I think there may be something to your point about needing philosophy and not just pure science to settle moral questions. I'm definitely a lot more open to (although still skeptical of) the idea that science + philosophy combined can answer moral questions than I am to the idea that science alone can do it, where I'm pretty certain the answer must be no. However, you seem to have a much different view from me of what philosophy is about and can do.
I see philosophy as a way of clarifying concepts and sorting out what the best way is to talk about things. You seem to see it as something that goes beyond that and makes inquiries into a whole nother realm that science can't touch. I guess this may be a subtle difference but I think it's important.
Science does not give us an ontological understanding of substance, nor can it divide substances into animate and inanimate or, further, animate substances into rational and irrational. And without this metaphysics of the human person, there is no way to determine what counts as true well-being, or achievement of real eudaimonia or human flourishing. Harris is on the right track but he diverges too far from Aristotle and fails to keep in mind the differentiation of the sciences into the mathematical, the physical, and the metaphysical. Perhaps he fears that conceding too much to metaphysics will require confronting the First Mover arguments, which no atheist old or new has ever succeeded in defeating.
Science cannot divide substances into animate and inanimate because it has demonstrated--beyond a shadow of a doubt--that Aristotle was completely wrong about there being a dichotemy between the two.
That's the main reason the First Mover argument has no relevance today--there is no such thing as a mover because it was an incoherent concept. It was based on Aristotle's crude 4th-Century BC folk-physics, rather than physics as it's understood today. The idea of a "mover" makes no sense in the modern world, because we know that there isn't any distinction between animate and inanimate things, just a spectrum of complex behavior from crystals to viruses to cells to organisms. We know that when an object is in motion it remains in motion unless a force acts on it, contrary to Aristotle's false belief that objects can only move when animate "movers" act on them, and will come to rest soon after one of these imaginary movers acts on them. We have concrete examples of things like robots that act on their own without anything Aristotle could have mistaken for a mover--things which did not exist in his time and which if did, surely would have enlightened him and changed his mind.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2010-11-30 04:08 am (UTC)I see philosophy as a way of clarifying concepts and sorting out what the best way is to talk about things. You seem to see it as something that goes beyond that and makes inquiries into a whole nother realm that science can't touch. I guess this may be a subtle difference but I think it's important.
Science does not give us an ontological understanding of substance, nor can it divide substances into animate and inanimate or, further, animate substances into rational and irrational. And without this metaphysics of the human person, there is no way to determine what counts as true well-being, or achievement of real eudaimonia or human flourishing.
Harris is on the right track but he diverges too far from Aristotle and fails to keep in mind the differentiation of the sciences into the mathematical, the physical, and the metaphysical. Perhaps he fears that conceding too much to metaphysics will require confronting the First Mover arguments, which no atheist old or new has ever succeeded in defeating.
Science cannot divide substances into animate and inanimate because it has demonstrated--beyond a shadow of a doubt--that Aristotle was completely wrong about there being a dichotemy between the two.
That's the main reason the First Mover argument has no relevance today--there is no such thing as a mover because it was an incoherent concept. It was based on Aristotle's crude 4th-Century BC folk-physics, rather than physics as it's understood today. The idea of a "mover" makes no sense in the modern world, because we know that there isn't any distinction between animate and inanimate things, just a spectrum of complex behavior from crystals to viruses to cells to organisms. We know that when an object is in motion it remains in motion unless a force acts on it, contrary to Aristotle's false belief that objects can only move when animate "movers" act on them, and will come to rest soon after one of these imaginary movers acts on them. We have concrete examples of things like robots that act on their own without anything Aristotle could have mistaken for a mover--things which did not exist in his time and which if did, surely would have enlightened him and changed his mind.