Tag Archives: naturalism

Nature versus Naturalism

29 Monday Jan 2018

Posted by in General Philosophy, Logic, Metaphysics, naturalism, Philosophy of Science, Process Philosophy, Whitehead

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Nature is that which is studied by physical science. Saying as much does not answer many questions; most particularly, it tells us neither what nature nor science happen to be, only that they are connected as inquiry and thing inquired into. That being said, one can also notice that it is necessary to have some notion or concept of what it is that one is inquiring into, in order for that inquiry to have any sort of systematic or methodologically sound structure. Absent such a concept, inquiry loses any possibility of systematicity, and instead becomes nothing more than random shifting around and arbitrary clutching at straws. Such shifting and clutching will, ideally, eventuate in a more systematic concept of the topic being inquired into, at which point inquiry “moves into a new gear,” and begins to become genuinely organized. Physical science has long since moved past such a phase of randomly poking things with a stick; it has long been operating with a detailed and thoroughly developed concept of nature. But while the sciences have A concept of nature, does that mean they have the best concept of nature? There are reasons to believe that the answer to this question is “no.”Nature

This brings us to the philosophical question of naturalism. Some forms of naturalism take the position that “nature is all there is,” which might seem like a fairly strong metaphysical commitment until one realizes that saying, “nature is all there is,” tells us nothing about what all nature is. So in order to have any cognitive content, any and all forms of naturalism – regardless of whether or not they admit the possibility of anything beyond nature – must, primarily, be a thesis about what nature is. So a form of naturalism will be the source of a concomitant concept of nature. I will state without argument that the two stand in a one-to-one relationship: if “a” form of naturalism resulted in a “family” of concepts of nature, then in reality what we would have is a family of forms of naturalism as well – one member of this latter family for each concept in the former. Continue reading →

Natural Order

10 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by in Aesthetics, Logic, naturalism, Personal History

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I was looking at a picture that I had taken a few years back, of Thumb Butte, just outside of Prescott, Arizona, when the phrase “natural order” popped into my mind. What made this stand out (because words, phrases, and images are popping into my mind all of the time – it is like Tourette’s of the imagination) was the fact that it came to me flagged as ironic. What struck me as ironic, gazing with affection at one of my favorite places in the world, was how seriously disorderly nature really is. That’s what is so lovely about it – it shatters our boundaries with promiscuous abandon. And the only way we prevent such shattering is by murdering nature outright – which, of course, we are also working on with rather more energy and enthusiasm than we ought.thumb-butte-3-long-loop-006

The natural sciences look to distill, while the engineering and technical enterprises look to impose, order from and upon Nature. And there are certainly good and thoroughly ethical reasons for all of these valuable activities. We live longer, healthier lives (certainly on average) than we ever did in the past. Further, the quest for knowledge is, at least arguably, one of the most singularly noble pursuits available to our imaginations. But I’d like to say a little about the negatives, from my version of a Whiteheadian perspective. Now, I am not anti-science; when I’ve criticized contemporary disciplines (see below) it is for their abandonment of real science. Nor am I any manner of luddite; I am composing this missive on a computer, I intend to post it on the internet; I’ve a library that would be the envy of even the wealthiest individuals from a century ago on my Kindle; even as an introvert, I have connections to the outside world far beyond the imaginations of all but the luckiest persons from previous centuries. But there are costs, and we ought to acknowledge that there might be such a thing as “too much.” I began wondering, looking at that picture of Thumb Butte, if that too much might be related to our simplistic notions of “natural order.” Continue reading →

Intuition in Mathematics and Physics: A Whiteheadian Approach

05 Friday Aug 2016

Posted by in 2015 International Whitehead Conference, General Philosophy, Inquiry, Logic, Mathematics, naturalism, Philosophy of Science, Public Philosophy, Whitehead

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This is just a quick shout-out to my friend and colleague, Ronny Desmet, for putting together the papers that were presented at the 2015 International Whitehead conference in the new book, Intuition in Mathematics and Physics: A Whiteheadian Approach, in which yours truly is a contributor. Intuition Mathematics

The articles within are from Section IV, Track 2 of the conference. The table of contents is not yet available at Amazon, so the contributions are as follows:

  1. Integral Philosophy – An Essay on Speculative Philosophy – Ronald Preston Phipps
  2. Reflection on Intuition, Physics, and Speculative Philosophy – Timothy E. Eastman
  3. Whitehead on Intuition – Implications for Science and Civilization – Farzad Mahootian
  4. Whitehead’s Notion of Intuitive Recognition – Ronny Desmet
  5. The Beauty of the Two-Color Sphere Problem – Ronny Desmet
  6. The Complementary Faces of Mathematical Beauty – Jean Paul van Bendegam and Ronny Desmet
  7. Creating a New Mathematics – Aran Gare
  8. Whitehead, Intuition, and Radical Empiricism – Gary Herstein
  9. What Does a Particle Know? Information and Entaglement – Robert J. Valenza
  10. A Neurobiological Basis of Intuition – Jesse Bettinger

God o’ The Gaps (part 2)

20 Tuesday Oct 2015

Posted by in Critical Thinking, God, Metaphysics, naturalism

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In the early part of the previous (which is to say, 20th) century, philosophers tried to dodge the difficult question of characterizing the logical structure(s) of explanation by arguing that science was really only about description. This program was a failure of almost laughable proportions. Anyone casting even a casual eye at what science is and how it functions cannot possibly avoid the fact that science aims at explanations. But are scientific explanations the only things that qualify as explanations?God Blame

Let me restate this question using the points and issues raised in part 1: concepts of “God” serve no valid purpose in scientific explanation, but is scientific explanation the only kind that is valid? I have written at length in other posts about the pathetic misdirection that is to be found in certain elements of contemporary science, primarily gravitational cosmology. But this is a failure of science within science; this still begs the question, is science all that there is? Continue reading →

God o’ The Gaps (part 1)

18 Sunday Oct 2015

Posted by in God, Ignorance, naturalism, Philosophy of Science

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The “God o’ The Gaps” fallacy is an especially pernicious, yet easily dismissible, form of the argumentum ad ignorantiam. It is pernicious because religious dogmatists, with no interest in or capacity for rational thought, swing this fallacy about with the most abysmally childish enthusiasm, like blind persons with a sledge hammer in an empty field, who fancy themselves to be building a tent city. It is easily dismissible because anyone possessed of nothing more exotic than the mere abstract possibility of intelligence can readily see through it, for no more time or effort than it takes to have such infantilism articulated. All that being said, an analysis of the fallacy does invite some reflections upon the character of explanation, a character which the title of this blog ought suggest is a thing of interest at this site.Gap-In-Mountain

This will be a longish argument, so I’ll be breaking it into two parts. In this part, I will discuss the argumentum ad ignorantiam particularly in light of the God o’ The Gaps (which I’ll simply abbreviate “GotG”) variant, and generically mention some of the places it crops up. The argument will show how the concept/idea of God can play no useful role in natural science, even when the GotG fallacy is avoided. In part 2 I’ll turn to what, in many respects, is my primary question: What might the role of “God” in explanation &/or interpretation be? I’ll review (in a crude way) the distinctions between the religious, the theological, and the philosophical uses of the “G” word (although, I’ve already said a bit about this elsewhere.) With that said, let us turn to the argument itself. Continue reading →

Book Review: Thomas Nagel, “Mind and Cosmos”

19 Saturday Jul 2014

Posted by in Book Review, Philosophy of Science

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Thomas Nagel: Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, Oxford University Press, 2012.

      Having mentioned this book in several previous posts, I thought this would be a good opportunity to repost (and significantly expand upon) the review I gave that book at Amazon. The original review may be found HERE.

      I started out reading Nagel’s book with a considerable amount of trepidation, but discovered – to my pleasure! – that it was a much better work than I expected. Nagel’s primary thesis is that the idea of naturalism that is dominant in the physical/biological sciences is in desperate need of revision. Naturally, this means that, from its first appearance, Mind and Cosmos has been subjected to a great deal of vituperation from those who declare themselves to be on the side of science and the very naturalism Nagel is at pains to critique. Further, much of the hysteria and negativity directed against Nagel came about because he states at one point that he believes the “Intelligent Design” (“ID”) people have made a couple of good arguments. As one might expect, the above led to an astonishing amount of sharply worded condemnation from certain dogmatic atheists, who essentially accused Nagel of being a young-earth creationist and of selling the pass to religion. None of these claims is even remotely true, of course, and Nagel is very clear about this: he repeatedly and explicitly disavows any belief or interest in theological approaches. Such methods, Nagel is clear, “do not so much solve the problem as strangle it.” (This latter is Ernst Cassirer’s phrase, and neither mine nor Nagel’s. However, Cassirer uses it in an analogous situation – specifically Descartes’ appeal to the goodness of God to solve the problem of the mind/body dualism.) But Nagel is also clear that the mechanistic/materialistic approach to science faces some insuperable difficulties.

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“The” Nature of Naturalism?

16 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by in General Philosophy, Philosophy of Science

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      “Naturalism” is a term that is frequently bandied about with such carefree disregard for clarity and meaning that one is left rather breathless at the speed with which so many largely meaningless labels are confidently announced to the world. Naturalism is frequently associated with (physical) science. But regardless of how justified such an association is, it frankly tells us absolutely nothing about either nature or science. Scientific results only seem to tell us what nature is, in a pure and simple way, when the metaphysical presuppositions of science are thoroughly suppressed and the large-scale interpretive commitments that exercise their unexamined domination over the particular reading of this or that scientific theory are permitted to operate not only unchallenged, but altogether without so much as a first, much less a second thought. Scientific theories – most particularly those in theoretical physics, where abstract mathematics is so profoundly important and influential – do not come with their interpretations “on their sleeve,” as it were. I will be exploring this problem in greater detail in the not-too-distant future, when I spend a few posts on the problematic issue of what I call “Model Centrism.”

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