SEP updates
Color --revised: April 13, 2018
Géraud de Cordemoy --revised: April 11, 2018
Donald Cary Williams --revised: April 11, 2018
Al-Kindi --revised: April 11, 2018
Stoicism --revised: April 10, 2018
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Why philosophy is taking its time to answer the big questions
https://aeon.co/essays/why-philosophy-is...-questions
EXCERPT: . . . Such solutions to the problem of philosophy’s progress are well worth considering. But all of them – mine will be another – face fundamental criticisms. Some propose that the whole idea of making progress toward the truth gets philosophy wrong. Rather, philosophy’s job is to help us respond effectively to social and political issues, such as those involving race, gender or inequality, or to deepen the gravitas of our culture, or to help us achieve the examined life. Consider the latter time-honoured goal, for example. If this is what philosophy is for, then it makes progress one person at a time, and can do so even if people successively grapple with much the same questions and answers, with no answers ever designated as the ‘right’ ones.
But can’t philosophy do all of these jobs and be a search for the truth about the Big Questions, as many philosophers – myself included – suppose it to be? Whole ways of doing philosophy would have to be sent packing or provided with a new identity if that were not so. Here it’s good to remember how wide and deep is the curiosity that churns beneath our skulls. As Aristotle says in the first sentence of his Metaphysics, all human beings by nature desire to understand. And it appears that not everything we want to understand is addressed by science. Questions rather different from those of science fill philosophy’s textbooks.
[...]
As David Chalmers points out in a paper that has generated considerable internet discussion, the Big Questions of philosophy tend to stay behind when the sciences leave home. ‘Psychology has not done much to settle the mind-body problem, for example,’ he writes. And plenty of other questions remain for today’s philosophers to try to answer, even after – and indeed because of – the advent of science. Philosophy wants to know if nature, which science explores, is the whole of reality, or whether there’s something more. Tracing, with science, the innumerable causal pathways associated with our behaviours, philosophy wants to know whether these leave room for me to really be free and deserve praise or blame for my behaviour. And if there are truths about how things ought to be as well as scientific truths about how things are, what are they and how are they discovered? Might there be no truths of the former kind at all? In that case, what should we say about morality? Philosophy wants to know.
[...] Distress about philosophy’s progress on the part of its practitioners seems to stem from the assumption that if we were going to crack the Big Questions assigned to us, we’d have done so by now or be getting close. The Big Answers would loom visibly before us like the great rocks of Stonehenge. Here, the old views about our place in time, which after James Hutton, Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin should indeed be history, are still making themselves felt. Reflection on deep time would instead prod us to think more deeply about whether our very early stage of intellectual development might not also exhibit radical developmental immaturity – and to notice the distinctive and accessible sort of progress that is appropriate to such immaturity.
How should we understand such immaturity? Everyday examples suggest that the notion can be made precise in either or both of two ways....
MORE: https://aeon.co/essays/why-philosophy-is...-questions
Color --revised: April 13, 2018
Géraud de Cordemoy --revised: April 11, 2018
Donald Cary Williams --revised: April 11, 2018
Al-Kindi --revised: April 11, 2018
Stoicism --revised: April 10, 2018
- - -
Why philosophy is taking its time to answer the big questions
https://aeon.co/essays/why-philosophy-is...-questions
EXCERPT: . . . Such solutions to the problem of philosophy’s progress are well worth considering. But all of them – mine will be another – face fundamental criticisms. Some propose that the whole idea of making progress toward the truth gets philosophy wrong. Rather, philosophy’s job is to help us respond effectively to social and political issues, such as those involving race, gender or inequality, or to deepen the gravitas of our culture, or to help us achieve the examined life. Consider the latter time-honoured goal, for example. If this is what philosophy is for, then it makes progress one person at a time, and can do so even if people successively grapple with much the same questions and answers, with no answers ever designated as the ‘right’ ones.
But can’t philosophy do all of these jobs and be a search for the truth about the Big Questions, as many philosophers – myself included – suppose it to be? Whole ways of doing philosophy would have to be sent packing or provided with a new identity if that were not so. Here it’s good to remember how wide and deep is the curiosity that churns beneath our skulls. As Aristotle says in the first sentence of his Metaphysics, all human beings by nature desire to understand. And it appears that not everything we want to understand is addressed by science. Questions rather different from those of science fill philosophy’s textbooks.
[...]
As David Chalmers points out in a paper that has generated considerable internet discussion, the Big Questions of philosophy tend to stay behind when the sciences leave home. ‘Psychology has not done much to settle the mind-body problem, for example,’ he writes. And plenty of other questions remain for today’s philosophers to try to answer, even after – and indeed because of – the advent of science. Philosophy wants to know if nature, which science explores, is the whole of reality, or whether there’s something more. Tracing, with science, the innumerable causal pathways associated with our behaviours, philosophy wants to know whether these leave room for me to really be free and deserve praise or blame for my behaviour. And if there are truths about how things ought to be as well as scientific truths about how things are, what are they and how are they discovered? Might there be no truths of the former kind at all? In that case, what should we say about morality? Philosophy wants to know.
[...] Distress about philosophy’s progress on the part of its practitioners seems to stem from the assumption that if we were going to crack the Big Questions assigned to us, we’d have done so by now or be getting close. The Big Answers would loom visibly before us like the great rocks of Stonehenge. Here, the old views about our place in time, which after James Hutton, Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin should indeed be history, are still making themselves felt. Reflection on deep time would instead prod us to think more deeply about whether our very early stage of intellectual development might not also exhibit radical developmental immaturity – and to notice the distinctive and accessible sort of progress that is appropriate to such immaturity.
How should we understand such immaturity? Everyday examples suggest that the notion can be made precise in either or both of two ways....
MORE: https://aeon.co/essays/why-philosophy-is...-questions