Monday, January 29, 2007

Is Philosophy Progressive?

A guy named Mark Makin posted this link on Biola's intranet: http://www.philosophynow.org/issue59/59carey.htm. I found it interesting.

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Posted by Louis at 3:40 PM

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1 comment:

Derek said...

Science (as we have come to think of it) is progressive only because certain people were able to get certain things right about the world, and this process has taken civilization more than a few millennia to accomplish. Furthermore it wouldn’t have been possible (save a blatant and uncharacteristic act of God) if certain men didn’t ask certain questions (men like Socrates and his students (Plato) and their students (Aristotle) and the men who thought it necessary to understand them (all great western philosophers)), and if certain men didn’t encounter God (Adam, Moses, Abraham, Mary Magdalene, etc.), or at the very least if a great many people didn’t think that such people encountered God. For this is simply the ‘natural’ history of the western mind, and the West is the one who gave (a painful) birth to science.

So science, so conceived in the modern sense, is made possible by doing philosophy, and had not that ‘doing philosophy’ been progressive (however long it took) we never would have go to our ‘science.’ So if one thinks that science is progressive and philosophy is not, then one doesn’t know where one has came from.

But of course, as it always seems, the author of this article didn’t define his terms, and not just any term whatever, but not even the terms that comprised the original question, which was: is philosophy progressive? And without taking a cue from Socrates (the philosopher par excellence) forgets to ask the paradigm platonic question “what is it that we are asking?” What in the world does he mean by “progressive”? (I’ll leave him alone about not defining “philosophy,” for God could only cover all the corners on that one.) One could implicitly infer from the articles content that by “progressive” he means something extremely limited, something like “the ability to continually give us a better understanding of the (physical) universe”; for he could only mean this, because this is all science (in the modern sense) has been able to do.

But no great philosopher has ever been interested in just knowing how the universe works (in the mechanical sense), because knowing all the particulars of the physical universe will never tell how we ought to be. To put the point another way, the many questions Socrates would likely ask us if he were alive today could be summarized with one question:

“And with all of these ‘scientific’ feats, my Gentile offspring, do you live any better than my fellow Athenians who executed me?”

And our sober answer is: not at all.

True, scientific progress has comforted and extended many of our lives, but the ultimate death rate has never changed (disregarding some Christian and Hebrew texts) and the quality of our lives remains the same.

This is simply because “philosophy”, vaguely construed as the subject of all subjects and the questions of all questions, is something men do, and whether men do it well or not depends on the choices of men, and science has yet to prove, much less even conjure, what the choices of men will be. The day philosophy becomes “progressive” in the ultimate sense of the term is the day all men choose to see the truth, and the truth will set them free.

30/1/07 4:40 AM

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