Ok guys.
Last year a university in my area hosted a philosophy conference with the same title as this thread.
The list of speakers was as follows:
J.T. Ismael, University of Arizona, “Freedom, Natural Law, and the Humanization of Physics”
Michael Friedman, Stanford University, “Wandering Significance and the Dynamics of Reason”
Mark Wilson, University of Pittsburgh, “What Can Contemporary Philosophy Learn from Our “Scientific Philosophy” Heritage?”
James Ladyman, University of Bristol, and Don Ross, UAB, “Before and After Science (With Apologies to B. Eno)”
Paul Humphreys, University of Virginia, “Metaphysics for Metahumans”
Daniel Dennett, “Kinds of Things”
Andrew Melnyk, University of Missouri, “Summary and Going Forward”
I have been charged with the task of fleshing out and then condensing this information into something consumable by undergraduate philosophy students, and with taking the technical aspects of the arguments and pointing out the ethical implications of them to create a class that relates the elements of this debate specifically to ethics.
Now the first part is easy. Determine what’s necessary for each position in the debate, take note of the relevant points of each argument, then remove the jargon and replace with plain language, seal it, put a price on it and traffic it in the philosophy department to unsuspecting students who thought they were just going to get to argue about abortion and racism and the death penalty, thus startling them into the world of philosophy.
The second part may be a bit more fun, (because I hardly, in my own opinion see a connection between a conception of metaphysics which is immutable and one that’s necessarily connected to morality and ethics).
Conveniently enough…these lectures were recorded and posted on youtube.
So…if anyone has any interest in this particular subject, feel free to use this thread as a place to disseminate your ideas, and possibly I might gain some insight that would make the job I do better.
Here are the lectures as I promised: youtube.com/results?search_q … llmer&aq=f
Thanks to all who participate in advance.
And to get this started, I’ll throw out one possible answer to the question of whether or not science can dispense w/ metaphysics. Here we go…
Scientific naturalism, like most sciences, has a system of proofs which relies heavily on mathematics.
Mathematics doesn’t seem to function very well without assuming some kind of identity theory as a most basic axiom.
Even if two objects in the physical world share the maximum number of properties, it is impossible for them to share the property of spatiotemporal location.
Because there is no 100% identity in the physical world. Mathematics must postulate identities in order to be able to process data at all.
Postulating non-physical entities, (like identities), is what you do when you’re doing metaphysics.
Science therefore cannot dispense with metaphysics.
Now I’m not saying that you can’t push metaphysics into a corner, or redefine it so narrowly that it’s hardly relevant, I’m just saying you can’t properly dispense of it.
That may or may not be my actual view. I’m interested in hearing yours.
Thoughts? Comments?