about. For Fischer the product of science is a dynamic network of pieces of knowledge, between whose pieces there is potential for connections. But can consistency of argumentation be sustained and have meaning if the work of the subject is detached from reality; indeed if there is no such thing as meaning?

The papers of the Pietschmann and F. Wallner go further still to see science as constructing micro-worlds with no relation except to the life world which ordinary people construct consciously or unconsciously, and in terms of which they live. They acknowledge that there must be something existing in itself or real, but consider it (Realität) to be inaccessible to human reason. Hence, they transfer the meaning of reality to what appears in our everyday experienced life world. On this basis the sciences or perhaps better, scientists construct worlds of ideas or worlds.

Here the problem multiply rapidly, for not only is there no possibility of the consistent argumentation and significant interweaving in which Fischer would see any process that could be called science consisting. More fundamentally there is no basis for the notion of contradiction essential to the sole remaining technique, strangification (developed, it would seem, out of the notion of "falsification"), relocating a scheme in different scientific contexts until its limits are made manifest and its essentials circumscribed. (It was not without reason that the first efforts to establish a scientific approach to reality led rapidly and inevitably to Parmenides' and Aristotle's development of a metaphysics implemented precisely upon the irreducibility of being to nonbeing. One does without this only at one's peril.)

H. Pietschmann approaches this from the point of view of education to the counter-intuitive principle of physics. F. Wallner would reduce science and education to the metaphor of the market in which the scientist is a "player". By ingeniously manipulating different subjectively constituted micro-worlds and their possible relation to the life-world, scientist produce particular insights (small products). If they or others see a practical utility here they can attempt to market this insight. The value of such products of science will be judged not by peers on the basis of established content or in terms of logical interconnections, but by the broad public in terms of relevance of these micro-worlds to the passing needs of the market.

There is here a populist, anti-elitism. It is driven not by knowledge, but by skepticism. Whereas people look for content from the sciences with which to orient their life, Pietschmann and Wallner suggest rather that science education at the university level concentrate first on developing skepticism with regard to such content, and then upon developing marketable products, which is done through developing of micro-worlds and their application. The focus here is not on knowledge and its generation, but upon utility.

Can this make any positive contribution? A number are suggested based upon the possibility that training in the technique of contradiction or alienating inter-disciplinarity might help in generating marketable "small products." But while there is much humility to be learned, could such small outcomes be what the initiators of the project of science had in mind?

In Part III Prof. Tran Van Doan approaches this issue from the perspective of education. He looks into the ideologies of empiricism and idealism. The former by cutting off access to intelligible content directs all attention to method, while the other by focusing upon a priori intelligible content divorced from experience seals the mind within unchanging formulae imposed from without by indoctrination. His response to both follows the direction of critical theory and the rational pragmatics of Jürgen Habermas. But in so doing this remains ultimately within the envelop of rationalism and formalism.

Vincent Shen suggests that, rather than face such reductionism as is proposed in Part II, the theory of science needs to take up the related ontological and metaphysical questions. If to avoid these issues science would be forced to so limited and skeptical a goal as in Part II, then the path of reason calls for such ontological and metaphysical investigations. This is the burden of Part III. Vincent Shen shows how this broadening of the role of reason beyond the narrow structures of the enlightenment and a return to the perennial sense of reason might be accomplished, where Chinese philosophy can make essential contributions, and how the inter-translation technique of constructive realism locating ideas in contrasting contexts can serve such East-West comparisons.

If the issue is not to be left as is, with Western science wandering about in search of meaning and Chinese culture in need of help from the physical sciences, then one must ask, as does Professor Hang in his chapter, why Chinese civilization as a culture has not yet effectively discovered modern science, and why in the past it did not lay the foundations for doing so. Science was developed in the West, rather than in China, he writes, because in a number of internal and external ways it depends upon the notion of a Transcendent. There is need for the conviction, which is provided by the notion of an all-wise and universal Creator, that the universe is rational and that human reason in turn provides access thereto. In this light seeming inconsistencies stimulate intense effort to resolve them intelligibly.

While these elements were present very early on in the Chinese cultural tradition, loss of faith in a just and all-powerful God led to an identification of heaven and the natural course of events. This substituted the Transcendent by the notion of Tao as an impersonal Way. The effect of this as regards science was to leave a vacuum. Since 1919 this has tended to create such a desire for science that human spontaneity has been submerged to a scientific theory of human history. Adequate protection against this will require not only the knowledge contained in a more adequately developed science, but also the redevelopment of its metaphysical and religious contexts.

In a way the results of these investigations are surprising. Theory rather than being impeded by practice, can be enlivened thereby. But in order for this to be so both theory and practice need a metaphysics. But that is only to rediscover through long pilgrimage the distinctive role of wisdom for science. To this crucial discovery the present work makes an original contribution.