The philosophy of science (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, March 24, 2014, 21:19 (3897 days ago)
edited by unknown, Monday, March 24, 2014, 21:40

The findings of materialistic science does not contain all the answers, ever!:-"Those predisposed to dismiss philosophy—some of my best friends—might hear in Whitehead's kudos to Plato a well-aimed jeer at philosophy's expense. That an ancient Greek could still command contemporary relevance, much less the supremacy Whitehead claimed for him, does not speak well for the field's rate of progress.-"Or does it? The question that Goldstein's book sets out to consider is what we mean by progress, and also what we mean by meaning. Her goal is to do more than prove how relevant philosophy still is. She aims to reveal how many of our most pressing questions simply aren't better answered elsewhere. Much of what we take for progress delivers answers that miss the point, distort issues, ignore complications, and may be generated by badly formulated questions in the first place. Goldstein also wants to show us that figuring out how to live a meaningful life is something very different from understanding the meaning of special relativity or evolution. We are deluged with information; we know how to track down facts in seconds; the scientific method produces new discoveries every day. But what does all that mean for us? As the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard observed:-"Whatever the one generation may learn from the other, that which is genuinely human no generation learns from the foregoing ... Thus, no generation has learned from another to love, no generation begins at any other point than at the beginning, no generation has a shorter task assigned to it than had the previous generation."-http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/04/playing-with-plato/358633/-All of the mechanistic stuff being discussed about self really requires a philosophic look for a deeper understanding.-Another view requiring philosophic study:-http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/03/23/evangelicals-still-don-t-know-what-to-do-with-the-big-bang.html#url=/articles/2014/03/23/evangelicals-still-don-t-know-what-to-do-with-the-big-bang.html-"The Big Bang theory, in fact, was developed in the 1920s by a Catholic priest who was also an acclaimed physicist, the Monsignor Georges Lemaître. It was ridiculed and rejected by Lemaître's atheist colleague, Fred Hoyle. Hoyle applied the derisive term "Big Bang" to Lemaître's theory in a 1949 BBC interview—a nasty label that stuck.-"they would do well to heed this caution from Lemaître, as he spoke of the theory that he discovered: -"We may speak of this event as of a beginning. I do not say a creation ... Any preexistence of the universe has a metaphysical character. Physically, everything happens as if the theoretical zero was really a beginning. The question if it was really a beginning or rather a creation, something started from nothing, is a philosophical question which cannot be settled by physical or astronomical considerations."