I never got really deep into this forum but I decided to leave because all too often these philosophical debates move over to scientific debates, more so in atheist forums of which I am a frequent member though I always get kicked out, than here. I simply find myself too ignorant of science to have a meaningful debate. So right now I’m studying science and trying to get my knowledge up to snuff. I am really excited about learning science. This is the first time in about 16 years that I have tried to really get something out of science. I find it fascinating and a welcome change from the humanities. What I find so funny is that so many scientists agree on so much whereas in the humanities hardly anyone agrees about anything.
Thesis: learn science first, put it all together with philosophy.
I reckon you’re onto something there. I believe my learning was put back 5 years because of an undergraduate course I done that was highly skeptical of science. As gullible as I was back then, I was swallowed it. Only in the past year or so have I realised the importance of scientific/empirical enquiry. And ever since then I believe I have gotten a much better understanding of the world. Before I was a stupid cobweb spinner that only ever landed me frustration.
Science is due much criticism, but its critics should first understand its infinite value. A lot of people who study philosophy or are into the subject at a young age I think become so jaded as constant critics and skeptics that they miss out on appreciation and understanding of the things they criticize.
You should be able to talk about any subject under the sun if you do philosophy, whether or not you know the technical bumpf.
Philosophy is the foundation for the sciences, not a tool for its understanding. There is no “it” to be understood without philosophy.
I’ve been banned from four forums in the last month for talking philosophy. Atheists and scientists hate philosophy and see it as a threat. Dawkins and quantum scientists particularly.
I told the guy I didn’t like analytic philosophy so he has made it a little project of his to visit every thread or thread I have posted in and say something to me. Let it go, man.
Yeah, that was what I was getting at in my post. The course I done tried to take science out of the picture and left it all to philosophy. Bad move. Some lecturers really need to be more careful of what or how they teach their course.
Ok, since Oct 29, I’ve read textbooks in Basic Chemistry, Microbiology of the Cell by Albert, Bringing Fossils to life by Prothero, Introduction to Biochemistry by Mckeen, Seven out of 30 chapters of Organic Chemistry, Introduction to Genetics, Welcome to the Genome, Paul Davies’ The Cosmic Jackpot, Dawkin’s the God Delusion and the Greatest Show on Earth, Michael Behe’s Edge of Evolution and Darwin’s Black Box, Sean Carroll’s the Making of the Fittest, Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell, Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution is True, William Demski’s No Free Lunch, Roberto Pennock’s The Tower of Babel, and Johnathan Wells Icons of Evolution, Freeman Dyson’s the Origins of Life, and a few others.
My science education has gotten off to a good and I’m ready to get back into philosophy. See my post, refuting Dawkin’s Ultimate 747 argument.
Believe it or not, science is still confusing and jibberish in its own way. After a while when you find the holes in 'em you will get bored of it. Plus sciences majority are too formal and conventional. Real life is not.
I don’t. Science as a philosophical resource or inspiration is the 21st century’s blind alley, rejected, or rather, not even considered, by the philosophers of the 20th century. Science answers nothing whatever that pre-scientific philosophers did not answer. It’s merely a fig leaf to cover the sterility of modern thought.
Empirical enquiry existed long before there was science. Scientific method is nothing special, anyway. Science, in the words of Huxley, “is simply common sense at its best: that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.” It is possibly true that education outside science is defective in teaching rigorous thinking skills, and modern students turn to science as the only source of learning them. Debate used to be integral to humanities courses. It is certainly true that those capable of debate are few and far between, if the internet is anything to go by.
We don’t actually know anything about people or things, except what we are projecting on the object or the individual. The knowledge one has about it is the experience. It goes on and on. That’s all. What that really is, there is no way of knowing.
From that, it’s understood that when we speak about reality, we can only speak of our knowledge about it and call that knowledge reality. But what for? Then it becomes a classroom discussion or a discussion in a debating society, each one trying to show that he knows more, a lot more, than the other. What do you get out of it? Each one is trying to prove that he knows more than you, to bring you over to his point of view.
This is patently false; science is the development of what was called natural philosophy. Just look at how much crap Aristotle set out as fact, that has since been revealed as false. Newton considered himself a philosopher.
Science is about empirical facts, not about argument. It’s complementary, not antagonistic.
Science and philosophy - the two go hand in hand, always.
The “facts” of science will always be interpreted through a human lens, completely dependent upon the state of current human knowledge, which is precisely why scientific “facts” change over time, and why very few scientific theories are universally accepted, even among the most eminent scientists.
Ochaye is right. What Only_Humean said is patently false. Science answers the same “questions” as the pre-scientific natural philosophers. —The answers are just much different. That is to say, the subject matter is the same; the natural world. And there is even some truth to Ochaye’s last line—the natural philosophers were much more…errm, …“imaginative”.