Dec 3, 2017 06:06 AM
https://aeon.co/essays/science-and-metap...-questions
EXCERPT: If philosophy is a tree, metaphysics and epistemology are its two main branches. Epistemology asks how we can know about the world; metaphysics tries to figure out what the world is, at its most fundamental level. If our tree fell down in a forest and no one was around, the epistemologist would set about examining the quality of the evidence for what happened; meanwhile, the metaphysician would wonder if it made a sound.
Philosophers of science (like me) usually take the existence of things and events for granted. We do epistemology: we focus on knowledge, not the thing itself. We ask ourselves questions such as: why is science so successful at finding stuff out, if indeed it is? Is there a method that underlies this success? How do values shape scientific enquiry? Mainstream metaphysics keeps us in our place, generally saying that the scientific endeavour is just too narrow to address profound questions about existence, being and reality.
But I’d argue science is precisely where we should start to answer these questions – in particular, with the weirdness and complexity of biology and biochemistry. From the origins of cancer to the nature of personal identity, the life sciences do not merely provide us with ever-greater numbers of disconnected facts. They also offer us the best data for putting together a broader picture of what the world is really like, a picture that confounds many common assumptions about what things are and where they come from. When we first pull a fish out of the sea, we might wisely remain agnostic about how such an unusual entity got to be there. After thousands of fish of many different kinds, we are entitled to infer that there is a whole strange, living world down there under the waves. Similarly, since science aims to discover truths about the world, surely it should tell us something about the very deepest levels of our reality, which is to say, metaphysics.
This project of science-based metaphysics, sometimes referred to as ‘naturalistic metaphysics’, has been surprisingly controversial. The philosophers James Ladyman at the University of Bristol and Don Ross at the University of Cape Town offered a forceful defence in their book Every Thing Must Go (2007). As that book illustrates, the debate can be technical and vitriolic. Consequently, I won’t defend naturalistic metaphysics from its critics so much as show you how it helps us inch towards an answer to one of the oldest chestnuts in the history of philosophy: is reality made up of things that somehow change over time, or are things just temporary shapes that our perception plucks out from a flux of unruly, unfolding processes?
MORE: https://aeon.co/essays/science-and-metap...-questions
EXCERPT: If philosophy is a tree, metaphysics and epistemology are its two main branches. Epistemology asks how we can know about the world; metaphysics tries to figure out what the world is, at its most fundamental level. If our tree fell down in a forest and no one was around, the epistemologist would set about examining the quality of the evidence for what happened; meanwhile, the metaphysician would wonder if it made a sound.
Philosophers of science (like me) usually take the existence of things and events for granted. We do epistemology: we focus on knowledge, not the thing itself. We ask ourselves questions such as: why is science so successful at finding stuff out, if indeed it is? Is there a method that underlies this success? How do values shape scientific enquiry? Mainstream metaphysics keeps us in our place, generally saying that the scientific endeavour is just too narrow to address profound questions about existence, being and reality.
But I’d argue science is precisely where we should start to answer these questions – in particular, with the weirdness and complexity of biology and biochemistry. From the origins of cancer to the nature of personal identity, the life sciences do not merely provide us with ever-greater numbers of disconnected facts. They also offer us the best data for putting together a broader picture of what the world is really like, a picture that confounds many common assumptions about what things are and where they come from. When we first pull a fish out of the sea, we might wisely remain agnostic about how such an unusual entity got to be there. After thousands of fish of many different kinds, we are entitled to infer that there is a whole strange, living world down there under the waves. Similarly, since science aims to discover truths about the world, surely it should tell us something about the very deepest levels of our reality, which is to say, metaphysics.
This project of science-based metaphysics, sometimes referred to as ‘naturalistic metaphysics’, has been surprisingly controversial. The philosophers James Ladyman at the University of Bristol and Don Ross at the University of Cape Town offered a forceful defence in their book Every Thing Must Go (2007). As that book illustrates, the debate can be technical and vitriolic. Consequently, I won’t defend naturalistic metaphysics from its critics so much as show you how it helps us inch towards an answer to one of the oldest chestnuts in the history of philosophy: is reality made up of things that somehow change over time, or are things just temporary shapes that our perception plucks out from a flux of unruly, unfolding processes?
MORE: https://aeon.co/essays/science-and-metap...-questions
