F. L. Kunz

From Philosopedia

Kunz, F. L. (20th Century)

Kunz, vice president of the Foundation for Integrated Education, was a naturalist.

On the subject of the term, humanism, he wrote in 1956:

My own personal philosophy is entirely naturalistic.

However, I would like to say that I use the term in the sense as would a modern physicist, familiar with deductive-exact scientific method. Einstein would be my model here, and not Bertrand Russell. As you know, for such people—Einstein, Schrödinger, etc.—empiricism has a vital role in testing, winnowing, and proving out certain structures of thought which start with postulates, but end up as the finest kind of pragmatic science.

One of the results of this development—which took strong hold at the time of [physicist] James C. Maxwell—has been the physical and theoretical demonstration of the reality of the non-material. Thus we have established for us a view that inverts the 19th century mechanism, to which many 19th century people added a weak, inconsistent idealism. One of the important ingredients now, in 20th century thought, is a powerful realistic idealism. It is easy to show this, experimentally, in physics.

Further, one can produce evidence which shows that the same kind of methodology and the same authoritative content of knowledge can be derived for biology, without submitting to reductionism. After that similar gains can be made (and are prima facie acceptable now) in human psychology and sociology. But what I have said above is only a small beginning and must not be taken to represent the whole of my own view.

(In 1956, a person by the name of F. L. Kunz - it is not clear if he is the same individual - wrote The Quest for the Quiet Mind (The Honorary American Theosophical Lecture). If that person was a theosophist, he would be more interested not in physics but in mysticism, Madame Blavatsky, Mrs. Annie Besant, and others in the late 19th century, individuals who sought to bring enlightenment in the Western world from Eastern religion and metaphysics.)

{WAS, 7 August 1956}