WOLFGANG SMITH CHAIR IN PHILOSOPHY

FoS endowed the Chair believing that Wolfgang Smith's work deserved and necessitated a wider audience. The Vice Chancellor Anthony McClaren said: "It is good to welcome the first externally funded Chair in the year in which we are celebrating the 175th anniversary of the founding of St Mary’s. The appointment of Dr Morello is excellent news, which will further strengthen our growing School of Theology. "

It's the implications of Dr Smith's work for the public square that are so striking. Incorporating his thought in order to hold scientism's feet to the fire substantiates FoS's claim that the scientism of Dawkins and Hitchens are not only meaningless but misleading.

The language of modern science education often sounds aspirational, yet too often it resembles the corporate gloss of ‘talking the talk’ without truly walking it. The Nuffield Science Teaching Project — distinct from its mathematical counterpart — once championed investigative science grounded in empirical honesty, following the evidence wherever it led, in a manner Galileo himself would have recognised. Yet the high ideals of the NSTP have withered on the vine. They remain present in policy documents, but in practice they have been quietly displaced by risk aversion, proceduralism, and a reductive framework shaped by methodological naturalism and the Cartesian ontology that underpins much contemporary science. What was once a living pedagogy of discovery has become a managed process of predictable outcomes.

Modern culture is full of diagnoses of what has gone wrong with our intellectual life. But three contemporary voices—Eric Weinstein, Wolfgang Smith, and St John Henry Newman—offer unusually sharp and contrasting accounts of the crisis. Each sees a civilisation that has lost its bearings, yet each proposes a different path back to truth.

This is not a comparison of personalities but of epistemologies—three ways of understanding how we know what we know.

Eric Weinstein’s critique begins not with metaphysics but with institutions. For him, the problem is not that science has the wrong ontology, but that it has the wrong culture. 

His Core Claims:

• Science is structurally stuck.
• Gatekeeping, careerism, and intellectual monocultures have frozen physics in place.
• Einstein’s legacy has become a sacred relic, inhibiting innovation rather than inspiring it.
• A new mathematical synthesis—his “Geometric Unity”—is needed to restart the project.

Weinstein’s worldview is naturalistic but anti‑reductionist. He believes the universe is intelligible, mathematical, and ultimately unified, but he does not claim that physics can explain consciousness, meaning, or value. His quarrel is with the practice of science, not with its metaphysical foundations.

In short: 

Weinstein wants to fix science by reforming its institutions and expanding its imagination.

Wolfgang Smith’s critique, by contrast, strikes at the ontological roots that Weinstein leaves undisturbed. Smith identifies the transition to the Quantitative Projection Domain (QPD) as the primary subversion of reality, wherein the horizontal, mensurative project of modern physics has been mistaken for the totality of being. Where Weinstein seeks to liberate the institution, Smith seeks to recover the lost verticality of the cosmos.

His Core Claims:

• The “vertical” hierarchy of reality—the distinction between the corporeal world of human experience and the physical world of measurement—has been collapsed.
• Modernity has mistaken the “shadow” of the QPD for the substance of the world, leading to a profound metaphysical illiteracy.
• The recovery of a perennial, ontological realism is essential; we need not just better physics, but an ascent back to the understanding that the corporeal world is real and primary.

Smith does not merely seek to tweak the equations; he demands a return to the Scholastic recognition of formal and final causes, exposing the “Shut up and calculate” mentality as a form of intellectual suicide.

Smith argues that science cannot be saved by institutional Reform alone because scientism remains the default metaphysics of the researchers themselves.

St John Henry Newman offers the necessary teleological and moral anchor for this recovery. If Weinstein concerns himself with institutional capture, Newman concerns himself with the capture of the mind itself. For Newman, the crisis of the modern age is not merely a failure of data or physics, but a failure of the Illative Sense—the human capacity to arrive at certainty through a convergence of probabilities where logical deduction alone reaches its limit.

His Core Claims:

• Knowledge is a concrete, personal act involving the whole of the human subject, not just a detached, syllogistic process.
• The “preponderance of evidence” is the judge’s tool, but faith and the conscience are the guides that ensure the search for truth is directed toward its proper end.
• Modern science, by stripping away the moral and teleological dimension of the observer, has produced a “notional” knowledge that is disconnected from the “real” assent of the human person.

Where Weinstein offers a mechanical adjustment and Smith offers a metaphysical map, Newman provides the internal mechanism of judgment. He warns that an intellect trained only in the proceduralism of the laboratory becomes a “shadow-self,” incapable of acknowledging the transcendent truths that hold the cosmos together.

Integrating Newman into the FoS project ensures that the pursuit of truth remains an act of persons rather than a function of machines, anchoring the mathematical and metaphysical in the lived experience of grace.