Now that I have christened my fledgling blog with a personal note on the moral and ""scientific"" (double scare quotes a definite must) decrepitude haunting the same-sex marriage/proposition 8 debate, I am looking forward to orienting my posts towards slightly less socially-embedded forums.
Here are some things that I am cooking up for the new year:
1.) In the philosophical discussions of mind/brain issues, one element I find missing is a dialogue, or even sustained commentary, on what exactly the divergence between scientifically-motivated philosophical and the more traditional metaphysically-motivated approaches.
Researchers working in, inter alia, metaphysics and the philosophy of mind and language often seem to have a very dismissive attitude towards other approaches that are more disposed toward asking how sciences that are interested in studying the mind (biology, cog sci, the neurosciences, psychology (?)) may help us orient our questioning, if not help supply an answer to, the most enthralling questions driving all of us.
The feeling is mutual on the other side. Metaphysicians are seen less as serious contenders to offering solutions, and more like an unending source of obstacles to these solutions. Only rarely are they seen as colleagues with a different perspective to offer, at least in my limited experience.
The exceptions to this are indeed interesting, but a general forum thematizing this gulf between methodologies and motivations deserves highlighting. I've been interested in this topic for quite a while, and intend to pursue it in depth with a colleague of mine (who happens to be a quantum physicist-turned-neurobiologist).
2.) Optimality in evolutionary adaptations -- seriously, wtf? Despite the widespread assumption that evolutionary features (but especially adaptations) are optimally "designed", I share no enthusiasm for this intuition. This topic came up in a conversation recently and I still have to collect my thoughts on it.
3.) Perhaps relatedly, I am also deeply concerned about The New Atheism and its brainchild the Brights Movement. The movement's champions, including most famously Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, Chris Hitchens (?), and Sam harris, have struck out a very broad frontal assault against religion in the last half decade or so. I am more than hesitant in supporting this attack, however, due to its unabashedly polemic style, and at times dogmatically uncritical content. At the very least, this movement represents a horrible fault in strategy re engaging "the enemy".
I have talked with several other atheists who are enthusiastic about the New Atheism, but I have yet to find one who does not blip into ham-fisted (and hence ineffective) dismissal of everything relating to religion or religious people.
We'll see where this goes...
Ad 1: You're missing the point if you divide the field of research into "scientifically-motivated philosophical and the more traditional metaphysically-motivated approaches". There are people like that, but I think research has gotten further.
ReplyDeleteAd 3: This is time wasting pop culture of people that think the won an argument if they show "the more traditional metaphysically-motivated approaches" are wrong. There's more.
Read Kant. Not because he's traditional. Not because he's german. Because he's working out philosophy in detail and it's hard to argue with him. You'll find more answers in Kant than in pop culture due to the intensity of argumentation.
My problem with Kant, or rather concerning Kant, is that I don't have any idea about how to interface his ideas with current research. If we have to fix the data to the system rather than vice versa, then I think we are on the wrong track. Science, then metaphysics; not metaphysics, then science.
ReplyDeleteAlso, regarding the gap between traditional analytic philosophers and philosophers of science, I may have found one point of contention that could lead to a discussion; namely the role of thought experiments in philosophy. After writing this entry I was immediately clued into this debate, which has been dividing philosophers for some time now. But re the aforementioned gap, the disagreements about thought experiments have been used as little more than identifying superficial rather than critical differences, which I think it does.