MPorciusCatoCivver
Chief Windbag
- Joined
- Aug 14, 2023
- Messages
- 311
I guess I could summarize in a very brief, neat, shell like fashion, this way.
I took this from the "God and Trump" thread, btw.
I'm not really interested in debating or affirming whether Trump has been divinely annointed, but just to correct some points.
First of all, I take a realist, mixed, Plato-Aristotle approach to knowledge. This has important ramifications in all fields of knowledge.
So straight to the point: one of the most powerful myths advocated by Enlightenment thinkers is that the onset of the Physical Sciences has completely, instead of just partially liberated them from natural philosophy.
This is wrong wrong wrong.
For one thing, physics can only tell us what and how (according to a simplified definition) physical substances in nature exist. It is powerless to go beyond this.
For one thing, we have a field of study - ontology - which classifies how physical knowledge operates and how much it can tell us. And we have physics itself, telling us, hey, that's the properties of natural objects described mathematically. It has always been like that.
So the claim is, when we're saying we can eliminate metaphysics or that metaphysics doesn't make sense, we're appealing to a circular and fallacious logic.
Physics can tell us what an atom looks like, but it can never proof if "atomism", the idea first advanced by Democritus that atoms are the smallest indivisible parts of reality, is true.
Physics can describe the regularity of planetary movements, or the regularity of natural instances, but the fundamental definition of what a natural law is is beyond physics.
Similarly, the fact that physics can operate and describe a myriad of natural events independently, doesn't prove that physicalism - the idea that only physical entities exist and things like qualia or the mind are unreal - it doesn't go an inch in proving this.
All of this belongs to another field of inquiry. And we can say this for certain, this is the fundamental step that most naturalists and atheists miss when they proclaim the so-called "triumph" of scientism over metaphysics: they don't know that the physical sciences will never validate their own statements, and that the descriptions of physical objects according to mathematics or the idea of a natural law are not exactly exhaustible or even unquestionable and self-sufficient, in themselves.
As for what metaphysics pertains, well, it pertains to a different layer of understanding. To define and understand what a natural law is, we need metaphysics. To define and accept that reality is made of atomism or hylemorphism, we need metaphysics. To define and understand that numbers correspond to reality and aren't just virtual entities in our mind, we need metaphysics.
It doesn't matter here whether one is Hegelian, Aristotelian or Humean, once you make statements that pertain to natural philosophy, you're in a domain where you can be questioned solely according to natural philosophy.
And to sum up very briefly, the materialist, reductionist, hard mechanistic account fails to account for why the mind exists, for why qualia exist in nature, it even fails to account for why things like causality or a law of nature exists. They cannot define such things, and they become increasingly restricted to a picture of the world that is way too simplified, stripped, and inconsistent.
Similarly, empiricism cannot account for natural philosophy or even fundamental ontology. It is too restricted, too centered upon a problematic account of abstraction and causation, and also ends up being unable to explain how the very nature of physics operates without collapsing itself in dichotomies, like, "are laws of nature mere coincidental regularities?", and so on.
A succesful questioning of how empiricism can't even define what a law of nature is was brought in a phil site. Basically, if we take hard empiricism for granted, there's no way we can have the conceptual tools we need to explain the need for a law of nature to be a fundamental rule, instead of a mere regularity.
So it goes on as saying, there's plenty of refutations of physicalism out there, and physicalism is not the most end of it all just because we have found out some properties and laws of nature, for the reasons I've very briefly summarized. There's no way physics can prove this or that, it's outside the domain of physics.
I took this from the "God and Trump" thread, btw.
I'm not really interested in debating or affirming whether Trump has been divinely annointed, but just to correct some points.
First of all, I take a realist, mixed, Plato-Aristotle approach to knowledge. This has important ramifications in all fields of knowledge.
So straight to the point: one of the most powerful myths advocated by Enlightenment thinkers is that the onset of the Physical Sciences has completely, instead of just partially liberated them from natural philosophy.
This is wrong wrong wrong.
For one thing, physics can only tell us what and how (according to a simplified definition) physical substances in nature exist. It is powerless to go beyond this.
For one thing, we have a field of study - ontology - which classifies how physical knowledge operates and how much it can tell us. And we have physics itself, telling us, hey, that's the properties of natural objects described mathematically. It has always been like that.
So the claim is, when we're saying we can eliminate metaphysics or that metaphysics doesn't make sense, we're appealing to a circular and fallacious logic.
Physics can tell us what an atom looks like, but it can never proof if "atomism", the idea first advanced by Democritus that atoms are the smallest indivisible parts of reality, is true.
Physics can describe the regularity of planetary movements, or the regularity of natural instances, but the fundamental definition of what a natural law is is beyond physics.
Similarly, the fact that physics can operate and describe a myriad of natural events independently, doesn't prove that physicalism - the idea that only physical entities exist and things like qualia or the mind are unreal - it doesn't go an inch in proving this.
All of this belongs to another field of inquiry. And we can say this for certain, this is the fundamental step that most naturalists and atheists miss when they proclaim the so-called "triumph" of scientism over metaphysics: they don't know that the physical sciences will never validate their own statements, and that the descriptions of physical objects according to mathematics or the idea of a natural law are not exactly exhaustible or even unquestionable and self-sufficient, in themselves.
As for what metaphysics pertains, well, it pertains to a different layer of understanding. To define and understand what a natural law is, we need metaphysics. To define and accept that reality is made of atomism or hylemorphism, we need metaphysics. To define and understand that numbers correspond to reality and aren't just virtual entities in our mind, we need metaphysics.
It doesn't matter here whether one is Hegelian, Aristotelian or Humean, once you make statements that pertain to natural philosophy, you're in a domain where you can be questioned solely according to natural philosophy.
And to sum up very briefly, the materialist, reductionist, hard mechanistic account fails to account for why the mind exists, for why qualia exist in nature, it even fails to account for why things like causality or a law of nature exists. They cannot define such things, and they become increasingly restricted to a picture of the world that is way too simplified, stripped, and inconsistent.
Similarly, empiricism cannot account for natural philosophy or even fundamental ontology. It is too restricted, too centered upon a problematic account of abstraction and causation, and also ends up being unable to explain how the very nature of physics operates without collapsing itself in dichotomies, like, "are laws of nature mere coincidental regularities?", and so on.
A succesful questioning of how empiricism can't even define what a law of nature is was brought in a phil site. Basically, if we take hard empiricism for granted, there's no way we can have the conceptual tools we need to explain the need for a law of nature to be a fundamental rule, instead of a mere regularity.
So it goes on as saying, there's plenty of refutations of physicalism out there, and physicalism is not the most end of it all just because we have found out some properties and laws of nature, for the reasons I've very briefly summarized. There's no way physics can prove this or that, it's outside the domain of physics.
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