Philosophy discussion
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"Philosophy is dead"
Elena, Why I stress 'language' rather than 'mind' as being the precondition for philosophy is because language expresses a relation between us and an external world. This generates 'truth conditions' or 'meanings' that any self-respecting philosophy cannot do without.
Elena wrote:"[O]ur culture responded to the disintegration of a coherent worldview in modernity by trying to escape from philosophy. First it achieved this through adherence to unreflective scientism. That didn't quite cover the human element of thinking, so now people try to escape into unreflective mysticism."
This is an excellent point and I agree a very important diagnosis of our modern, 'pragmatic' culture and how it suffers -- between scientism and mysticism -- for loss of philosophical thought.
This is precisely the dilemma of science writers like Sam Harris, who explicitly asserts that mystical experiences are legitimately desirable but not comprehensible, thereby dismissing everything science can't determine empirically into the 'mystical' bin. Thus in his famous book "The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values" he argues that science determines empirically that all human values are external utilities to the enhancement of organisms.
So Harris concludes -- though it is not at all a clear inference -- we 'ought' then to maximize the greatest utility for the greatest number. Harris is regurgitating John Stuart Mill and his Christian-Humanist background presuppositions (i.e., all souls are intrinsically equal in the eyes of judgment) despite a superficial critique of Christianity.
But why not the equally plausible inference of Nietzsche and his more clear-headed anti-Christian conclusion that modern scientism and naturalism lead inevitably to disintegration of all such egalitarian values -- whether Christian or Secular Humanist! -- exposing them to be without any basis in the reality determined by science. Nietzsche is a vitally important voice for this reason.
Do we kill the few ill to eliminate their drag on the many who can achieve greater health and enhancement then? This is the old logic of mechanistic modern progress, arguably behind the modern progress machine built by the Nazis.
For lack of knowledge or even respect for the history of philosophy, scientists like Harris unbeknownst to themselves regurgitate frail, long-worn utilitarian arguments, oblivious to philosophical accounts of right and intrinsic moral worth as articulated by philosophers like Kant and Hegel. Never mind that Aristotle may yet still have given a better account of how moral character and judgment works in human life than any of the moderns.
Elena wrote: "All these traditions have much to teach us about ourselves, about what we might be in other conditions, and we can but struggle to bring all these together into a coherent understanding of what it is to be a human being, and how each cultivates and expresses our underlying humanity.Philosophy is precisely the activity to do this. It cultivates a kind of metacognitive, integrative mental function (that can express itself in formally coherent systems, but not necessarily) that enables us to step back from available worldviews in order to get a sense of the mental foundations from which they spring, and therefore to relate them as expressions of human nature."
Fine-sounding stuff. The problem I have with it is that I don’t think modern Western philosophy is at all up to the task. For one thing, far from standing loftily above world-views and cultural perspectives it is itself deeply embedded within the cultural perspective that arose in post-Renaissance, post-Reformation Europe. That perspective colours not only the solutions it produces but the very way it conceives of the problems in the first place.
To see this, you need only consider how Descartes framed the problem of existence. For millennia this problem had basically arisen out of suffering; it reflected humanity’s grasp of the awful contingency and brevity of life. As such, any “solution” did not take the form of a rational argument but a suggested way of living. Typically, this involved some kind of encounter with the Divine (and that was as true of Greek philosophy as it was of Hinduism, Buddhism or Christianity).
For Descartes, however, all problems were basically rational ones. For him the problem of existence arose from logical difficulties with the quest to make all knowledge as sure and certain as mathematical knowledge. (It is probably true that this quest for certainty itself arose out of the terrible ravages of the 30 Years’ War, but such notions formed no part of the new philosophy. The human concerns were there but unacknowledged; they lurked in the background as quasi-mystical features - eg, Descartes’ blatant deification of mathematical certainty.)
Unfortunately, Descartes’ re-framing of the problem cut him off from the chance of anything other than a superficial solution. The concepts involved had been rationalised and “literalised”. But as a straightforward description of a literal problem, this new philosophy was full of the conceptual confusion that Wittgenstein’s later philosophy so thoroughly exposes. The concepts of mind, thought, sensation, soul, etc, were all stripped from their normal uses to disastrous effect.
Although there have been some brilliant attempts to break out of the straightjacket (Hume, Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche spring to mind) Western philosophy is still living with the consequences of this re-framing.
All this is not to suggest that there’s no way of evaluating (or even synthesising) various worldviews. And obviously such an evaluation requires thought, intelligence and argument. But it also requires an historical imagination and a sensitivity towards the different ways of living in different epochs. And philosophy, far from being best placed to consider such things, is one of the items which must itself be considered.
Philip, no time to reply in too much depth right now, but I will clarify a point about my position. When I said that "philosophy" was in the position to take such a meta-cultural vantage point, I wasn't talking about Western philosophy alone. A point I made on the "What is philosophy" thread should clarify my position:
"So far we have had access to one tradition of reasoning – our own. Who knows what other traditions might teach us about ourselves, about wisdom, and about reason itself."
Many thinkers like to deal with culture by simply ignoring it, but Kant and Wittgenstein alone should be a warning to us - you cannot achieve accuracy of thought by ignoring the way our cognition is both conditioned and circumscribed by our symbolic (and therefore cultural) apparatus. To do so is to render oneself blind and impotent towards our cognitive filters (as you've shown Descartes to be in your post). But I think it is in the capacity of philosophy to learn from a comparative study of other traditions, and therefore provide us with a more comprehensive perspective of the foundations and structure of thought, and therefore, of human nature.
I don't think we should judge a field of study as illuminating as philosophy only on the basis of its past errors. We should instead try to gain a grasp of the deeper aims that drove philosophers all along, and see how they might be better fulfilled in the future by learning from and compensating for the mistakes of the past.
"But it also requires an historical imagination and a sensitivity towards the different ways of living in different epochs."
Very much agreed.
"And philosophy, far from being best placed to consider such things, is one of the items which must itself be considered."
Yes, and the strength of philosophy lies precisely in its metacognitive capacity, ie, in its capacity to perpetually re-consider and re-define itself.
It just occurred to me that a large part of the disagreement on this topic stems from our holding different notions of rationality. Because we disagree in our basic understanding of reason, we come to differ also in our conceptions of the scope and function of philosophy. The matter is not helped by the fact that there seem to be as many conceptions of reason as there are philosophical systems. How a philosopher constructs his ontological system will determine how he frames the various faculties, as well as the reason that is to try to coordinate them all in an act of knowing. Thinkers after Descartes have done reason much disservice by conflating it with its symbolic products – ie, the various formal systems it expressed itself through. It is too easy to mistake mental function with its concrete products. The cultural anthropologist Edward Hall even devised a fallacy out of this procedure: “the extension-transference fallacy,” whereby we are led to equate the mind with its various extensional systems (its conceptual, symbolic or material tools) ever forgetting that it is always more than it produces.
Also pernicious is this reason/intuition, or reason/emotion dichotomy. I think there is not the slightest meat to it, although much abuse has been made and is still being made of it. Reason IS in fact a very powerful, very focused, organized form of intuition. There is actually an intuitionist school of mathematics with respected adherents that posits intuition as the basis of mathematical process (and math is held aloft as a supposed emblem of formal reason). Likewise, meditation at its purest would not be possible without the guidance of reasoning which peels back layer after layer of accreted habit. And as you pointed out earlier Philip, mysticism is seldom completely purged of thought, and I would add to that that the history of ideas has been furthered by intuitive flashes of insight which reason then strove to interpret, articulate and relate.
It is only in the West, with our baggage of dichotomies, that we tend to cram meditation and what we call “mysticism” into the limited Rousseauan camp, and associate it with one faculty (which we label emotion, intuition, or whatever) and then value this aspect of the dichotomy over the other ("formal" reasoning). This is just as bad as doing the converse - formal reason over intuition, as the analytic philosophers urge. We're playing the game of compartmentalization and dichotomizing even as we claim to move away from it to some superior synthesis. And further, Kant, the arch-rationalist, drove this point about rational intuition home when he said:
“To neither of these powers may a preference be given over the other. Without sensibility no object would be given to us, without understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. It is, therefore, just as necessary to make our concepts sensible, that is, to add the object to them in intuition, as to make our intuitions intelligible, that is, to bring them under concepts... The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their union can knowledge arise.”
These forces can be artificially disintrinsicated and contrasted for the purposes of analysis and understanding, but we must understand, as Kant did, that they are in fact integral parts of a continuous process. The whole idea of carving up the mind into pieces and ranking one on top of the others is not going to take us anywhere I think.
So now that I got this bit of analysis out of the way to show what reason is NOT in its essence – ie, a strictly formal, abstract, disembodied, quantitative, linguistic cognitive mode, though this is the way it has been configured by some influential thinkers in our tradition – I will suggest my own take on what it might be, as a mental act of the total personality. I think it is an integrative, metacognitive function that enables us to coordinate our various faculties so that we can enter into the kind of relation with our world that produces intelligibility, meaning, knowledge, and fulfillment. It is also an emancipatory function, in that it enables us to place a “region of quiet” between ourselves and the pressure of instinct, custom and environment, so that we can step back, reflect, and assert our claims and whatever is unique in our nature.
So I very much agree with your analysis of the Cartesian heritage, the limitations of its framing of the problem of existence (and of its understanding of reason and philosophy), its blindness toward its cultural limitations, and, finally, its ignorance towards the more fundamental fact of the existential subject which underlies the formal epistemic subject it proposes to exclusively and myopically cultivate. I would reply though that philosophy, in its inception with Socrates and Plato, -was- seen as a form of revelation of being, a way of life which required the total, passionate commitment that alone could achieve the transformation of the total personality by reason. This was Socrates' dis towards the Sophists – their reason was unfounded on ethical commitment (to which we could add some spiritual commitment), and which rendered their reason flimsy and blind. The grounding we provide for reason makes all the difference in the quality of reasoning.
Existential epistemology shows that there is a primal commitment expressed in the adoption of a particular existential stance that underlies and determines the course of thought. Without this commitment, reason is sophistry or arid formal analysis "refined" of all human content. And without acknowledging this commitment, reason is blind to its own nature and oblivious to its foundations.
But reason still remains the configurer, the guide and the integrator - ie, what enables us to understand our experience and determine what to make of it and ourselves. As soon as the mystic steps down from his mountain and tries to interpret and understand his experience, he is doing philosophy. I apologize in advance for my long-windedness today.
Elena wrote: "It just occurred to me that a large part of the difference of opinion on this topic stems from our holding different notions of rationality. Because we disagree in our basic understanding of reason...">Existential epistemology shows that there is a primal commitment expressed in the adoption of a particular existential stance that underlies and determines the course of thought. Without this commitment, reason is sophistry or arid formal analysis "refined" of all human content. And without acknowledging this commitment, reason is blind to its own nature and oblivious to its foundations.<
One of the very best things you've ever written, E!
Gun wrote: "Elena wrote: "It just occurred to me that a large part of the difference of opinion on this topic stems from our holding different notions of rationality. Because we disagree in our basic understan..."This "commitment" is the force that pushes the Philosophers' pen.
Elena wrote: "It just occurred to me that a large part of the disagreement on this topic stems from our holding different notions of rationality. Because we disagree in our basic understanding of reason, we come..."I think we're in broad agreement here, though of course there is still much to quibble over - as you suggest, "reason", and its close cousin "rationality", are very slippery concepts.
I'm not sure what the new philosophy resulting from your idea would actually look like, but it seems pretty clear to me that an awful lot of what is currently considered paradigmatic of the discipline (especially on the analytic side) would have to be abandoned or substantially re-oriented. To which I say: good!
Elena, as mostly, I find myself agreeing with the general trajectory of what you say, and then your eloquence makes enjoyable what tends to be tiresome. For now I wont take up the latter part of the discussion, but address the initial topic. The quotes below are from Hawking's The Grand Design, unless otherwise stated.
When Hawking says, “philosophy is dead”, he means the philosopher’s quest for ultimate world-view answers: metaphysics. This is obvious from the relativist perspective he adopts along with an empiricist pragmatism. He calls it “model-dependent realism”, from the conclusion that “there is no picture-or theory-independent concept of reality.” His philosophical relativism comes in where he says,
“According to model-dependent realism, it is pointless to ask whether a model is real, only whether it agrees with observation. If there are two models that both agree with observation, like the goldfish’s picture [in a curved bowl] and ours, then one cannot say that one is more real than another. One can use whichever model is more convenient in the situation under consideration.”
Basically, his thesis is that philosophy is involved in any concept of reality, but there can be no ultimate truths in philosophy, no metaphysics. In an earlier book, he is more explicit about what a ‘model’ necessarily constitutes:
“We are not able to make cosmological models without an admixture of ideology.”
[The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time]
Hawking is admitting that his science is dead in metaphysical terms, and what is left for scientists to pursue is ‘convenient’ ideology. His proposal is “M-theory”:
“M-theory is not a theory in the usual sense. It is a whole family of different theories, each of which is a good description of observations only in some range of physical situations.”
Leaving aside relativism, one has to survey his book to see that worse than blind philosophy, he engages in ideological scientism that is comfortable with ignoring facts, especially in maintaining that horizontal and naturally progressive religion which supports the false pride of the modern mentality: evolution.
Coming back to the status of philosophy, if Hawking means philosophy is generally dead because modernist western philosophers have come to an impasse in their vocation, then he is merely admitting his provincial arrogance and ignorance. He presumes to bury an art because of the bankruptcy of some artists, and that also the foundation of all human arts: fundamental thinking. This impasse in modern philosophy was inevitable, in fact it was the most basic point emphasized at the beginning of this enterprise in the West, by Socrates: The most profound insight that a rationalist (humanist) philosophy could come to is “I know that I don’t know”, and it was the rationality of this insight that called the philosopher to transcend rationality and encounter its foundation in a direct vision marked by centrality and totality (which rationality only provides in a relative manner). Sadly, modernity is based on obscuration of that faculty of transcendent vision in humans, of which rationality is merely one reflection: the spirit (‘breath’ of divinity).
Jehanzeb wrote: "This impasse in modern philosophy was inevitable, in fact it was the most basic point emphasized at the beginning of this enterprise in the West, by Socrates: The most profound insight that a rationalist (humanist) philosophy could come to is “I know that I don’t know”, and it was the rationality of this insight that called the philosopher to transcend rationality and encounter its foundation in a direct vision marked by centrality and totality (which rationality only provides in a relative manner). Sadly, modernity is based on obscuration of that faculty of transcendent vision in humans, of which rationality is merely one reflection: the spirit (‘breath’ of divinity)."This, or something quite like it, seems to be what this thread has been slowly moving toward. But what sort of philosophy emerges from such observations? Would it be akin to Eastern Wisdom writing? Are the post-modernists showing us the way? I'd be very interested to hear any views on the subject.
Hi everyone! I am really happy to have found this discussion showing in such a beautiful way philosophy is not dead at all.I would like to address Philip's question, what sort of philosophy emerges from such observations. Just my views as far as I was able to follow the discussion. I think Elena has described it precisely. "We experience our lives as a question." And philosophy IS this radical question and what emerges is clear consciousness of this radical question. Answers are important only inasmuch they articulate our connection with the ground of reality discovered and differentiated in the act of questioning.
We can observe the same problems arising throughout the history of philosophy. And is it not striking they found their best formulation in the very beginning, in Socrates and Plato? Philosophy is primarily the Question. Unfortunately some philosophers make so much effort to bury their greatest discovery as soon as they glimpse it, but that what makes philosophy characteristic is still the fundamental question, the question we are. I do not think "I know that I don’t know" is impasse, as Jehanzeb suggests. I see it more like the very way "philosopher transcends rationality and encounters its foundation in a direct vision marked by centrality and totality".
As long as there is the question, one possible approach is denial. Therefore philosophy will always be accompanied by anti-philosophy. What more, the best anti-philosopher is philosopher himself. For if you see the question, you can avoid it, if you see your enemy, you can hide before him. And there will always be someone saying philosophy is either nonsense or dead.
The radical question, the ground of our being not knowing and questioning itself is dialectical and demonstrates itself in positive answers. But the answer is always something relative and depends on what is given. Every generation and every individual in that generation must rethink the question. I seriously doubt philosophy alone can give us answers. It is just the metacognitive faculty, the extra level of lucidity in the totality of our life. Answers are different for ancient Greeks, medieval Christians or contemporary atheists, because their existential situation, the only matter philosophy has available, is different. Philosophy is part of the situation, but it cannot make for the total. It is just what we are. The nature of future philosophy depends on the nature of future generations and what kind of philosophy emerges depends on what kind of life emerges.
Of course, there is also possibility of some new differentiation of consciousness, just as philosophy emerged in the time of Socrates. But then, strictly speaking, it would not be philosophy as we know it. In the compact world of mythical reality people could not imagine something like our philosophical thinking and perhaps we are in the same situation in respect to some future generation. Who knows?
In the time being, I find philosophy quite satisfying. Look at you, my dear fellow thinkers. We see the Question, we have commitment, we try to find answers - and what else, what better should philosophy be? What else than transparent description of our life?
For myself, what sort of philosophy emerges is not as interesting as what kind of science emerges. Perhaps just as positive answers are byproduct of the philosophical questioning, science in its origins is just byproduct of philosophy scared by the Question, denying it and trying desperately to replace it with something firm and certain. For science has not yet learned to question itself. And I believe it must finally realize its assurance is based either on totally unreflected grounds or even on intentional denial.
These last posts are wonderful guys, so thanks for your considerate replies. Thanks to Jehanzeb, we have a pretty clear understanding of how Hawking construes our current intellectual situation, as well as the projects he deems are valid for us to pursue.
The question is, how correct is his understanding of our situation? And should we accept his projected goals for inquiry? To answer the first, I'd have to offer my own two-cents' on what I consider to be the sources of our modern impasse (and in part, Jehanzeb was right on the money in suggesting that the problem of modernity is that the transcendental, immediate, transrational vision that alone can ground the chain of reasoning is forbidden on principle). And to answer the second, we have to answer for ourselves what we think the “real goals of inquiry” might be.
Now for the first, I think philosophy has come to its modern dilemma due to at least four main attacks:
The first was the growing awareness of reason's dependency on non-rational (oftentimes culturally- and historically-conditioned) faculties. While we once assumed that the linear, abstract, conceptual cognitive mode cultivated by our culture, with its concomitant picture of reality is Reason itself, we came to realize, at around the time of Hegel, that our account of man, and therefore of reason, was in fact ethnocentric. We came to understand that all along, it was merely -our- reason, as we've configured it culturally, as we've directed it by projecting around it a world picture containing the ideal objects of knowledge we expected to find: forms and structures, essences to be discovered and defined through analysis, principles and laws, linear time and the fiction of “absolutely simple objects” - all of which are just idols and “aesthetic anthropomorphisms” (as Nietzsche called our projected lodestars for inquiry). These are not reason; they are the cultural signposts for reason. And yet we scarcely seem to imagine reasoning without them. The challenge posed for philosophy now is to find the golden grail of modernity, which is an account of human nature that is not ethnocentric (more on this later).
The second challenge to philosophy came from optimistic, unreflective scientism. Despite Kant's insistence that the knower is always present in the laws and the explanatory theoretical constructs -he- makes, and that knowledge is always “knowledge for us,” certain terribly misguided folks thought they could just crunch the numbers and “stick to the evidence.” By thinking (theorizing) as little as possible, they hoped they might just shut out the specter of Error and Illusion that ever haunts our constructs. Fortunately, Hawking follows Quine in not being so thoughtless as to project a Lockean passive spectator consciousness, and seems to incorporate in his model realism Quine's notion that every act of thought and explanation presupposes an “ontological commitment.” So with naive scientism out of the way (which isn't really a challenge to philosophy; it is rather an ignorance thereof), there is no challenge – unless philosophy = metaphysical body of doctrine, which we've already agreed it isn't.
The third challenge is from the problem of meaning. Now this stems I think from Kant's critical analysis of the basic structures of the understanding. The historico-cultural consciousness described in point one relativized all that, which meant the a priori concepts weren't universal after all, and were now afloat in a sea of cultural-historical contingency. Enter the problem of meaning (with such movements as pragmatism or with Nietzsche, both of whom used the problem of meaning to dissolve both metaphysics and much of traditional philosophy and expose them as “nonsense”). So now the challenge is to answer the problem of meaning, to find, in other words, what relation to reality our most fundamental concepts really have. Until then, these “fictions,” “idols,” “anthropomorphisms” of ours – yes, even the “laws” of nature! - have a very problematic relation to reality. And yet without them, we cannot really be said to understand.
The fourth challenge is from such things as phenomenology and existentialism, as well as modern physics (funny enough), which show that a total system to encompass all existence may not be possible in a dynamic, open universe and a dynamic, open-ended existence such as ours is. So we have a problem of method: philosophers after figures such as Wittgenstein can't systematize or theorize, unless they're ok with knowing that to do so is merely to poetize. So what else can they do?
So here's my two-cents' on what we can do about these four challenges:For 1) we need a combination of worldview analysis (a comparative study of the conceptual foundations of the various cultural systems) and cognitive science (which inches towards a unified picture of human nature).
2)Since this is not a challenge, the issue really is integration, somehow persuading scientists that a self-critical approach will prevent the ideological conservatism that is the inevitable result of unreflective scientism. A critical philosophy can help with this, as well as with understanding the foundations and basic principles that underlie and make possible the knowledge contained in our various disciplines. With such an understanding we could sketch a map of knowledge that can make real, ie, comprehensive understanding again possible in an era of myopic specialization. Critical philosophy can be such a guiding meta-discipline, imo.
3)Again, critical philosophy paired with cognitive science and worldview analysis.
4) We'll figure this out after the first three conditions are met; probably not before.
And lastly, the renewed respect for the transrational and for intuitive, world-discloding insight Jehanzeb mentions, and trying to incorporate this into reason and rigorous method. Meditation techniques are also useful for the phenomenologically-minded philosophers as they enable us to ground the chain of reasoning about ourselves in an immediate apprehension that alone can illuminate which questions are legitimate and which are founded on merely chimeric projections or conceptual confusions.
To answer the second question – is Hawking's scientific goal the only valid one for inquiry? - I would say no, not if we want to come to understand ourselves as -subjects-, ie, not as slots in an abstract scheme of objects, but as subjects pushing against the limits of their beings through questioning and autonomous self-definition. Philosophical thought will always be radical, anxiety-fraught, and a venturing into uncertainty because it IS an expression of our autonomy. We're moving into the darkness of possibility. We have to let the illusion of systematic fixity go, and yet still hold on to reason. As E. Cioran put it:
“To what temptations, to what extremities does lucidity lead! Shall we desert it now to take refuge in unconsciousness?"
PS: I apologize in advance for my long-windedness; you guys gave me so much food for thought, it's like glutting at a buffet!
Just a few comments from a philosophic reactionary :)These are not reason; they are the cultural signposts for reason. And yet we scarcely seem to imagine reasoning without them. The challenge posed for philosophy now is to find the golden grail of modernity, which is an account of human nature that is not ethnocentric (more on this later).
So now the challenge is to answer the problem of meaning, to find, in other words, what relation to reality our most fundamental concepts really have. ... And yet without them, we cannot really be said to understand.
That is absolutely right! We cannot understand anything without the tradition we are rooted in. But this tradition also enables us to understand the tradition itself including its limitations and contingency. And it enables us to try to understand other traditions as well. This may significantly enlarge our horizon. As I see it, we are really moving toward the "golden grail", but it remains unreachable on principle. Any attempt of non-ethnocentric account of human nature is ethnocentric and study of other cultures is only expansion of our culture. Please correct me if I missed the point and repeat something trivial.
Philosophers after figures such as Wittgenstein can't systematize or theorize, unless they're ok with knowing that to do so is merely to poetize. So what else can they do?
System is gone, let's be happy. Poetizing is good and if a philosopher could articulate his thoughts with all the strength and clarity of expression poetry has, it would be absolutely marvelous. Nonetheless, I believe philosophy can merrily continue philosophizing the same way it has for the last 2500 years. The problem is, as it has been mentioned earlier, philosophy was sometimes mistaken for formalized body of thoughts, while it is dialectic of the engendering experience and its articulation. Once the experience is forgotten, the articulation must necessarily face crisis of meaning. It becomes just senseless play with words. To recover meaning, we should not abandon philosophy, but recover the experience. And the current embarrassment is an excellent opportunity to do so.
Philosophical thought will always be radical, anxiety-fraught, and a venturing into uncertainty because it IS an expression of our autonomy. We're moving into the darkness of possibility. We have to let the illusion of systematic fixity go, and yet still hold on to reason.
And I endorse this.
A link of interest for this thread:http://commons.pacificu.edu/cgi/viewc...
I think that paper can help define the sense in which philosophy is, pretty much undeniably, "dead," and has been for a long long time. I think that sense is exactly what Hawking had in mind.
This doesn't mean it is dead in any other senses, of course. Not any more than, for example, art it "dead."
From the article, "There Is No Progress in Philosophy""There is much more work to do on points of view, work that is required before the weirdness that is philosophy can be explained and understood. But we now know this much: In philosophy, clashing points of view are ineluctable, and their existence is the only truth. Thus, philosophy cannot progress."
I strongly agree with this, particularly with the first sentence, and my last post was written in an attempt to offer some suggestions for possible ways of dealing with that problem. It looms large in current philosophy, to be sure.
And yet while I agree that there can be no progress in philosophy -of the kind found in science-, some major problems with the essay are that:
1) there is little argumentative meat to it. Aside from the rhetorical flourishes, the persuasive and confident persona adapted by the speaker, and the fanciful Aristotle-in-a-time-machine thought experiment, go and see for yourselves if you see a single shred of argumentative substance there.
2) there is almost no historical analysis to back the main points - for instance, how does he account for the success of the philosophically-derived methods, concepts and principles that our various sciences are based on? What would modern science have been without Descartes's perspectival shift, which offered epistemological justification, as well as methodological guidance for the new science? Furthermore, philosophy is still birthing new sciences, as we can see with cognitive science. A philosophically-felt lack in our map of knowledge motivates the development of new modes and domains of inquiry. These are viewpoint changes, but they have produced considerable fruit in the form of scaffoldings for inquiry. They have helped inquiry progress, in short. Also consider the incredible power of such perspectival achievements as Kant's epistemological revolution, which forever changed the way we understood the enterprise of metaphysics. There is far more here than just a perspective alongside many others, all equally valid.
3) he's not really very clear on what his yardstick for progress really is, but I take it it is the lack of unanimously agreed-upon truth that irks him in philosophy. Even granting his point, which I do, I am not sure I agree that progress necessarily must be measured in this way: the quest for wisdom necessarily must incorporate the subjective POV (something Nagel recognized as well), and therefore, we cannot reasonably expect everyone to unanimously agree. And yet there -is- progress in the perspectival achievements of each age, in that we feel with each compelling new philosophy that we are breaking new ground in our understanding of our minds and of what stretches of reality they can cover. Philosophy is progressive when it is world-disclosing, when it reveals new potentialities for being and thinking. Furthermore, I find no shame in the fact that Aristotle still can have some human relevance for us - this is reassuring, to me, that human nature can still find itself across the eons and the shifts in ideological fashions. Also, I do not see this as a mark against philosophy but for it - perspectives are added on top of each other, and some are preserved when they have strong human content, ie, when their characterizations of our condition truly help us gain a grasp thereof. Philosophy is an elaborative, additive process, unlike science. Through it, we explore the many dimensions of our humanity, and its many possible relationships to our world.
4) his interpretation is anachronistic - the subjective/objective divide, as well as the perspectivism that follows from it, is a modern invention. It did not exist before Descartes, and therefore, the problems that come with it are historical, and do not cover the whole breadth of traditional philosophical problems.
I guess it comes down to the fact that I treasure and celebrate as a strength what he bemoans as a handicap. His rhetoric - because that's all it is - can't persuade me to adopt his valuations. A point the author may wish to consider: usually when philosophy DOES progress, it does so with more than rhetoric. As far as I am concerned, philosophy will only cease to progress when it will cease to offer new world-disclosures.
And perhaps in the end, philosophy is as good as it could be for a creature as paradoxical as man. If we factually are paradoxical, what would you call a domain of inquiry that professes to present an adequate picture of our condition, but gives us a semblance of simplicity and linearity instead? I would call it: fraud.
I mostly agree with you on not equating philosophy progress with one-viewpoint-beating-all-others. Again, it's like art - you can still enjoy Homer even when you have Joyce. But:> 1) there is little argumentative meat to it. Aside from the rhetorical flourishes, the persuasive and confident persona adapted by the speaker, and the fanciful Aristotle-in-a-time-machine thought experiment, go and see for yourselves if you see a single shred of argumentative substance there.
Well, that's a pretty big "aside from," seems to me. In particular the Aristotle experiment is too detailed and persuasive, to me, to be brushed off like that. I personally have reservations about it; it seems to me Aristotle will, in fact, feel some inferiority when confronted with modern philosophy, but it's very difficult to disentangle how much of this would be due to the "purely philosophical" sophistication of the modern theories and how much can be attributed to the modern scientific knowledge they inevitably incorporate.
> What would modern science have been without Descartes's perspectival shift, which offered epistemological justification, as well as methodological guidance for the new science?
Both Descartes and Francis Bacon did science themselves, along with philosophy, so it's impossible to know if their epistemological ideas could ever come from "pure" philosophy.
But overall, I agree with you here. I see it like this: science works by groping, by aiming for the low-hanging fruit, by taking the next inevitable step from the ground reached so far. That method works, but only so long as there's a limited and more or less obvious set of next-steps-to-take after each step. This seems to be the case for modern science - perhaps ever since the Scientific Revolution.
By contrast, philosophy tries to ascend, to take a wider look, to see over the next hilltop. Sometimes this works - the scientific method, whatever are its origins, is that rare bit of pure philosophy that _can_ be said to have turned out universally true: it showed the path, which science followed, which brought countless discoveries. Kudos to philosophy on this one. But sometimes it fails miserably: most of the "cultural relativism" and "postmodernist philosophy" didn't produce much progress even in the humanities, let alone science. It did produce much writing, and we can say (if we're in a charitable mood) that it "taught us to pay more attention" to this and that, but most of the fundamental assumptions of that school of thought turned out simply false, refuted by experiments (such as Sapir/Whorf) and incompatible with the growing body of evolutionary evidence.
Can we expect new guidance from philosophy, comparable to the scientific method by its usefulness? I'd venture to say it is rather unlikely. It seems to me that the science is progressing quite nicely, thank you very much, in its regular grope-for-the-next-fruit-on-the-branch mode, as there's no visible shortage of fruits remaining on the branches. That can change one day, though. If there are no more next fruits to grope, or suddenly too many of them (like the string theory landscape, only testable throughout), philosophy may again come to the rescue.
> 4) his interpretation is anachronistic - the subjective/objective divide, as well as the perspectivism that follows from it, is a modern invention.
I really don't understand this. A child is able to recognize perspectives, distinguish "what really is" from "what person X likely thinks about it" by the age of four. How can this be "modern invention"?
Kai, one question for you - how deep does the affinity between philosophy and art run in your view?I just find it absurd when somebody writes an essay, supposedly conclusively establishing the END of philosophic inquiry, and yet without using any of the rigours of philosophical argumentation to do so. Basically, this essay amounts to this:
"Philosophy is dead. This is -obvious-. And any who doesn't recognize this obvious point is disabled." Can anyone think of a cruder ad-hominem than this? I am sorry, but this kind of bullying rhetorical tactic works well in a highschool gym, but is simply unacceptable in philosophy.
So aside from the declarations buttressed merely by rhetorical flourishes, what persuasive weight does the thought experiment bear? Well, trouble with thought experiments is they can be pulled in any direction our fancy pleases. (This is by the way a thought experiment I often play in my mind with various figures I admire). Even by his account, Aristotle's resuscitation in postmodernity could play out differently. He could, as you say, be bewildered merely by the mutations of our discursive forms.
But more likely, I think he would actually catch up within a few weeks. Aristotle's greatness as a metaphysician wasn't so much in presenting concepts that necessarily and in all contexts will have methodological validity. Rather, his basic outlining of concepts such as dynamism and potentiality revealed certain core schema which have provided the foundation for the cognitive mode we've inherited. It was only a matter of taking these schema as points of departure and elaborating on them the structure of later conceptualizations. A bright guy like him, who devised the very foundations of our thinking (and this setting up of fundamental cognitive forms is the hardest thing to accomplish) will find no great effort in doing so.
“Both Descartes and Francis Bacon did science themselves, along with philosophy, so it's impossible to know if their epistemological ideas could ever come from "pure" philosophy. “
Well now we just have to quibble over categories. And yet I don't think there can be such a thing as “pure” philosophy, because as a meta-discipline, philosophy in some respect contains within itself the conceptual nodal points of all specialized disciplines – ie, it points to their fundamental, “a priori” principles. Descartes' philosophic vision was inseparable from his geometric sensibility. Plato's drive for philosophy was sustained by his passionate poetic insight. Is either ever a “pure philosopher”?
It is pretty clear though that Descartes – as a philosopher -, particularly in his Discourse Upon Method, set up the mode of reductive analysis as well as projected the ideal objects of knowledge (the mechanistic laws) which set the pattern for all later scientific inquiry. The trouble with early scientists was that they lacked organizing insight. A lot of their experiments were highly particularized and often practical. It was Descartes's philosophical reflections that set up a coherent worldview as the guiding framework without which science would have still groped from practical experiment to practical experiment. This is pretty well established in the history of science, as far as I know.
In response to your points on relativism, it's actually been pretty well established by the human sciences that the charges of relativism are not entirely unfounded, and that culture has determining power. But again, this only points out that human nature is far deeper than anywhere we've so far thought to look.
“Can we expect new guidance from philosophy, comparable to the scientific method by its usefulness?”
Yes, we can, and the fields I mentioned – cognitive science, worldview analysis, comparative cultural analysis, and the kind of “transcendental inquiry” into the fundamental structures of the understanding, ie, those that underlie our various specialized disciplines – can only be conducted under the aegis of philosophy. These are domains of inquiry where groping from fruit to fruit will not yield the comprehensive understanding we need.
Re: point 4 – His interpretation is anachronistic because the subject/object dichotomy, with the perspectivism it eventually foregrounded, did not exist before Descartes. This is something that often surprises people who don't take the history of philosophy seriously – that philosophers of the past did not recognize the same problems we do because they did not carve up the world as we do. But yes, before the modern period, people took it for granted that we shared the same world. The problem of perspective did not exist because the problem of so-called secondary qualities did not exist. The mind didn't “represent” the world in pre-modern philosophy – it “participated” in its order. All we needed do was locate ourselves in that meaningful order. As the result of this existential stance, different problems emerge altogether.
As a fan of Kant, I cannot say the pre-moderns were right. But it is worth pointing out when a reading that is meant to be exhaustive is in fact anachronistic.
Why do they want to kill philosophy? Isn't progress of science a product of philosophic inquiry as well? Why do we say this is mayhematics,this is physics etc.? How do we comprehend and accept numbers,formulas,axioms, models and so on? Don't we accept at some point, a priori? ▲
That is why I love this discussion: when somebody exposes a problem much better than I ever could. Elena has done it, so I can just try to offer perhaps some more aspects. Problem with the article is it has some good points, but draws dubious consequences. Some examples:1) Philosophy lacks "deep and widespread agreement". Therefore it "emerges as a riot of relativism" and is doomed to failure.
I do not think it follows. At first, the lack "deep and widespread agreement" is not failure of philosophy. It is rather consequence of the nature of philosophy. For the question of philosophy is grounded so deep it does not leave any evidence that could force you to a unified, generally accepted view. There could be even as many philosophy schools as philosophizing people. You have to take a stand and you must do it for yourself.
Luckily we do find fellows on this way, but this fellowship is not forced by necessity, is not grounded on some insight with character of given, indubitable evidence. It is much more human and social, much like moral and even political stand. It is mixture of a share in the same continuing tradition, good luck and communion of virtue or convergence of fundamental existential stands if you will. Yet I must stress this is no relativism. It does not mean you should not consider your stand to be the right one and cannot demand others should think the same way. It just means there cannot be any force to make you think one way or the other. It is up to you. It is much like moral decision.
2) Because there is no "deep and widespread agreement", there is no progress.
Only if progress means to reach a "deep and widespread agreement". But as I see centuries of philosophical tradition, despite the the lack of it, there is certainly both sense of collaboration on common work and advance in elucidation of our conditions. We should not expect a unified view, not even a unified view that progress should lead to a unified view. But there surely is some progress if philosophers sharing the continuing tradition feel there is some progress, which some of them do. To the extent we can say there really is tradition with "deep and widespread agreement".
3) Society does not ask philosophers for advice, so philosophy has little impact on the course of history.
On the contrary, I think philosophy, in the form of progress or regress, elucidation or obscuration, has significant impact on the course of the world. Elena pointed up modern science. I would add the Enlightenment or Hegel and the following Marxist catastrophe. It is true politicians or scientists usually do not go to philosophy departments for advice (fortunately, sometimes). But what they think is profoundly shaped by originally philosophical standpoints (it must have been taken by someone), although they gain some influence only when they are petrified in a form of unreflected, generally accepted views and notions which retain so much trait of the original spirit of philosophy as nowadays even some corporations claim to have a "philosophy".
Kai put an interesting question: Can we expect new guidance from philosophy, comparable to the scientific method by its usefulness?I would say we can expect guidance from philosophy, it is all what it is about. The comprehensive understanding Elena talks about. And it is surely not comparable to the scientific method, either by usefulness or anything else. It operates in a different way on a different level. It is incomparable. It is not about groping fruits. No linear, quantitative progress.
It is more like anchor which draws us to the ground. It is centripetal, not centrifugal movement. And as such, it must put still the same questions, never solved finally and forever. Maybe the bigger the question, the greater progress is achieved, for it does not seek expansion of external knowledge, it should not pile knowledge of particular facts, but it looks still deeper on the same place, to the center of existence.
This sceptical or relativist outbursts have, apart from their destructiveness, an important therapeutic function. They stop philosophy from the senseless run of delusive progress, which happens periodically once it has lost its connection to the ground of existence and become just groping facts or expanding body of knowledge.
> Kai, one question for you - how deep does the affinity between philosophy and art run in your view?That made me think. I would propose the following model.
Art is anything evolved in our social species to attract attention. This sounds too vague, but it's actually the only definition that is general enough to cover everything we call art, from cave paintings to dadaism to flashmobs. How it manages to attract attention and what side effects it has is what makes all the difference. You may never publish and keep it secret, but it's still art, even by this definition, just like masturbation is still part of human sexuality. It's just that something has to first attract attention _of its own creator_, who then may or may not use it to attract attention of others.
Philosophy is part of art, so defined. An insight or a speculation that comes into your head first needs to attract your attention, to seem sufficiently new and interesting to you. Only then you may share it with others who will assess its interestingness for themselves.
What sets philosophy apart, then? I think it's in _how_ it attracts attention, in what it appeals to in order to command attention. It was the first to feed upon, and in turn stimulate, human curiosity for how things "really are", the first to appear as soon as humans could discern that "what really is" is not always what it looks like. That set it apart from pure art that makes no truth claims, and some time later it also parted ways with religion (which also has its roots in generic art) in that philosophy further appealed to the capacity of reasoning. But the evolutionary basics remained the same: whatever attracts attention, survives. The integral estimate of survivability, for philosophy, is its _persuasiveness_: if I can follow the reasoning and it seems true to me, it is good philosophy; if, in addition to that, it is also new and interesting ("gosh, how come I didn't think of this before!"), it is excellent philosophy that will survive (at least) in my mind and procreate by affecting (at least) my own philosophizing.
Further down the road, however, an interesting thing happened. The persuasiveness selector was continuously refined and made stricter, and at some point it turned into something quite different: _verifiability_. Science was born and gradually separated from philosophy, which continued to use the old persuasiveness selector. (Verifiability, in turn, split into internal (mathematics) and external (the rest of sciences)).
So, what can we make of "progress," in this view? Definitely "widespread agreement" is not how you should measure it. But neither can we appeal to the sheer volume or diversity of the modern philosophy - if "every man is his own philosophy" then the only progress we have is demographic.
As we have an evolutionary process here, I would propose a purely self-referential evolutionary definition of "progress": it's when the descendants are better adapted to a wider set of conditions than were their ancestors. In fact, it's the same Aristotle time machine thought experiment in Dietrich's paper, only (I hope) better defined. Namely, if both of the following is true:
(1) best "old" philosophy completely or partly fails the modern persuasiveness standards: sounds arbitrary, contradicts itself, does not reason strongly enough, misses obvious objections;
(2) best "new" philosophy adequately answers both modern and old persuasiveness standards,
then we can conclude we have genuine progress in philosophy.
On whether these conditions are valid, or on whether we can in fact determine their validity, I won't speculate at the moment. The only thing I would like to point out in conclusion is this. One critical difference between persuasiveness and verifiability is that the former depends on _simplicity_ while the latter does not. Verifying the existence of Higgs boson is extremely complex; if we had to write down the entire procedure it would likely take hundreds of volumes. Despite that, this verification is accepted by scientists, and hailed as a major achievement. In philosophy, if you need to write hundreds of volumes to prove some point, you can give it up immediately: it will never fly. Once you realize this, it is clear how extremely difficult it is to make any progress in philosophy: there's only a finite number of _simple_ ideas, and quite naturally many of them were exhausted by the old philosophers. New philosophers, in order to produce more philosophy, have no choice but to go for more complex concepts and/or reasoning, and more complex automatically means less persuasive.
P.S. I'm aware my ideas here are reminiscent of Dawkins' "memes," but I didn't mention them as they carry some extra baggage I would like to avoid.
Agreed, Pavel. Particularly with your understanding of a kind of progress in our capacity for collaboration in philosophy. The fact that we accept many of the same problems as well as the same fundamental conceptions reveals a kind of agreement, even though the agreement is not at the level of doctrine. On the issue of perspective, I'd like to add that perspectives are themselves tools - they can serve us well or poorly in our encounters with the world and with ourselves. Some are more cramped, while some sweep across the mind like wildfire because adopting them we feel we can really stretch ourselves out more fully, because they are more comprehensive, in short, and seem to encompass many smaller perspectives and to put -them- into perspective. Something like this happened with Kant's "Copernican Revolution" in philosophical perspective, which forever changed the way we conceived of the entire project of metaphysics. Not everybody agrees with every detail of his arguments, but his general perspectival achievement has become a pivot around which the thought of all who philosophize turns. You can't simply philosophize as though he never existed (though positivists deal with him the way they love to deal with all serious philosophical problems - ie, by ignoring him and hoping his critique will just go away). This shows something -happened-, something changed, something about the way our minds run was revealed that we can't simply go back on. We move forward from that new starting place.
Thus, appreciating that thought is perspectival in nature doesn't give license to relativism. With total relativism, we could not have such a movement forward from a new starting place, with more polished tools. And it is not the case that we are amoebas with indefinite natures, capable of infinite mutations - some tools will be better in serving creatures conditioned such as we are, and some will fall short. Contradiction will probably always exist between perspectives and tools, as we are not clones, but so will some agreement, shared forms and mutual understanding, as we are not gaseous clouds.
Furthermore, postmodernism, with its exposure of so many other traditions of thought, as well as with the developing human sciences can pave the way for yet another powerful perspectival achievement. We can now have the tools to be more self-reflexive about our perspectival stances, about what it means to have a perspective, about what shapes perspectives. This is why the essay is right on the money when it says: "There is much more work to do on points of view, work that is required before the weirdness that is philosophy can be explained and understood." This is exactly what we need to do to get past this postmodern-relativist hurdle. And with such knowledge, postmodernism seems to open up the possibility for a kind of meta-perspective. This of course would also be just a perspective - there can be no "views from nowhere." And yet, the scope and self-reflexive rigour of such a perspective would be incomparable to what came before the critical and cross-cultural period. Relativism I think is just one necessary step along the way there.
And... it turns out Kai posted just before I did, but I will have to return with a reply later!
Elena wrote: "On the issue of perspective, I'd like to add that perspectives are themselves tools."I like the idea. Perspectives as tools, something that has potential both to reveal and to conceal. It reveals what is given in the perspective and conceals because it is only perspective concealing all that is left out of perspective. The way of our being, isn't it?
Kai wrote: But the evolutionary basics remained the same: whatever attracts attention, survives.I am not sure nature of art is to attract attention. Would not it mean buying a car or using foul language is art?
Frankly, I have never seriously studied philosophy of art. But I'm inclined to believe something like Heidegger (as far as I remember): Nature of art is letting things be, showing what there is, it reveals being of a thing. This may be something philosophy and art have in common. They have revelatory function. Art reveals being immediately to senses, aesthetically. Philosophy does it reflectively to reason. They may attract attention, of course - the revealed being attracts attention, but is it their essence? What would it be? Hype? If fact, I think art and philosophy can reveal being only if they let it be, which excludes using it as a tool for something else, e.g. attracting attention.
Tracing propagation of an idea can be interesting, but can it tell you anything about the idea itself? You can study why an opinion prevails, but it will never tell you if it is true. That is what irritates me on the evolutionist method. It only investigates why something survives and never sees what the thing is. It just does not seem to care about the main questions.
I can accept progress in philosophy means to be "adapted to a wider set of conditions". But not inside a project of attracting attention, which would make philosophy merge into show business. I believe it should be adapted to revealing being.
> Would not it mean buying a car or using foul language is art?"Art of obscenity" has lots of Google hits. Buying a car is more difficult to categorize, but it _can_ be art too - of a very low variety but still art. Many people turn car-buying into an act of self-expression, and self-expression is certainly akin to art.
> You can study why an opinion prevails, but it will never tell you if it is true. That is what irritates me on the evolutionist method.
You're spot on. Evolution is basically a tautology: something survives because it survives - not because it is better or worse, more or less true, more or less complex, etc. I perfectly understand how this can be annoying for some people, but I hope you can also understand how it can be, for exactly the same reason, exciting and liberating for others. Truth, beauty, understanding don't come to us from above; the only place they can come from is our own minds. By demonstrating how much of our notions, preferences, actions have evolutionary underpinnings, the evolutionary approach does not turn us into puppets - on the contrary, it sets us free. Only by clearly seeing the puppet strings and where they pull us, we can _really_ approach the question of what is true and good, in full honesty and with full information. We can even try to re-wire our puppet strings to be more to our liking, if we cannot cut them outright.
> I can accept progress in philosophy means to be "adapted to a wider set of conditions". But not inside a project of attracting attention, which would make philosophy merge into show business.
I think you mistook "attracting attention" for "attracting as much attention as possible." The latter is how show business (also a form of art, alas) more or less operates. But in evolution, survival does not mean choking out all competition; it just means survival, nothing more nothing less (again, tautology). If a species is well adapted to its specific habitat, no matter how narrow and limited, it may survive for as long as the habitat exists. Philosophy is such an inconspicuous bug that thrives in its own, admittedly small but stable, habitat; it need not feel threatened by the big and scary "show business" predators out there. However, in its habitat, it keeps evolving, and the basic resource for which different philosophies compete is the same: human attention (of a specifically "philosophic" kind, of course).
(Relevant articles from my book, Everday: "puppet show," "rething," "nomogenesis")
Kai wrote: Art of obscenity" has lots of Google hitsOK, words can denote pretty much anything. "Art" is no exception and it has many uses. I was referring to one of them, classical, I would say, and tried to fix what feeling people want to express by using it. Even in this sense obscenity can be one of the means of art expression. But not just because it is obscene and attracts attention, but because it reveals being. Sometimes using obscenity just to shock and attract attention is called art too, and it can be even in the classical sense, in a situation where it reveals being. But a schoolboy using foul language in an ordinary situation to attract attention of his peers isn't, so far, usually considered to be doing art. But someone some day can use the word in altogether different sense.
Kai wrote: Evolution is basically a tautology
Exactly. It does not say anything. And I agree with you that understanding of the conditions of our stands and opinions can set us free. I just doubt this tautology can help us understand. Doesn't it just create an illusion we understand, while it says nothing at all?
Kai wrote: I think you mistook "attracting attention" for "attracting as much attention as possible."
I just wanted to point out that "attracting attention", no matter what amount of it, cannot be the key to understanding the meaning of philosophy and its progress. It either explains nothing, if you see it as an external vehicle of an opinion (the tautology in evolutionary approach), or, if you see it as an internal incentive (and you don't, as I understand), doesn't explain philosophy, but show business, whose primary aim is to attract attention. (By the way, I think it is significant for certain usage of the word "art" that some people are reluctant to award artistic quality to products of show business, whose only capacity is to attract attention.)
Maybe I don't get it, but what is the advantage of introducing this principle if it explains nothing? Obvious mistreatment when the tautology that not only says nothing, but on principle cannot touch the meaning, is used to pretend there is no meaning? Or when it mistakes external vehicle for the meaning? Is it not the same evasive tactics as when, on the contrary, people deny that certain meaning can be conditioned, that the immediate meaning can have another deeper meaning, as in psychoanalysis?
But to come back to the question of progress in philosophy, where we started: I believe it can be answered only by philosophy itself, as it is question of meaning. I don't see how could the self-referential evolutionary definition of "progress" you proposed define progress, since it is tautology without meaning. You are right that in order to be free and to elucidate meaning, we must understand our contingency. So we need to avoid both meaning unaware of contingency and contingency unaware of meaning. They should meet each other. My problem is I fail to see any connection to meaning in the contingency of evolutionists, as if they just wanted to get rid of it.
Kai wrote: Evolution is basically a tautology: something survives because it survives - not because it is better or worse, more or less true, more or less complex, etc.Folks, surely we can do better than this. Evolution is not a tautology. It is the second best confirmed scientific theory ever. Evolution is not about survival, truth, complexity, etc. etc. It’s about procreating. And things do get better relative to their environments: it got colder *before* the wooly mammoth got wooly – check the fossil record. Also in the fossil record, simple life came first and complex life came later. Any US college biology course would show all this easily. In the rest of the industrialized world, it would be any high school course. Furthermore, a good understanding of science shows how and *why* it progresses and why philosophy doesn’t. Here we are defending philosophy from Stephen Hawking’s attack, when we can’t even get the science right. No wonder he has such a low opinion of philosophy.
I think it is important to recall that the evolutionary and the philosophical perspectives answer different questions for us; neither can give us some ultimate perspective that can resolve every question that might be pertinent to thinking beings wishing to understand their condition in the world, though it is very tempting for human beings to go crazy over some tool or perspective that has proven immensely revelatory in answering some of our questions and to with to extend its domain of application indiscriminately. The two perspectives can comment on each other, and reveal aspects of each other as well as point out where their respective blindspots lie, but neither can ultimately engulf or subordinate the other. Each has its use, and each has its proper range of application. The evolutionary perspective can answer questions about how we came to develop some of the institutions and cognitive abilities that have enabled us to do philosophy. But it cannot actually answer philosophical questions themselves. Let me give an analogous example. An evolutionary perspective can reveal to us how cognitive abilities such as language-use or mathematical reasoning have developed. But we don't go to an evolutionary psychologist or neurobiologist to help teach us how to prove a mathematical theorem, or how to understand syntactical relations. We go to a mathematician or linguist respectively for that. In just the same way, if we wish to contemplate and understand philosophical problems, we take up the philosophical perspective.
Stating that evolution is a tautology does not in the least denigrate its power as a perspective. Is logic any less powerful for being tautological? I like Kai's idea - we must begin by understanding where we are, without illusions, through tools such as evolutionary theory, and then decide - philosophically - what lessons we wish to draw from the tautologies of evolution, and how we want to proceed from there. The latter is an inescapable task for autonomous reason, ie, philosophy.
Eric wrote: Folks, surely we can do better than this. Evolution is not a tautology. It is the second best confirmed scientific theory ever.I'm starting to get lost. Unless we want to get completely off-topic and discuss evolution here, which could prove to be problem much more complex than high school teaching, I would prefer staying with the original question "is philosophy dead". Kai proposed evolutionary approach to the question and we were discussing its relevance, not evolution.
I just doubt this tautology can help us understand. Doesn't it just create an illusion we understand, while it says nothing at all?Consider Newton's discovery of gravity. In a way, it was utterly tautological. Why did the apple fall down? Because gravity. What is gravity? It's what makes an apple fall, among other things. Newton didn't derive gravity from some higher principle, didn't explain what it "is"; he only postulated its universality and quantified it. And yet it was a profound discovery that led to countless testable predictions and deep new understandings.
Tautology is not emptiness. In a way, all of science is tautological so long as it rejects supernatural explanations; it states, in general, that things happen this way because they just do. A modern scientist can no better explain what the Higgs field (or any field, for that matter) "is" than Newton could explain what gravity "is." Scientists are not even interested in non-tautological theories; more, their tautology is what gives them the power to do new science. Exactly because Newton's theory lacked any "explanations" other than the inverse-square law, Einstein was able to supersede it with general relativity. Einstein's theory replaced the inverse-square law with much more complex math, led to more testable predictions, profoundly affected thinking inside and outside science - and yet remains just as amenable to being replaced with some new theory to come, and is just as tautological as Newton's gravity: it contains a longer chain of "A because B, B because C," etc., but at some point the chain again stops: for some Z, it's _not because anything_ (at least, not anything we now know). This end of chain is a guarantee that science can progress further - but from another viewpoint, it's a manifestation of its self-containedness, its limitedness, its tautology.
So, if you take science seriously, you shouldn't too easily dismiss a tautology.
However, as I see it, philosophy is a rebellion against this tautology - the uneasy feel that science is, basically, tautologic is what motivates many modern philosophers (who are sometimes scientists themselves - not every scientist is like Hawking) to try and find some non-tautological explanations. See my previous message on how philosophy works on persuasiveness while science works on verifiability; persuasiveness is utterly incompatible with tautology - while verifiability can live happily with it. So I can understand why philosophers may not be exactly excited to see something so tautological as evolution applied to their work.
They needn't feel threatened. Theory of evolution is not a prescription, only a description. Most of Earth's biology happily evolves along without ever having heard of Darwin. But one species that does know how evolution works is now in position, by virtue of this and other "tautological" knowledge, to empower itself literally beyond recognition. Humans already created culture which differs from natural evosystems in being strongly autocatalytic: it quickly changes its own habitat, and therefore its own selection function. (That's what Elena was saying: after Kant, you can't philosophize as if he didn't exist.) In the foreseeable future, humans may start to directly and purposefully change their minds and bodies, and of course this is impossible without fully understanding how the current minds and bodies came to be. Moreover, I suspect that the evolutionary principles of mutation and selection will still be at work, except that this evolution will be more autocatalytic, more conscious, and more virtual (performed on models and not live organs; see my book for more on that).
> The evolutionary perspective can answer questions about how we came to develop some of the institutions and cognitive abilities that have enabled us to do philosophy. But it cannot actually answer philosophical questions themselves. Absolutely. Evolution is not _the_ answer; it's just one perspective. You don't have to agree with it, or even be aware of it, to be successful in your field, whatever that may be. Moreover, I suspect that some of the most profound results, achievements, paradigm shifts are done by those who, through chance or personal disinclination, are unaware of some important parts of the world picture that "everyone else" takes for granted.
"Progress" is something that (a) happens in time, and (b) is often measured by comparison with other similar entities. Both of these suggested that an evolutionary take on "progress in philosophy" may possess certain persuasiveness - but it does not exclude other perspectives.
Eric:Folks, surely we can do better than this. Evolution is not a tautology. It is the second best confirmed scientific theory ever.
I don't think being a verifiable theory precludes tautology - in fact I think it kind of implies a tautology of a certain sort (see my answer to Pavel).
Evolution is not about survival, truth, complexity, etc. etc. It’s about procreating.
I both agree and disagree. True, _in general_, you cannot derive any qualities of a thing that survived and procreated from just the fact that it did. That's the tautology I wrote about: in "survival of the fittest," "fittest" simply means "one which is the best at surviving." But that doesn't have to be true in each specific case. For example, if we have an evosystem of ideas where, from empirical observation, the chances of an idea's survival correlate with that idea's trueness (which we obtain independently), it need not be an illusion; it may well be an important feature of this specific evosystem that true ideas survive better in it. We can use this observation to better understand this evosystem and its products. However, here's what we should NOT do:
- we should not be surprised that the winners also posses other qualities that we don't normally associate with being true - such as "attention-grabbing power" or "greenness" (whatever that may mean);
- we should not expect it to always stay that way: with time, the evosystem can conceivably change so that that true ideas start being disadvantaged in it;
- most importantly, we should not redefine "being true" through "having survived" in that specific evosystem; our notion of "true" should remain independent.
By the way, though this may be offtopic, I think I have an objection to "procreation" part of your statement as well. Evolution need not be about procreating; at the most basic level, it's about the _staying power_ - the power of things to stay long enough to be noticed by us. On a good day's walk, I may find an insect from a species that is 100 million years old; and I may find a piece of rock that is also 100 million years old. I propose that there is a deep similarity between these two findings. Why was I able to see that insect? Because its ancestors managed to survive and procreate, eventually producing something visible for me, while other insects weren't so lucky. Why was I able to see that piece of rock? Because it, too, managed to survive all these years - while other rocks were crushed, metamorphosed, simply hidden from sight underground. So with the rock, we also have mutations (different kinds of rocks were created in different places) and selection (only some of them survived, and only some of those are now findable on a walk). That's 2 out of 3 elements of evolution; the only missing element is procreation. To me, it's still evolution of sorts, only using a different "staying strategy" - in place of feeding and procreating as living things do, rocks use the sturdiness and the beneficial location (near the surface) to ensure "survival" (as defined by my finding them). It opens interesting ways to extend the evolutionary insights to questions like "why is the dust accumulating in the corners?" or "why is it so easy to break a loose chain into pieces simply by shaking it, and harder to do it on purpose?"
Kai, thanks for the answer. In your own words, "that made me think", which may be good for me, but for others it means another long and tedious post about which I am sorry.I can see better what you mean by tautology. Science is tautological in the sense of exclusion of supernatural explanations, as determination to stay with the facts of objective reality. OK? So if I say the apple falls because it falls, I put brackets around certain fact to mark inner field of possible explanations.
Evolution can be tautology. Something survived. It is fact. We may explore qualities and conditions which resulted in the survival and formulate some principle. It may be perfectly plausible, scientific, non-redundant explanation and may help us predict something will survive in future. I'm OK with this "tautology" explanation which, overall, does not say more than something survived and how did it happen.
Everything changes if evolution takes form of a metaphysical assumption about the ground of reality. It is no accident religions start with the question of origin. Origin is what gives meaning to things. Evolution in the strict scientific sense is neutral to this question. It may say man has evolved from lower species in process of evolution, but we can always ask what is origin of the process. It may seem odd, but the evolution in the first sense does not deal with the question of either origin or meaning, it is just question of facts.
Quite different concept of evolution is lurking behind, if we say process of evolution in objective reality is itself the ultimate origin of everything there is. This, much more than philosophy, is "a rebellion against this tautology". It is no more strict scientific theory, but analogy of religious belief. It does not just explain facts, but its strong gnostic features enable us to redefine meaning of things: Since we know the origin of things, we are masters of their meaning and can disclose the illusions of phenomenal being. It can be hardly disputed, since it is faith, but I don't buy it. In my view, evolution in this sense is ideological construct of secondary reality devised to conceal the primary reality we experience. I understand evolutionist will, on the contrary, say it is revelation of truth.
And yet another problem is application of these principles. Let me take an example from popular media: "Scientists discovered that we are attracted by certain features of the opposite sex because they are sign of better chance of successful reproduction". There are plenty of such popular explanations. I still wonder what's the meaning of this "because"? It does not say B happens because A has happened. It says A happens because B should happen. It is teleology. Meaning of things is defined by their place in the great design of evolution.
It turns out to be surprisingly complex, deep and muti-level problem, further complicated by the fact there are many competing evolution theories and each of them can have many different and often confused applications. As I see it, the reason, "why philosophers may not be exactly excited to see something so tautological as evolution applied to their work", has nothing to do with science or tautology, but with metaphysics.
On one hand gnostic evolutionist can say - and here we return to the topic - philosophy is dead. All can be explained by evolutionary science, anything else is just an illusion. It could be interesting to observe how fatal consequences it must have for the notion of truth or even science itself, but in brief it follows that truth is out there. Take it or not. On the other hand, taken as "tautology", it need not have any consequences at all, as you observed. Or we may fluctuate between both extremes.
Thus your original hypothesis - philosophy is what attracts attention by persuasiveness - can turn out to be a fairly tricky riddle, with many possible meanings, which made me explore various interpretations and consequences. Does it make philosophy an illusion, or is it left intact? It depends on metaphysical connotations of the thesis. And on what you put as the ground of reality. And what is truth. And what is being. Pretty broad field of exploration.
Adeel wrote: "Stephen Hawking, in his latest book, The Grand Design, claims that philosophy is dead:Living in this vast world that is by turns kind and cruel, and gazing at the immense heavens above, people ha..."
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I must say, this discussion has started to make me feel all Carnapian - and that's not a good thing! Lots of airy rhetoric and fine-sounding phrases, but I'm struggling to see the meat in it. Maybe I'm just being a nasty old analytic type, but there should be some meat, shouldn't there?
Philip, if the charge is directed at me, please be more specific and I will gladly define more rigorously whatever terms you may find inadequate. I do try to meet the analytic challenge, although at heart I am still what one of my analytic friends called an "incontinental humanist."
John wrote: "Hawking's quote is perfect evidence that most people well versed in science are dreadfully ignorant of work in the humanities. First of all, what he said facilely draws a quick-and-fast distinctio..."I agree with John, but I would like also to add that not all scientists are so "closed" to the fundamental contribution that the humanities have brought (and are bringing) to the knowledge of ourselves and of the world. Just as an example, a beautiful book by Werner Heisenberg (who is one of the founders of Quantum Physics) discusses the philosophical implications of modern science: "Physics and Philosophy: the revolution in modern science" - ModernClassics edition.
Einstein was not closed to the "humanities" aspects and implications of his work either - even his relativity theory, according to Einstein himself, started from philosophical considerations about the nature of the Universe. The same applies to the works by Roger Penrose, a world-class mathematical physicist, mathematician AND philosopher. And the list could continue ... Max Planck, Kelvin, etc...
Hawking would therefore represent just one faction of the scientific community; Philosophy is NOT dead and it will never be dead, for as long as there will be unanswered questions about the nature of reality and of ourselves.
However I still respect Hawking's towering intellect and inspirational life - he is an intellectual giant, and sometimes in order to achieve the amazing results in a particular field that he did achieve, it could unfortunately become natural to negate / neglect / underestimate other fields of knowledge.
Everyman wrote: "Desgreene wrote: "Certainly I do not have the definitive answers to how a Republic should be governed but I do know that the ideas proposed by Plato were of his time and knowledge and thus of littl..."Beatifully written.
I would also like to add that some of Plato's ideas might have been discounted/demoted last century by "classical" science and physics, but some of them have been significantly revisited and revaluated by the most recent discoveries in fields such as Quantum Physics. Even "hard-core" scientists like Werner Heisenberg do not discount Plato's (and other philosopher's) approach and ideas. And some world-class mathematicians and physicists (such as Roger Penrose, just as an example) come very close to a "Platonic" view of reality. My recommendation therefore is to never discount in a definite way any of the past philosophical giants - it would be a great loss to humankind if we stopped listening to these great man of the past. Things are never simple or definite as they look - as the very scientific methodology teaches us.
Elena wrote: "Philip, if the charge is directed at me, please be more specific and I will gladly define more rigorously whatever terms you may find inadequate. I do try to meet the analytic challenge, although a..."It was more the discussion's general flow than any particular individual contribution (though I balked when you mentioned cognitive science as part of philosophy's future - a more wretched mess of conceptual confusion one couldn't hope to find).
It's always a danger, I think, that as such discussions become more and more general the language slips free from its moorings and skips off on holiday.
Philip wrote: "Elena wrote: "Philip, if the charge is directed at me, please be more specific and I will gladly define more rigorously whatever terms you may find inadequate. I do try to meet the analytic challen..."I do not see how identifying cognitive science as a key to resolving some of philosophy's traditional problems is a case of "conceptual confusion." In fact, cognitive science is the only science in which philosophy still plays an integral and recognized part.
To show its relevance to the epistemological project pursued from the beginnings of modern philosophy is not difficult. Locke insisted that before we can go any further, we must understand our understanding, so that we can restrict it to the sphere of its proper applicability. Hume accepted this insight when he further claimed that "a science of human nature" is the key to future philosophical progress, and that only such a science could serve as a foundational discipline. Kant accepted his predecessors' insights, and built his transcendental critique of the fundamental structures of the understanding on them. He realized that a foundational "science of man" would provide us with an understanding of the various founding principles of the various disciplines, and how they fit together in the general structure of the understanding.
I don't think this traditional philosophical project of coming to an understanding of ourselves will be complete without consulting empirical evidence from the individual human sciences any more than the individual sciences on their own can constitute the comprehensive "science of human nature" that the philosophers had in mind. Cognitive science, it seems to me, gives the philosophical project of self-understanding an empirical basis. It represents one of the points where the distinction between philosophical and empirical thought blurs, and where the two can cooperate and become mutually beneficial. To insist on some sharp line of demarcation between the two is suicide for both, I think, at least when it comes to understanding the multifaceted human phenomenon. My hunch is that the individual specialized disciplines on their own will never converge to form an integral picture of human nature. On the contrary, if their past pattern of development is any indication, further specialization is in store. Each treats the founding principles of the others as heresies, imaginative fictions, or at the very least as derivative from their own more fundamental principles. Is economic man fundamental? Historical? Cultural? Political? The sociologist condemns the psychologist's myopia and deems the isolated self to be an abstraction from the “more fundamental” social reality, and the psychologist treats the social self as derivative from the more fundamental personal self.
If one starts from the point of view of any of these disciplines, I do not think one can ever come, through some kind of inevitability, to a comprehensive perspective that unites and organizes all these various partial perspectives. That is an entirely different - and philosophical - type of knowledge task. It would help us put them into perspective, to connect their foundational principles with each other in a comprehensive understanding. Knowledge necessarily must include an element of structural integration and perspectival comprehensiveness, if any act of knowing can be said to be "complete." And the only thing that could complete any given act of knowing would be to relate the findings of the specialized disciplines to just such a foundational understanding of the principles of the understanding. Only thus could we grasp how distinct items of knowledge relate into a structural whole.
It is in cognitive science that the different, otherwise clashing perspectives on human nature provided by the various disciplines come together in an attempt to forge an interdisciplinary perspective and discourse. That philosophy can serve as a kind of aid and guide to interdisciplinary thought is in line with Kant's insight that it can function as a "queen of sciences." And it can still play this part today, through such endeavours. This is just one very important way in which philosophy is not "dead," but is actively furthering our knowledge.
But all this aside, I find it interesting that the analytical thinkers only flare up and ask for the meaning of concepts when these are alien or inimical to their own projects and valuations. The selective analysis conceals a selective (and motivated) blindness to meaning. The criterion of rigorous definition only ever comes up when we want to demolish the projects of others. When you spoke of the mystical and the lectio divina, the issue didn't even arise.
In my humble opinion, Mr. Hawking has committed the not very clever sin of confusing science and philosophy, as in their mutual pursuing for truth they can very easily confused. Philosophy has a great responsibility in the same confusion, since during the last three centuries has been apparently searching for its own substantiation (justification) behind the sacrosanct aura of science, Physics in particular, which is the evident queen of sciences in these not coincidentally times of mediocrity. But the mediocrity never stops, and very soon I am very afraid that Economics will take over the very same Physics. In the meantime, the prepotency of the prejudice that leads scientists to actually feel as the unique torchbearers of The Truth, has finally shown itself as dead end when it comes to Spiritual matters (note that Spirit means exactly the same it does in Hegel). To each his own. Mr. Hawking just do not understand what is philosophy. But there is a question we have to ask to ourselves: despite the efforts of science, philosophy is still here... but, and this the question, what really is philosophy now? For it cannot be what has been until our day. And this exactly what scientism doesn't understand: the constant need that philosophy has in order to justifies itself is not a weakness, but a stronghold. The sooner we see this, the sooner we start to work in the right direction.
Hi David, I would agree with you that there may be dangers in confusing what science and philosophy can achieve. However I would be very wary of any artificial complete opposition between the two. The scientific method, at its very core, is based on philosophical considerations - Einstein himself (and many other scientists like him) have very clearly stated that the major revolutions in science have happened when new fundamental assumptions about the nature and the structure of the Universe have been made on the basis of "philosophical" considerations. Maxwell equations, Special and General Relativity, and Quantum Physics are a fascinating examples of this. And the commonalities between the scientific approach and the philosophical investigation are evident when we look at the history of science. And the scientific method did not come out of nothing - it came out of a long history of philosophical investigation. The great geniuses of the past were polymaths, like Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo etc. And let's not forget about geniuses like Bertrand Russell (eminent philosopher and a lover of mathematics) and Roger Penrose (just to name a couple of examples). I find it slightly disturbing when, from both the "humanities" and "science" side, some artificial barriers are erected; for example, I find sometimes disappointing that Mr. Hawking, one of the biggest living intellects, adopts this position. It is a loss both to science and philosophy when the potential cross-fertilization between the two disciplines is not recognised. No discipline is the (I am using your words here) the unique Torchbearer of the Truth. I also like your terminology when you refer to "scientism" (intended as a dogmatic ideology of science as the only Torchbearer of the Truth); this "scientism" is actually against the very concept of the scientific method.
Hi there, I would like to comment the statement by Hawking: "Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics". While (see my previous posts) I do not agree at all with his statement that "Philosophy is dead", I nevertheless see that Hawking does have a point when he highlights that the fundamental philosophical impacts of the latest fundamental scientific discoveries have not been satisfactorily addressed by the philosophy disciplines. The scientific discoveries of the last 100 years have completely re-defined the very basic concepts of causality, space, time, reality of matter, interaction between the observer (Man) and the Universe, the destiny and origin of the Universe, relativity, consciousness, the probabilistic nature of reality, the wave-particle duality, etc. These are very important developments that address questions of fundamental philosophical nature; I do not see the current philosophical speculation addressing fully all these aspects. There is some fundamental catch up work that has to be done here. And it is a pity that this is not happening, especially considering that in the past philosophy was actually much more reactive to the changes to the knowledge that Man had of the Universe. Actually, in the light of all these developments, I think that philosophy is as important as ever in order to fully understand the implications of all these discoveries: philosophers need to descend from their ivory towers and understand these changes in order to deal with them. We need philosophy, and we need it updated with what is happening around us.
Fortunr wrote: "Hi there, I would like to comment the statement by Hawking: "Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics". While (see my previous posts) I do not agree at a..."IMO, philosophy has not "kept up" because philosophers have been experiencing a kind of crisis of direction. Nobody agrees on what the discipline is supposed to do any more. Many philosophers in fact, particularly the linguistic analysts, simply wanted to reduce philosophy to a highly technical procedure of thought which itself was supposed to guarantee insight. There's been a heavy duty post-Nietzschean critique of the ontological project which has kept philosophers from delving into constructing grand world schemes, even if scientifically based. And unfortunately, there's been little -positive- guidance provided to help thinkers discern a valid alternative goal to systematization.
There is a common thread in this confusion though, I think, and it can be discovered if we look at the underlying cause of this loss of direction - we are incapable of projecting goals for philosophic inquiry because we lack some kind of theory of human nature on which to base a valid philosophic method and goal of inquiry. Because philosophy is so bound up with an understanding of the human condition, lacking such an understanding (which is one of the great intellectual crises of our age) leaves philosophers at a loss as to how to proceed, where to proceed, and even - why to proceed (Wittgenstein).
But this is no news, as I pointed out: since at least the time of Locke, philosophers have recognized that before philosophy can return to ontology, they must pass through epistemological critique. And to pass through epistemological critique, they must devise a comprehensive and workable "science of man." They need a meta critique of what the mind -does- when it systematizes before they can systematize in a way that resists the corrosive Nietzschean anti-metaphysical critique (which sees "true worlds" as psychologistic projections). Even basing an ontological scheme on the hottest scientific find won't satisfy that critique because the problem lies in understanding the validity of higher level theoretical/abstract contributions of the mind to knowledge. Imagine the scorn an ambitious systematizer would receive from the hard-nosed empiricists should he choose to spin some flowery theory on the basis of empirical evidence, mythologizing data as it were. Not only would such an unwieldy conceptual superstructure be based on the most ephemeral evidence, which would likely be radically re-interpreted tomorrow, but we'd be reminded once more that such a theory has zero "scientific value," and rightly so. There's really no point to this project, and no way to resist such critiques, until the meta critique part is satisfied. I explained why in more depth in previous posts.
It is important to say something about evolution here, because there is a direct relation between the flaw of rationalism and evolutionism, and that is the arbitrary ‘ideological’ leap of considering what is relative and partial as absolute and total. They are both cases of irrational philosophy, because they seek absoluteness in what shows its own relativity. Such irrational philosophy is entirely different from a supra-rational approach which admits it is beyond rationality, and which rationality itself affirms without giving direct access to it. Just as rationality cannot give the foundations of a world-view but support it in a relative manner, so evolution is scientifically sound as far as simple variation in species [micro-evolution], but the evolutionist arbitrarily extends this process to include the transformation of species into new species [macro-evolution, evolutionism]. This evolutionism naturally includes and so infects his sociology and psychology, and basically becomes a foundational pillar of civilization. Evolutionism is an ideological leap because a basic view of natural history alone shows how absurd this theory is, leave alone the rigorous scientific methods employed to judge theories. This is without considering the mathematical and sociological critique, or the coherence with nature that is found in the unanimous philosophy underlying the various spiritual traditions of mankind (and I’m not referring to the shallow creationism of an exclusivist theological view).
In philosophical discussions, I avoid getting into many polemical details, but primarily focus on the descriptive significance of a spiritual perspective, and oppose it to the fragmented and contradictory nature of non-spiritual approaches. However, let’s look at an example of basic natural history in relation to evolutionism.
Scientists agree that there are basically no intermediary forms of species, except for a few specimens which are doubtful. In fact, Darwin says in The Origin of Species, “this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory.” He asks, “Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links?” His answer: “The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.” And, whoever “rejects this view of the imperfection of the geological record, will rightly reject the whole theory.” Now, take this fact of lacking intermediary forms, and add the following fact that Darwin states is “an allied difficulty, which is much more serious”:
“I allude to the manner in which species belonging to several of the main divisions of the animal kingdom suddenly appear in the lowest known fossiliferous rocks … If the theory be true, it is indisputable that before the lowest Cambrian stratum was deposited, long periods elapsed, as long as, or probably far longer than, the whole interval from the Cambrian age to the present day; and that during these vast periods the world swarmed with living creatures ... To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer ... The case at present must remain inexplicable; and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained.”
Geological knowledge today tells us that Darwin was right about the great duration of the Precambrian age. The Precambrian strata amount to about four-fifths of the Earth’s crust, which corresponds to around 900 million years, beginning about 1,500 million years ago. In short, 600 million years ago thousands of species emerged without precedent in the previous 900 million years, and 600 million years onwards these species show no intermediary forms. And, we say macro-evolution is one of the best theories! A closer study coming from various disciplines offers more damning criticism, but I hope this cursory glance is enough, to give a sense of the immense presumption involved at a basic level, and for the interested reader to pursue further inquiry.
The question arises as to why such a theory is so prevalent. I don’t wish to go into this much, but I will say that evolutionism primarily confirms us in the error of modernity, which is our irrationally self-contained and non-spiritual rationalism, as I discussed earlier. It is the objective complement of our subjective error, an unnaturally self-contained and non-spiritual naturalism. And, our intellectual and socio-ecological disintegration is a witness of this detachment from our divine ‘breath’ (spirit). As Meister Eckhart said, “Anyone who blasphemes God himself praises God.”
Philosophy cannot detach itself from a supra-rational foundation, as science cannot detach itself from a founding philosophy. To put it in Thomas Aquinas’ words, “… error concerning creation leads to error about God.”
The language of supra-rational wisdom which integrates science and rationality below itself is fundamentally symbolism, and it is in principle the most comprehensively rigorous and revealing science. It is contained in the mythologies and revelations of mankind, and is made further intelligible by orthodox commentaries. If we find it ‘naïve’, this only means we have not understood it, and certainly not that we have advanced beyond it.
Elena wrote: "Fortunr wrote: "Hi there, I would like to comment the statement by Hawking: "Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics". While (see my previous posts) I d..."Hi Elena, your post was of great interest to me. In particular I would like to raise a couple of points in relation to the following extract from your post: "Imagine the scorn an ambitious systematizer would receive from the hard-nosed empiricists should he choose to spin some flowery theory on the basis of empirical evidence, mythologizing data as it were. Not only would such an unwieldy conceptual superstructure be based on the most ephemeral evidence, which would likely be radically re-interpreted tomorrow, but we'd be reminded once more that such a theory has zero "scientific value," and rightly so."
You made your point very compellingly and eloquently here, but I do not personally think that the objective of philosophy should be (or it can ever be, considering the complexity of the information about the world we now have, so much more complex and sophisticated than even just 30 years ago) to provide an all-encompassing, forever valid, full-blown ontological system. My personal idea of the objectives that philosophy can nowadays realistically achieve is quite different: I would like to see a more pragmatic approach, much more closely coupled with the advancements in science (including cognitive neuroscience and psychology, not just "hard-core" sciences); and the fact that such a philosophical approach might bring out "results" that may have to be significantly revisited and possibly proved wrong or obsolete in a few years would not be a sign of weakness, but of strength and flexibility. As our understanding of the Universe changes so quickly, so its philosophical superstructure might have to be revisited - NOTHING WRONG WITH THIS. The fact that a theory may have "zero scientific value" next year does not make it any less valid this year - this is nature of the scientific method.
I think there is a real need, and desire, to understand what are the philosophical implications of the last 100 years of scientific discoveries - and if the answers that any philosophical investigation can provide are only partial and subject to change, then so be it. In order to align philosophy to the real world, it has to be flexible and adapt to the speed with which our knowledge of the world changes. If we insist on keeping philosophy decoupled from science and the enormous increase in knowledge experienced in several other fields in the last say 50 years, then there is the real risk that philosophy might die. Philosophy was born to explain the world and the place man has in it, and how man can understand it and live within it.
I see your point when you say that a thorough epistemological critique is fundamental, and sometimes the scientific community itself tend to forget this point. Quoting Werner Heisenberg, one of the founders of Quantum Mechanics: "what we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning". So the very design, interpretation and communication of the results of the experiments is dependent and subject on our concepts, prejudices, mental constructs and languages. And the fact that we can build a closed and fully consistent mathematical structure around a particular scientific theory is not a bulletproof guarantee of its validity. Classical physics was such a system: perfectly consistent mathematically, but demonstrably wrong at subatomic and at relativistic speed levels. Science is as fallible as philosophy, but science has something that philosophy should adopt a bit more: being happy with the intrinsically temporary nature of the models that are constructed on the basis of the current knowledge, and do the best with what we have got. The important thing is that we are aware of the limitations of such models.
Fortunr wrote: "Hi David, I would agree with you that there may be dangers in confusing what science and philosophy can achieve. However I would be very wary of any artificial complete opposition between the two...."
Hi, Fortunr,
Thanks for your comment: I basically do agree with it. It was not my intention to create a clear opposition between science and philosophy, but just remember they are not the same. The very "scientific method" needs to be constantly reviewed from both the scientific and philosophical sides, and each one of them requires specific methods and particular knowledges. But all things aside, what bothers me is that Mr. Hawking, as many scientist do, makes philosophical assertions without understanding what philosophy is, which by the way is not easy to even define, while we all have a very clear structural concept about what is science. I am not trying to underestimate science, only to remark that if we try to understand philosophy from science, we will kill our understanding at the very process. We all expect from scientist, before they make any scientistic affirmation, to develop the proper knowledge and the correspondent investigations, which implies a complete dedication for many years, if not for life. On the other hand, many feel free, as of course they should, to make philosophical affirmations without developing the proper knowledge nor the correspondent investigations. When this happens, philosophical views are often predetermined by science or religion, but not by philosophy itself. We should require from ourselves the same severity, and specially from scientists that so easily extract philosophical consequences from their studies. Philosophy, be that what it may, is anything but easy, and Mr. Hawking, as we see convinced that philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, could also ask himself if he has kept up with philosophy, modern, ancient or from any time.
Fortunr:I wrote: "There's really no point to this project, and no way to resist such critiques, -until- the meta critique part is satisfied."
The key word here is "until." :) As I explained in a previous post, Kant introduced a new starting point for philosophy that we must follow through if we are to attain a truly rigorous and self-aware method. This is not to say however that he rejected the traditional goals or ends of philosophy altogether. On the contrary, through his work we come to better understand our traditional goals of constructing an explanation of man's position in the universe.
Furthermore, only through satisfying the epistemological critique, as well as the meta critique it culminates in, do we stand a chance to fulfil our original goals. Kant reflected on the history of philosophy, on its contradictions, confusions, and its lack of progress (ie, precisely on the same problem that folks like Hawking contemptuously hold against philosophy). The problems he identified through his analysis won't just magically go away if we ignore them. The issue again is, as he points out, the ontological status of our higher order structural and theoretical constructs, ie, what kind of relationship to reality they have. It is this understanding that is the holy grail of philosophy after Kant.
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Fuller response to follow at some stage. For now I'll just comment that you seem to have a restricted view of the mystical insofar as you equate it with a meditative process that involves no engagement with thought. That would've surprised Aquinas no less than ancient Sufis.