Noetics is Lawrence Krader's magnum opus which he began while still an undergraduate
philosophy major at the City College of New York in the 1930s. By examining the architectonics
of some of the greatest thinkers in history - Aristotle Plato Descartes Leibniz Spinoza
Kant Hegel and Husserl among others - as works of art combining myth speculation and
empirical science Krader tackles one of the central problems of the philosophy of science:
what is science and how does it relate to human thinking and knowing more generally. Building
on his theories concerning the different orders of nature adumbrated in his Labor and Value
(2003) he follows not only the lines of development of the three fields of science
corresponding to three orders of nature (material quantum and human) but also examines the
development of all three as human processes and products. Krader takes up the relations of
thinking and knowing in conjunction with emotions feelings and judgment and examines the
processes of abstraction as one of the key and unique features of human being and knowing. He
proposes noetics as a science of thinking and knowing and establishes its relation to the
natural sciences the human sciences and the arts. The breadth and depth of Krader's
scholarship is stunning and evokes Spinoza's thought that «all things excellent are as
difficult as they are rare.»
