Friday, August 24, 2012

Faith and Philosophy: II


More chunky-crunchy crumbs;  click  for the whole  loaf…

Many things we take for granted, and ought to take for granted, are not in fact straightforwardly empirically given, but must be derived with the aid of fundamental metaphysical principles,  which we seldom explicitly acknowledge in daily life, and which it has become the fashion  to deny.

The antonym of determinism would be indeterminism, I suppose;  but there are a couple of things that might mean.   (This is because, in natural language, the negation of a composite or quantified predicate is not well-regimented regarding the scope of the negator.)

The unity of science consists  alone  in its method, not in its material.
-- Karl Pearson
The unity of science is a pipe-dream.
-- Ian Hacking

G.K. Chesterton, in the course of his biography of Chaucer -- or rather, in his book entitled Chaucer (1927), in which he discusses all his favorite subjects, with an occasional nod towards that worthy bard -- mentions a celebrated medieval predecessor…

By now we (plain men  all) begin to suspect: This attribute sits on no throne in Platonic heaven;  somehow we have gone too far -- or possibly even set off in the wrong direction (pessima in principiis corruptio -- Geach).

We did not have to wait for the tribe of those laboratory nihilists known as neuroscientists, to behold an academic school dedicated to reducing free will and cogitation to the level of meat.  The behaviorists were there first.

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