… or how son will we eventually figure out that our world does not exist? Should the antinomies of reason and other signs that our world is incoherent and unintelligible lead us to conclude that we are figures in some super-gamers’ game?
P2: What can I know?
The last person to know everything
Leibniz is often said to be the last person who knew everything. Beyond that, he is mostly remembered for his invention of calculus and for his proof that this is the best of all possible worlds. But, as Marc Bobro explains in “The Optimistic Science of Leibniz,” there is much more to this great genius.
Spinoza: how to be happy (or at least not too sad)
“Interestingly enough, philosophers have long been in the business of offering advice on how to be happy. Or at least not too sad.” Spinoza is one of the great philosophers offering advice on how to be happy: “As Spinoza saw it, people are slaves to their emotions and chained to what they love, such as fame, fortune and other people. This inevitably leads to sadness … .” In Spinoza, Self Help and Agency, Mike LaBossiere explains Spinoza’s advice about how we can free ourselves from our emotions … and then points out “one crushing and obvious problem with Spinoza’s advice.” Along the way he makes quite a few interesting points about free will and determinism.
Moral facts
Are there moral facts? For example, is it a fact that “copying homework assignments is wrong”? Or is this merely an opinion or belief? In “Why Our Children Don’t Think There Are Moral Facts,” Justin McBrayer explains that there are moral facts and along the way raises some useful distinctions about facts, values, beliefs, opinions, and the truth … though it’s clear from readers’ comments not everyone agrees. (Also, it’s “ad nauseam,” not “ad nauseum.”)
Supreme deception
Does the supreme being deceive? “Until the Scientific Revolution, God’s power included a licence to deceive. How did science make an honest man of Him?” Dallas Dennery explains that “the commitment of the Scientific Revolution to rational causes for all events, even exceptional or seemingly anomalous ones, robbed God of the power to deceive.” Interesting discussion of differences between traditional conceptions of God and the God of the philosophers.
Time v. math
Is the universe ultimately made of time or of timeless numbers? In a review of Unger and Smolin’s The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time, Bryan Appleyard discusses the “superstitions and allegories” of science, especially physics. “If, as Unger and Smolin insist, time is real and not simply an aspect of space or of our perceptions, then the laws of physics begin to look even less solid. If everything is subject to time and, therefore, change, then these laws can evolve. They suggest the idea that these laws are eternally fixed is a supersition caused by mathematics – all the insights of maths are timeless and maths is only a human creation. In fact, two of the greatest physicists of all time – Richard Feynman and Paul Dirac – both accepted the possibility that the laws of physics evolve through time. Yet eternal, immutable physical laws, somehow detached from our physical universe, remain one of the primary superstitions of our age.”
Disgusted with gross violations
Disgust is often used to persuade. But are gut feelings a reliable guide to right and wrong? Carol Hays’ persuasive answer is that they are not. Reasons rather than emotions should guide our moral reasoning.
Return to “The Lagoon”
Another review of “The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science,” this one by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, the author of Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away. Goldstein admires Aristotle but also defends Plato: “Plato and Aristotle: What an accident of history that two such contrasting orientations toward the physical world, animated by two such different aesthetic sensibilities, should have been pedagogically entangled with each other. One espies beauty in the elegance of the mathematical proportions he is certain rules the cosmos, the other in the richness of sensed particularities he is certain can be functionally explained. Both orientations would find application in the developed sciences to come … .”
Has “philosophical superficiality” harmed physics?
John Horgan interviews quantum gravity expert Carlo Rovelli. Can science attain absolute truth? “I have no idea what ‘absolute truth’ means. I think that science is the attitude of those who find funny the people saying they know something is absolute truth. Science is the awareness that our knowledge is constantly uncertain. What I know is that there are plenty of things that science does not understand yet. And science is the best tool found so far for reaching reasonably reliable knowledge.” And what is your opinion of the recent philosophy-bashing by some scientists: “Seriously: I think they are stupid in this. I have admiration for them in other things, but here they have gone really wrong. Look: Einstein, Heisenberg, Newton, Bohr…. and many many others of the greatest scientists of all times, much greater than [those who are bashing philosophy], of course, read philosophy, learned from philosophy, and could have never done the great science they did without the input they got from philosophy, as they claimed repeatedly.”
The skeptic chuckles darkly
Steven Poole’s review of Jennifer Nagel’s Knowledge: A Very Short Introduction is a nice overview of what we can know about what we can know. “Does any of this really matter to non-philosophers? Yes, and for two kinds of reason. The first kind is sociopolitical. Arguments about what kind of testimony (eg from scientific experts) we can trust, and therefore gain knowledge from, are evidently germane to major public issues such as global warming. … The second kind of reason for why thinking about knowledge might be important is more personal. It boils down to this: how worried are you about whether you are a brain in a vat? Versions of this idea have been put about through history by that imp of the perverse known as the sceptic. The sceptic insists that knowledge of anything at all is impossible.”
Socratically Speaking 