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People tend to forget how utterly limited the capacity we have for scientific inquiry is, and how those limits shaped history and science. Before there was ever
by vinceguidry 11y ago
People tend to forget how utterly limited the capacity we have for scientific inquiry is, and how those limits shaped history and science. Before there was ever science there was philosophy, and that philosophy was shaped by religion, and the same people did all three of those things throughout history.
If you took a king from the 1200s and had him look at our scientific establishment, he'd have called them monks. From this perspective, philosophy is religion without deity, and science is just philosophy of the empirical.
Disciplines of the mind do not have to have this hard separation, its a shame cynicism and scorn have been allowed to take over the public discourse. Not everyone who looks at the philosophy of science is a quack.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y agoI feel that this reflects an ignorance about (a) the lives and work of scientists in the modern day and (b) the lives and work of monks in the 13th century.
- coliveira 11y ago> Not everyone who looks at the philosophy of science is a quack True, but the problem with philosophy is that it is the study of how humans embrace reality, not the study of reality itself. For the simple reason that philosophy has no tools (other than science) to establish what is true or false in the world outside our own minds. If you understand philosophy as the ways we make sense of the world, instead of a tool of finding what is true, then we would have a better time dealing with it.