Middle Earth

Garrett Moritz thinks that something is seriously amiss with the Elves of Middle Earth ~ a must read for Lord of the Rings fans.

More musings on Philosophy and Science

Jessie Rosenberg has some interesting comments on the relationship between philosophers and what she calls experimentalists and theorists. In her theory, each plays a crucial role in the progress of science and the discovery of workable, simple, and cohesive theories to explain and manipulate the natural world. An overview of the history of philosophy and science uncovers an unmistakable relationship between the two, and as I stated in my previous post, philosophers were themselves the seeds of science and the scientific method (i.e., Francis Bacon). Clearly philosophy and science were not distinct disciplines from the time of the pre-Socratics through the Enlightenment.

However, I think that modern philosophy no longer plays any role whatsoever in the realm of science. Science has become specialized in discovering facts about the physical world through methodical testing of scientific theories. Philosophers know little to nothing about the intricacies of scientific paradigms and care little about scientific discoveries which reveal yet more facts about the natural world. A modern philosopher would be more interested in the thought processes of the scientists and whether that process is consistent with the world view that the scientist believes when not in the laboratory. The ethics of cloning would be a good example -- i.e., are the scientist's experiments consistent with his or her view of the nature of existence and that view's moral implications?

Philosophers do still posit theories (or adopt old ones), about the nature of existence. But this is of no interest to scientists, and rightly so, as it would be no help to them whatsoever. The philosopher's goal is in learning how to act and what kind of person to be -- i.e., Should I be a deconstructionist and thus forget about knowing or believing in anything at all? A deconstructionist would tell a scientists that science is useless because there is no truth and nothing is knowable anyway. Even the meaning of words themselves is too liquid to depend upon.

And science does not inform philosophy. Especially in the post-modern environment of universities where errors in knowledge translate to no truth existing about anything, the accumulation of facts and more cohesive paradigms about the natural world are useless to the post-modern philosopher.

But it's late and I can see that I have tried to bite off much more than I can chew at this hour. Suffice it to say that I believe, consistent with Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that philosophy does not and cannot play a role in the further articulation of current paradigms and that scientists do not and should not take philosophers' ideas seriously when it comes to scrutinizing the natural world through the lens of a new scientific model. It is the process of normal science itself that gives rise to new and creative theories to explain the natural world. So to the scientists, don't worry about ignoring us philosophers. I promise we won't be offended.

Coffee and Islam

You would never know it by looking at its website that the Caribou Coffee Company is mostly owned (87.8%) by the First Islamic Investment Bank of Bahrain. This normally would not not be of immediate concern -- however, according to Debbie Schlussel of the New York Post, Sheik Yusuf Abdullah Al-Qaradawi, a member of the bank's advisory board, is also a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, a terrorist group that also sports such members as Mohammed Atta and bin Laden deputy Ayman Al-Zawahiri. According to the NY Post, his membership got him sent to Egyptian prison for several years and banned from preaching at Cairo mosques.

Yet another argument for home roasting!

For more info on the Caribou Coffee Company and this story, go here.

Links via InstaPundit and James Lileks.

This simply deserves a wide audience ~ from The Indepundit.

Archive Problem

My "linkback" permalink at the bottom of each post is not currently working properly. Thus, if you try to link to a specific post, it will only link to an error page. If you have any suggestions as to how I can fix this, I'd appreciate it. I've already reset my archives, but somehow need to also reset the permalinks. Until then, you'll just have to link directly to http://www.thelegalbean.com. Sorry about that. I will try to get it fixed asap.

UPDATE: Any permalink 6/14/02 or older still isn't working. The newer one's are just fine.

UPDATE: All permalinks are working normally.

Roasted up

. . . some small batches of Sulawesi Toraja (sometimes called Celebes Kalossi from the colonial Dutch name of the Toraja region) and some Kenya AA tonight. And last night I roasted small batches of Columbian Peaberry and some more El Salvador. Tomorrow my colleagues at the court will be "subjected" to the Columbian, brewed via a new method (well, new for me) -- a manual drip directly into a thermos. Roasting and (amateur) cupping notes will follow in the next few days along with any interesting comments from others.

Reading old philosophers

Sasha Volokh challenges his philosophy friends to tell him why it is still worth reading old philosophers -- to challenge whether the term "old philosophers" is really nothing more than a fancy term for intellectual history. His political science friends have nearly convinced him that ancient political philosophy is worth skipping because modern political thought is no longer political philosophy, but political science. The moderns have better answers and ask better questions. Volokh, however, does not have a settled view on the matter.

Quare offers the view that facts usurp philosophy in the areas of hard science (such as neuroscience), and that even the fields of soft science - political science or psychology - are discovering factual material, though more slowly, and usurping philosophy as more facts are collected.

Let's first remember that philosophers think about everything and were themselves the seeds for the development of science and the scientific method. But these philosopher/scientists studied the physical world because of interest in the more essential questions: What is there (ontology)? What is knowable (epistemology)? How should we act (ethics)? The fact that these questions (which I agree are essential) are asked and examined so thoroughly by the early philosophers (and rarely to never in modern education) is, I think, itself a powerful argument to continue studying the old philosophers.

The Western world and "Islamic extremists" have answered these questions differently. But how many of us bloggers had to search for the intellectual hardware (or software?) to discuss these differences with clarity and state good reason for why we should take the fight on the offensive (how should we act?). Being steeped in the ancient philosophers illuminates intellectual frameworks (models, paradigms), that have worked and haven't worked for bright thinkers in the past and is useful and, I think, necessary still today.

Science did not help or even aid, and, in fact, cannot help or aid in answering these questions, because a collection of facts or a framework for learning facts (scientific method) cannot inform us how to make ethical decisions, inform us of the nature of existence, or what knowledge is, how knowledge is attained, or what is knowable (and that's a biggie). The crucial distinction between science and philosophy is this: the goal of philosophy is the search for Truth (or the lack of it), for the purpose of informing us of the nature of existence, the nature of knowledge, and the nature of ethics. The goal of science is the manipulation of the physical world with the tools of paradigm (scientific theories which are nothing more than ideas that work and reflect no higher Truth) and the scientific method.

In the modern world where science is so thoroughly developed, it is appropriate that philosophy and science have become distinct. The world learned six decades ago that modern science should never encroach upon the province of philosophy and ethics. But why is that again you ask? Well, if you had studied your ancients you'd have the tools to analyze that question!

Thus, I do agree that because many philosophers were also amateur scientists, much theory of how the physical world and how politics actually works is mostly useless. So yes, there are good reasons for skipping scientific and political musings by ancient philosophers. But by doing so, you are not skipping over philosophy, you are skipping over early, but genuine science which is of little use anymore. Skipping over early science does not displace philosophy ~ the main point being that the pursuit of philosophy is not a pursuit of facts useful for the manipulation and control of the physical world, such as is the case with science; rather, it was and is the pursuit of a useful world view based on the nature of existence, knowledge and ethics. Studying such pursuits gives us good thinking tools, and possibly even a solid world view that we are better able to intellectually defend.

Second, Volokh doesn't say that intellectual history is worthless, but suggests that the study of ancient philosophers may nothing more than a fancy term for it. Impliedly, by my argument above, I think that intellectual history is important, and studying the ancients is a good way to go about it.

Why study Plato? He is a good example of a philosopher who saw existence (ontology) as independent of human action. Thus, his ideas about existence informed his ideas about knowledge (epistemology) and how we should act (ethics).

Why study Descartes? He is a good example of a philosopher who saw the nature of knowledge as absolute. His epistemology thus informed his ideas about the nature of existence and how we should act.

Why study Foucault? He offers up the third option, starting with how people act. His ideas about how people act informed him of the nature of existence and the nature of knowledge.

Do you know where you start and where your assumptions begin? I posit that it's a useful thing to know and that the above philosophers (and many, many others) provide a useful way of thinking about it.

Finally, I posit that modern science has usurped nothing of the essence of philosophy and never will. The philosophy of science or of technology or of art, each posits the same age old epistemological, ontological, and ethical questions. These are important questions, and ones that cannot be addressed by science or informed by an accumulation of facts.

UPDATE: I should probably mention that I was drinking El Salvador SHG Santa Adelaida from Sweet Marias while writing this post!

BloggerPro is back up . . .

It is noon on Sunday. I have only just now been able to publish with BloggerPro for the first time since noon on Friday! So I just re-upped my old template and made a couple of changes, most notably increasing the size of the font a bit to make the post more readable.

In my intended Friday post (just below), I said I was going to play in a disc golf tournament on Saturday. Well, I ended up staying home with a head and chest cold, which will hopefully be chased away with lots of fruits and vegetables today.

Anyway, it's good to be back. I will spend the rest of the day doctoring myself and fixing other template problems, reinstalling comments, etc.