This is the 'dialectical' process that Hegel is trying to point out. I start with an assertion that is not quite right. You locate what is not quite right. I try to patch the hole with more detail, more context. Repeat. — macrosoft
That also sounds like some explanations of the hermeneutic circle. Is it the same thing? — frank
It at least seems possible (if a little scary) that the globe could fall under the control of a specific community which makes its way of being and seeing dominant. — macrosoft
My question is whether science is essentially deeper than this. — macrosoft
There does not seem to be any other method that reveals actuality as opposed to mere imagination. Or to put it another way; there does not seem to be any other method to test imagination. — Janus
For instance, is the 'wrongness' of torturing kittens really less publicly accessible than the redness of human blood? — macrosoft
Yes, because moral stances are simply individual's mental states, which aren't third-person observable. — Terrapin Station
You didn't answer my question. Do you think science is deeper than prediction and control? IMV, saying that it 'reveals actuality' is already non-scientific metaphysics and goes beyond...prediction and control. — macrosoft
You write 'testing imagination.' And what is this imagination tested against? A public sense of reality, itself somewhat mysterious, — macrosoft
Do you deny that the kind of observation, employing unbiased analysis and synthesis, that is characteristic of natural science reveals what is really going on? — Janus
For example that the heart is a pump, that heat causes many materials to expand, some to combust, others to melt, that animals and plants both consist of cells (with plants cell, unlike animals cells, having cell walls consisting of cellulose) and so on? I mean, the examples are countless. Are these not revealing actuality? — Janus
I don't see how metaphysics comes into it at all. Can you explain why you think so? — Janus
I deny the absoluteness of this 'really.' Making this narrative (science) the 'real' one is where metaphysics comes in. — macrosoft
Assuming that science is the best way to predict and control nature as it is familiar to all of us, does this reduce philosophy to assisting such prediction and control? defending such prediction and control as the 'true' or only 'real' knowledge, so that philosophy is science's ideological bodyguard? — macrosoft
Truth, the cognition of which is the business of philosophy, was in the hands of Hegel no longer an aggregate of finished dogmatic statements, which, once discovered, had merely to be learned by heart. Truth lay now in the process of cognition itself, in the long historical development of science, which mounts from lower to ever higher levels of knowledge without ever reaching, by discovering so-called absolute truth, a point at which it can proceed no further, where it would have nothing more to do than to fold its hands and gaze with wonder at the absolute truth to which it had attained. — Engels
Aristotle never stated this exactly, but in 6.7.2-3 said that Wisdom [σοφία] is the most perfect mode of knowledge. A wise person must have a true conception of unproven first principles and also know the conclusions that follow from them. “Hence Wisdom must be a combination of Intelligence [Intellect; νοῦς] and Scientific Knowledge [ἐπιστήμη]: it must be a consummated knowledge of the most exalted objects.” Contemplation is that activity in which νοῦς [nous] intuits and delights in first principles. 1.
I deny the absoluteness of this 'really.' — macrosoft
I think we share a sense that philosophy should not collapse into something 'small,' dazzled so much by the undeniable public power of science that it is afraid to investigate that which makes science possible and yet may be resistant to the scientific method, supposedly 'subjective' 'meaning.' — macrosoft
Who said that philosophy should not investigate supposed "subjective meaning"? It's trivially obvious that science cannot investigate that! But what do you think phenomenology consists in? — Janus
Not publicly, as I've already said. I can't see anything puzzling about the distinction between private and public actuality. — Janus
On the other hand, philosophy seems like exactly the human pursuit that digs deep, 'uselessly' or for 'existential reasons' or out of curiosity. It does question 'educated common sense,' or is all such questioning ridiculous? Philosophy makes the sensible, worldly people giggle. Is philosophy essentially worldly and respectable? Or is it a little foolish, like a child? — macrosoft
natural science reveals what is really going on? — Janus
But that has culminated in a somewhat religious kind of philosophy, although possibly ‘religious’ is not actually the correct word, in that it’s not oriented around mainstream religion. Anyway, I have never wavered in my pursuit of that understanding. — Wayfarer
IMV, it (among other things) dissolves or problematizes the everyday understanding of terms (which is why you put 'religious' in quotes.) In some ways it is precisely this thrust against educated common sense (or all that a community takes for granted) --ideally because it has a larger view on existence that no longer fits in that everyday taken-for-granted obviousness. — macrosoft
What motivated my initial interest in philosophy was the possibility of spiritual illumination or enlightenment — Wayfarer
Since I think science depends on 'ordinary consciousness,' the world of tables and chairs, I can't embrace the notion that the chairs and tables are not real while electrons, etc., are. — macrosoft
I think it is acknowledged by science that any entity that cannot be directly observed is a mathematical model. Of course it is assumed that there is something energetically real there which is being modeled, but that we cannot visualize it adequately (and thus must rely on our mathematical models for understanding) simply because our abilities to visualize have been conditioned and limited by the perception of observable entities. — Janus
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