Faustus5 wrote
You know the answer to this question already—just look at what normal, sane people actually do. When they want to know what is the case about a disease, they turn to a medical professional. When they want to know what is the case about their car not running, they go to a car mechanic. When they want to know what is the case about the natural world, they ask an appropriate scientist.
Things are more complicated when it comes to ethical or aesthetic issues, because those by their very nature are not always things about which we can form a consensus and turn to reliable experts. But that’s okay. The vast majority of us get by just fine.
Of course, if you're read anything I wrote, you will see that I agree with every word you say here. I would simply add, if you want to know about a philosophical issue, go to a continental philosopher. You know, I just wrote Gertie a few paragraphs on the way I see things and perhaps you could give it a glance.
The "natural world" is not the issue and I leave that to science entirely.
There can never be a serious question asked about the “nature of all things” because that question is hopelessly vague to the point of being utterly meaningless. The best response is that there is literally no such thing as the “nature of all things”. Serious questions depend on specificity.
Ahh, but you are so close. Hopelessly vague? Well, if one's idea of what the final ontology would be issues from a naturalistic view, then will find that vagueness is somehow built into the very conditions observation and problem solving that underlie observations of nature. It is not nature but the business of taking IN nature, that bottom line description of the, if you will, manufacturing plant that produces perceptual possibilities to even have perceptions at all. It is NOT as if this is untouchable analytically. Exactly the opposite is true. the specificity you are looking for lies in Being and Time, And totality and Infinity, and Being and Nothingness, and on and on. Now, you may find these titles off putting, understandably, but so what?
There is a very good reason Rorty thought Heidegger to be one of the three greatest philosophers of the 20th century. They are, in important ways, cut from the same cloth.
Science dominates all discourse about the natural world, and this is how it should be. Philosophy stopped having a meaningful contribution to such discourse long before we were born.
I suppose you could say science should and does have something to say about moral or aesthetic issues, but pretty much all philosophers understand that its contributions are very limited there, though of course folks debate about where the borders should be.
My point is that people are smart enough to know when science is the right tool to use to solve or discuss a problem, and when it is inappropriate. There is no problem of science having an unjustified hegemony over issues where it has nothing valid to say. Your entire thread is premised on a made up issue.
By the way, I would never deny that some scientists or philosophers have gone too far in thinking they could apply scientific reasoning or techniques to subjects, or that they have mistakenly denied that philosophy had something to contribute when in fact it does. We'd have to look at this issue by issue. All I am denying is that there is a widespread problem of people doing this. There is not.
Several things. One is that the natural world is not the issue here, at all, unless, that is, you want to reassign the term "natural". As to ethics, the matter comes down to the essence of ethics, that is, what makes ethics, ethics! this too is analyzable philosophically, apriori. This is THE philosophical issue for me, the way value, the essence, or an essential part of, ethics, is at once, embedded in experience, all experience (I follow Dewey on this, in a limited way) and unavailable for scientific inspection. I am referring to metaethics, metavalue, the irrational part of our being in the world that is the material basis for the meaning in things; not the dictionary meanings, but "value" meaning, the importance of importance, if you will. Or, as Neil DeGrasse Tyson put it, I think disparagingly, the meaning of meaning. This is not Heidegger's interpretative dawin but the "aesthesis" of living and breathing.
Look, the issue I have put on the table is more fundamental than you describe it. This is certainly by no means something that "people" are smart enough about. They are in fact so ignorant about phenomenological ontology that they don't even know it exists. They've never read or heard of Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger. They have been processed through a public education system that provides knowledge in basic sciences and are told implicitly or explicitly that this is what human knowledge IS, and beyond this, there is only religious faith, which is explained by the church which has a long history of really bad metaphysics, which, again, implicitly or explicity works its way into people's thinking. God the father, son and holy spirit? What IS that? People are thoughtless sheep when it comes to thinking about such things, or anything, for that matter, at the basic level, so please, do not place the validity of a philosophical perspective in the hands of people. The idea is patently absurd.
With regard to the "widespread problem" I am referring to the absence of serious consideration of any talk at all about the foundation of knowledge, the meaning of meaning, and the philosophical issues of phenomenology due to a lack of this alternative in people's basic vocabularies. They don't know, or concern themselves, that there has been a monumental paradigm shift in the process of religion's demise, and where not at all long ago, science was tempered by a implicit religious faith, now there is a rising NOTHING to give the irrational part of our existence interpretative meaning at the level of basic questions. This is overwhelmingly evident in your and other responses in the thread. And analytic philosophy merely encourages this, treating metaethics, metavalue as a curiosity easily dismissable.
Public religions are dangerous things. But this has nothing to do with the existential religiousness as a part of the structure of experience itself. to understand what this means, you would have to read about it. No reading, no understanding. to dismiss it, well, from afar, outside the reading is just perverse. Alas, high schools don't teach phenomenology, they teach physics, not phenomenology. And you think there are no scientific prejudices built into the person on the street's thinking??
You are making things up. No serious, respected thinker in the entire history of Western philosophy has ever claimed something so silly.
You have not read Wittgenstein or Kant. You have not read Rorty. You have not read analytic philosophy if you say this. Scientific models fill these philosophical worlds!! What are they saying? They say, we must confine ourselves in making discoveries about the world to empirical science. Beyond this there is no sense to be made! the philosophy of mind: talk about C fibers firing; epistemology: establishing causal connections between the knower and the known (see Gettier); the philosophy of language: see Quine and radical translation, which has been interpreted by some as behavioristic; Quine was very clear about his devotion to empirical science.
Prove me wrong.
We turn to science when we want “foundational understanding” of the natural world. There is no sense in which a philosophical exercise conducted from the safety of the armchair is going to provide something deeper than this, though philosophers like to fool themselves into thinking otherwise. That’s why no one pays attention to them.
Well, clearly YOU don't pay attention to them, read them, that is.
Is that what WE do? Oh, you mean philosophers with the right view, the ones you just said have no truck with the idea that "Analytic philosophy IS an implicit endorsement of scientific paradigms to address all questions."
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