Consul wrote: ↑September 5th, 2019, 8:58 pm
GaryLouisSmith wrote: ↑September 5th, 2019, 6:32 pmDon’t forget that she calls herself a materialist (a silly non-philosophy)…
"Physical realism, or materialism, is the doctrine that the whole of what exists is constituted of matter and its local motions, not Aristotelian 'prime matter' but physical matter, and is hence 'physical' in the literal sense that all its constituents are among the subject matter of physics. Every entity—stone or man, idea or essence—is on this principle a vulnerable and effective denizen of the one continuum of action, and in the entire universe, including the knowing mind itself, there is nothing which could not be destroyed (or repaired) by a spatiotemporal redisposition of its components."
(pp. 212-3)
"As soon as physical realism is set forth with some degree of precision and polish, the same detractors who once charged it with being an odious grotesquerie are ready to charge it with being an obvious truism, having no intelligible alternative. On the contrary, the statement of materialism thus clarified not only means something; it means something distinctive, arresting, illuminating, a thesis so far from empty and obvious that, unfortunately, it has been expressly denied by a great majority of philosophers and philosophasters. It has seldom been wholly without adherents; it is the philosophy taken for granted by a good many educated men, including especially those engineers and scientists who have not been corrupted by mysticism or phenomenalism; but most of the populace of Christendom, and most metaphysicians dignified with livings, lay or ecclesiastical, have emphatically refused to admit that everything in the universe can be ruined or repaired by local rearrangement. They have believed in enormous amounts of nonphysical, nonspatial, and even nontemporal reality, beyond the corruption of moth and rust, either supplementing material reality or supplanting it: minds, soul, spirits, and ideas, transcendent ideals and eternal objects, numbers, principles, angels, and Pure Being."
(p. 224)
"The ideal aim of systematic knowledge is to disclose the fewest primitive elements into which the most diverse objects are analysable and the fewest primitive facts, singular and general, from which the behavior of things is deducible. Metaphysics is the most scientific of the sciences because it tries the hardest to explain every kind of fact by one simple principle or simple set of principles. It is the most empirical of sciences because, by the same token, a metaphysics is directly relevant to and confirmable or falsifiable by every item of every experience, whereas every other science is explicitly concerned with only a few select and abstract aspects of some experiences. Physical realism is the ideal metaphysics, the veritable paragon of philosophy, because its category of spatiotemporal pattern best permits analysis of diverse complexity to uniform and ordered simplicities, is most thoroughly numerable, and so most exactly and systematically calculable. Socratic purposes, Platonic ideals, Aristotelian qualities, Plotinian hierarchies—these are surds in comparison with a system of nature limned in patterns of actions in the ordered dimensions of a spatiotemporal hypersphere."
(p. 227)
"If the rivals of materialism have any advantage it must be because there are some residual phenomena which they can explain better. Now, most of the phenomena which the supernaturalist throws in the naturalist's teeth are such as the supernaturalist himself has never explained."
(p. 234)
"The candid student, in fine, cannot be blamed if he concludes that the only reason that physical realism seems vulnerable at all is that it explains so much more so much better than other philosophies that the imperfections of its explanations are noticeable. As solipsism gains undeserved credit by being so preposterous that its bare possibility looks like evidence in its favor, so materialism suffers by having so few difficulties that one difficulty more or less makes a difference. A blasé public does not expect idealisms and dualisms to explain anything. With innocent cynicism, we appreciate that these philosophies were designed for a different purpose and are doing all that can be expected in a logical way if they avoid contradicting themselves and the obvious facts of experience. The physical realist seems constantly riding for a fall because he is on the only horse really entered in the chase.
It is most excellent testimony to the high confirmedness of physical realism that so many of its competitors renounce confirmation as a criterion. It is a tribute to its power of explaining the appearances that its competitors call it a philosophy of appearances (for we have seen that it is not a philosophy of appearances in any other sense), and that the persons who hate it are preeminently the persons who hate understanding, the mystery lovers. It is a tribute to the scientific advantage of materialism that the application of scientific method in philosophy is so often decried as a begging of the question in its favor and that materialism is called a presupposition of scientific method or scientific method is alleged to be limited to material reality. The logic of science has in sooth no presuppositions and no limitations. It is analytic and a priori, like 'Eggs are eggs', and inexorably germane to any possible world, monistic or dualistic, theistic or atheistic, chaos or cosmos. The hand-in-glove conformity of physical realism and scientific method is no logically preestablished harmony but the empirical fit of a beautifully concordant hypothesis with the facts.
Physical realism is not a foregone conclusion, but it is so lucid and probable that to defend it is, in this day, to defend integrity and understanding. To be loyal to it is to be loyal to philosophy, as to be loyal to philosophy is to be loyal to knowledge and to life. Materialism has often been patronized as a naive and childish philosophy, and this judgment of it is less unjust than most. Materialism is the philosophy of the preschool child as of a pre-Socratic and pre-Sophistic culture. It is the philosophy of limpid minds concerned only to know what most likely is actually the case, not yet distraught by the desire to turn ideation to the uses of compensation, obfuscation, or denial.
For us in America today the contrast between the high-hearted metaphysics of naturalism and all the fine evasions of obscurantism and agnosticism may be literally of epochal importance. The culture of America, by reason of its unique provenance, may choose either to be old or to be young, to be Alexandrian or to be Milesian. Whether we are thus at the end of a career or the beginning or one will in large part depend upon whether our citizens in this century learn their lessons from mystic evangels who would purge us of scientific understanding, from resigned sophisticates who set up languages and toy with thoughts of future possible sensations, or from philosophers who explore the nature of things."
(pp. 237-8)
(Williams, Donald Cary. "Naturalism and the Nature of Things." 1944. In Principles of Empirical Realism: Philosophical Essays, 212-238. Springfield, IL: Charles C Thomas, 1966.)
For Kant the great divide was between the Phenomenal and the Noumenal. Man cannot see into the Noumena, the Really Real. He can only gaze on the Phenomena that surround it. Donald Cary Williams, though, has done the impossible; he has pierced through the phenomenal layers and gazed full face on the Truth of what we are. He has lifted the veil of Isis. He sees. And through his eyes, we too now see. Light upon Light. Truth from Truth. This Magus has given us the Salvific Vision (It ain’t much really).
Everything that is, is an aggregation of space-time quanta (or whatever). They come together, fall apart and then regroup. That’s it. Or rather, That is It. It’s rather close to nihilism, but oh well. The Light is so Bright. It is blinding. I bend my knee. And I will give him the honor he deserves – until I come apart. Then maybe someone will put me back together and I can do it again. I’ve had a lot of practice being down on my knees. I swallow. The Holy Eucharist. The naked truth. It's really something. To behold. And to hold. Never mind.
I hope I have been faithful to the style and mood that Donald Cary Williams set in his piece. Yours truly, Gary Smith, Philosophasster.
- By Cathal
- By Sy Borg