What is the Role of Philosophy in an Age of Science?

Einstein, Feynman, and perhaps other major scientists have made the claim that “philosophers of science” have contributed nothing that’s useful to scientists. While not sure exactly what the contexts of their comments really were, I’d generally say in response, “Yes, and why would anyone expect anything different?” I would think philosophers of science move in the opposite direction, putting the results of specific (or specialized) sciences in a different context which might better serve the needs of metaphysicians and historians of science and educated non-specialists in general. As is true of historians, they help us see the future by bringing past results into focus.

Rather than deal with such issues, I’ll be discussing metaphysics, which is defined by the 1913 Webster’s dictionary as follows:

The science of real as distinguished from phenomenal being; ontology; also, the science of being, with reference to its abstract and universal conditions, as distinguished from the science of determined or concrete being; the science of the conceptions and relations which are necessarily implied as true of every kind of being; philosophy in general; first principles, or the science of first principles.

My worldview doesn’t make quite this distinction between ‘real’ and ‘phenomenal’ being. In fact, I think we need to purge our thoughts of this distinction, or retreat to a Pythagorean mysticism if we’re to account for the strange twists and turns of mathematics and physics in recent centuries. (See The Christian in the Universe of God: 2.1 God as the Creator of Truths for one of my takes on this issue.)

In general, philosophers haven’t yet acknowledged that the understanding of empirical being developed by modern physical and mathematics has expanded far beyond the Pythagorean and Euclidean and Aristotelian roots of traditional metaphysics. Essentially, modern theoretical physicists and mathematicians have been using empirical (including mathematical) knowledge not yet much considered by metaphysicists to explore realms of being which traditional metaphysics reached only by way of pure speculations of nearly a dream-like sort. In fact, some of those realms of being reachable by considering modern empirical knowledge, at least in my worldview, are beyond anything which Plato or Aquinas or Kant could have dreamed of. In terms of my beliefs: God is more creative than human metaphysicians could be, and it’s empirical investigators who’ve passed beyond traditional speculations because they’re the ones paying attention to this phase of God’s Creation. (The interested reader can download a book in which I explain my views on knowledge: Four Kinds of Knowledge. My basic worldview is presented in my first published book: To See a World in a Grain of Sand.)

The most basic of all sciences, physics and mathematics, provide us with knowledge of being as we can observe it and quantitatively describe it. This quantitative analysis can include some speculative elements, but most of the speculation — whether done by scientists or philosophers or poets — is better labeled as ‘philosophy’. What’s important to remember is that empirical being is what we can observe. The field of ‘non-empirical’ knowledge most subject to certainty and verification is mathematics — but I consider even abstract mathematics to be as empirical as theoretical physics. If a metaphysical system doesn’t rightly and fully consider emprical knowledge, including mathematics, there’s no chance it can get much right in trying to understand being in its more general or abstract forms.

Einstein was, in fact, inconsistent in what he stated about the role of philosophy in science, sometimes exagerating the importance of Mach’s philosophical speculations and sometimes denying the usefulness of philosophical thought. Einstein was very consistent in his own use of speculations to shape his physical theories. The General Theory of Relativity and Einstein’s own early interpretations of it were shaped by various speculative, i.e., philosophical, assumptions, some of which proved to be right when Hubble and others collected data and others proved wrong. For example, his intuition that the ‘universe’ (of which he had only a vague idea in the early years of the theory) was homogeneous and isotropic proved to be quite true to a very high degree of accuracy as currently measured and it helped to guide much of the early work in finding interesting and useful solutions to the field equation of General Relativity — the equation that provides a relationship between the distribution of matter and the shape of space for an entity, perhaps a star system or perhaps the entire universe. On the other hand, Einstein accepted — without a comment — the assumption that the universe is static, not expanding. Clearly, this assumption, implicit in some of his early writings, is wrong. In any case, that erroroneous assumption didn’t hold up the development of physical cosmology much, if at all.

In the early stages of creative work, “right vs. wrong” isn’t always so important as you might think. What is important was the courage and energy which leads to forward movement of some sort. Metaphysical speculation was important to Einstein’s work even when some of his speculations were wrong.

And what about metaphysicians? What is their proper role? It’s actually no mystery, at least not to those who have read The Summa Contra Gentiles where Aquinas told us that metaphysics uses the specific sciences. I would go further than this, as I did above, pointing out that the specific sciences tell us of the observable and measurable properties of being as we can know it in this universe. Metaphysics doesn’t just use the specific sciences, it depends upon them and builds upon them — at least those specific sciences which deal with the fundamental nature of created being — physics and mathematics. At the same time, we must remember that physics and metaphysics deal with aspects and phases of the being of God’s Creation. We can know the truths of abstract mathematics because it is part of that being, just as electrons are. In fact, in my worldview, concrete being is shaped from what I call the Primordial Universe, the manifestation of the truths God chose for Creation. Those truths remain present in concrete being.

Certain scientists such as Einstein engage in metaphysics in their scientific work. More recently, brain-scientists such as Gerald Edelman and Walter J. Freeman (and William James a few generations earlier) have also engaged in metaphysics. In my worldview, this is a natural result of their interests in the human mind, as distinct from an interest in specific physical activities in the brain or even in the brain as a mere assembly of its parts. The interested reader can explore my entries on this blog in the category of brain sciences and play particular attention to the entries with a major title of What is Mind?. The most pertinent single entry is What is Mind?: Pragmatism and Thomistic Existentialism.

And so I come to a partial and tentative answer to my question, “What is the Role of Philosophy in an Age of Science?”:

Philosophy, as one of its tasks, takes the results of physics and mathematics and — at least since the work of William James — neurobiology and develops them in such a way as to provide a more complete template for the formation of a human mind.

I’ve deliberately flipped things inside-out to emphasize the primary result of a better understanding of created being — a human mind shaped to encapsulate the world. This possibility of a better understanding depends upon the existence of an exterior universe which is rational and which can be the proper object of this process of shaping a human mind, a shaping which is a creation of sorts, forming a human mind upon the physical stuff of a human brain. Few think of their minds as entities that come into existence as a result of a shaping process after birth. Partly because of Christian misinterpretations of the stories in the early chapters of the Book of Genesis, partly because of a wrongful canonization of perhaps misunderstood results of Platonic and Aristotelian thought, we tend to think of a human being as born with a mind of the sort which can has the native abilities of abstract reasoning. All that is necessary for a strong mind to develop is to exercise those particular muscles of the brain and we get Wolfgang Goethe or Ada Lovelace. In fact, various studies of high scholarly standards have indicated that abstract thinking was itself an innovation in the development of human history. The human mind as we know it came into existence during historical times, after the foundation of human technology and the birth of human cities.

I’ve started to slowly and erratically work on a short article entry about this subject and I’ll rely on R. B. Onians’ The Origins of European Thought About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate and Bruno Snell’s The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature to provide an admittedly sketchy argument that the human mind, in the sense of an entity capable of thinking abstractly and perceiving the wider context of its environments — a cosmos or universe or world, developed only about 2500 years ago or so.

We think of abstract thought as being separate from physical reality, inhabiting a separate realm of purer being. Against this, I’ll make the flat claim that my mind is an entity which shapes itself as I respond to my environments and, more recently, to the universe as seen in light of God’s revelations. By way of processes poorly understood and not often studied so far as I know, a proper reshaping of a mind can influence culture so that other minds begin to take on that shape. Those with moderate levels of education and literacy skills will begin to show signs of assuming, if not necessarily understanding, what was understood only with a great struggle by the brightest and most flexible of thinkers in prior generations. At the same time that scientists, engineers, architects, artists, and a few others performed calculations by way of Euclidean geometric arguments that are extraordinarily difficult for all but a few modern experts, double-entry bookkeeping and the associated forms of arithmetic were considered to be skills of genius. Samuel Pepys was a man of great practical skill who helped to modernize, maintain, and manage the port of London but he found the simplest of account-books to be well beyond his ken.

The modern mind has reshaped itself. Our understanding of the universe, including the affairs of men, is founded upon different sorts of abstractions than the involved Euclidean reasoning used by Newton when he first started working on the problem of gravity. If a well-educated man or woman with no college mathematics were to look through one of Einstein’s more accessible articles on general relativity, let alone one of the standard works on the subject, they would be intimidated by the symbolism. Moreover, they would have some trouble believing that much of the algebraic symbolism is an encoding of very abstract geometric reasoning.

At times, it seems that the mind of the metaphysician (and that of the theologian) has remained an oasis of stability in the midst of this ongoing enhancement of our knowledge of the being of our physical world and our more abstract knowledge of mathematics. This is neither all good nor all bad. It was good to have islands of stability during a period of chaotic creativity, however silly some think those islands to have been, but that stability developed into a problem when that creativity had produced a view of God’s Creation which was far from the traditional view of Creation inherited from pre-modern thinkers and plausible in earlier centuries — but no longer. I repeat:

If we understand the being we can perceive, the being we inhabit, we can have a chance of understanding being of more general sorts. If we don’t understand being that we can touch or at least observe, being that we can subject to various sorts of tests and measurements, it would be a stretch to imagine we could understand being of more general sorts.

And this is where a major problem lies when most scientists look at the efforts of philosophers. Many schools or even entire branches of philosophy have been bastions of human tradition during a period when empirical knowledge, knowledge of the world we inhabit and perhaps a little more, has been expanding greatly. As a convert to the Catholic Church, it bothers me a lot that the philosophers and theologians of that Church have so entangled Christian truths with ancient human speculations as to make it seem as if the Apostles’ Creed rises and falls with Aristotelian views of human nature enshrined in a very unnatural natural law. Because of this situation, Catholics have generally played little role in the development of this empirical knowledge in recent centuries and Catholic thinkers have so far generally not responded to the need to honestly encounter modern empirical knowledge, even though Pope Benedict XVI has been calling for such responses. (See Engaging the Thought of Pope Benedict XVI: Broadening the Horizons of Reason.)