On the side of science, for instance, positivists and phenomenologists, not to say the advocates of
noetics (Foltz, 2013; Krader, 2010), would disagree in almost everything regarding the natural phenomena (the ontological view of whether reality exists per se or is subjectively created) and how knowledge is appropriated (the epistemological and methodological views of whether and how to "touch" that reality).
These preliminaries furnish the fodder for the third part's discussion of "the conflicts which raged in the University of Oxford in the 1830s and 1840s, with Oriel College as the epicenter." Arrayed on one side were "liberal
Noetics," who "aspired to invigorate English Christianity through toleration, pluralism and reason." On the opposite side were conservative "Tractarians" who "fought to return the Church of England to the traditions, the conceptions of faith, the practices of discipline and the lines of authority of its apostolic foundation." Oriel College was then the scene of both commonality and controversy: "Both sides believed that modern men were astray in a spiritually barren wilderness.
The
Noetics of Nature: Environmental Philosophy and the Holy Beauty of the Visible
Elena Douglas, 'Reconciling commerce and virtue: Recovering a lost tradition in economics, Adam Smith and the Oriel
Noetics'.
And in doing so, some of them recognized that this text represented Platonic, and not Aristotelian doctrine; in one famous passage in al-Mutarahat, al-Suhrawardi quotes from the Theologia, introducing it with "the divine Plato said." Alexander seems to be a key link in the
noetics from the Aristotelian tradition through to the Theologia and al-Farabi, as Marc Geoffroy has shown most recently.
She covers riot, revolution, and reform in the colleges 1714-89; the new examination statute of 1800; the emergence of a junior reform program 1870-23;
noetics, tractarians, and the peak of junior influence, 1824-36; and the tracterian threat and the royal commission of 1850.
"There's this thing called
noetics, which says if everybody thinks the same good thoughts, good things will happen.