Many people nowadays are not convinced about why we need philosophy at all. It may have its use historically in providing the preambles of all the other fields of knowledge we have, but that has since been surpassed.
Each year newspaper articles appear, calling for the shutdown of the obligatory Ex.Phil-course at Norwegian universities. A main argument is that the content of the course is outdated, and that most people will never make use of it’s knowledge anyway.
Especially compared with the progress of natural sciences, philosophy seems stuck in the same old questions being repeated for 2.500 years without the renown thinkers of its fields reaching a consensus. Physicist Stephen Hawking has voiced such an opinion:
Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge. (2010, p. 10).
Lawrence Krauss has similar thoughts about philosophy’s having its golden years in the past.
But scientists don’t have to understand, or know anything about what philosophers write. They don’t; the proof of the pudding is that they don’t. They don’t read philosophers, they don’t think about what philosophers have to say. But a philosopher who wants to talk about the world has to know what science is talking about. So unfortunately, philosophy certainly had a very important role early on, but it doesn’t play a role in furthering knowledge about the universe any more. It can reflect and critically analyse the knowledge, but the knowledge is produced by science, not be philosophy (Payne, 2013).
On the contrary, I argue that philosophy, far from being superfluous, is absolutely necessary, even for the very practice of doing science. The notion of philosophy in both Hawking and Krauss, seems to presuppose a very shallow understanding of what philosophy is, and in fact both Hawking and Krauss who frequently dabble into philosophy themselves. But their statements reflect a wider prejudice. Edward Feser argues that at least in four ways does the modern sciences require a deeper philosophical foundation. These are:
- Science can only be justified by non-scientific methods.
- The scientific methods can, even in theory, never provide a complete description of reality.
- What we call natural laws, that the scientific methods refer to in order to explain natural functions, can, even in theory, never provide a complete description of reality.
- The argument from the predictive and technological progress of physics and its related sciences, has no strength. (Feser, 2014)
The need for non-contradictory justification
Any attempt to defend the sciences, its reliability, values, validity, utility, it’s connection to reality, or why it even can function at all, will take the form of a philosophical argument. We will never discover this through experiment or mathematical modeling, without first presupposing a philosophical argument.
Perhaps even more important, the natural sciences themselves rest on a number of foundational philosophical premises: that the human mind has access to knowledge about an external reality; that these are causally governed by certain lawlike relation; that our sensory apparatus are capable of capturing these in some sense; the applicability of logic and mathematics to natural processes, etc. These cannot be defended without turning to something outside of the natural sciences themselves, to examining first principles through metaphysics and philosophy.
Never a complete description
Historically the natural sciences were able to progress because of its very selective focus. Physics uses a purely quantitative description of reality, written in the language of mathematics. Therefore, it should be no surprise that physics has only uncovered the aspects of reality that lends itself to prediction and control as quantitative phenomenon. It abstracts from a world of qualitative aspects, such as colors, sounds, tastes, warmth, qualia, thoughts, purposes, meaning, forms and souls.
That’s why the mind-body problem is one of the biggest issues of our time, since our quantitative outlook on the world will never satisfy the search for something as thoroughly qualitative as the human mind, with its intentions, thoughts, desires, actions, qualia. Rather than attempt to reduce the activities of the mind, among others, to a type of explanation that is by definition unsuited for it, we should recognize its shortcomings, and return to investigate deeper philosophical foundations. Erwin Schrödinger summarized it thus:
We are thus facing the following strange situation. While all building stones for the [modern scientific] world-picture are furnished by the senses qua organs of the mind, while the world picture itself is and remains for everyone a construct of his mind and apart from it has no demonstrable existence, the mind itself remains a stranger in this picture, it has no place in it, it can nowhere be found in it (1956, p. 216).
Unintelligible laws
We’re used to the thought that we can perform empirical investigation and refer to certain lawlike relations in the world to provide sufficient explanations of natural function. But if these laws in themselves are unintelligible, this will not give us satisfying explanations. This is the contention of Ludwig Wittgenstein:
At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena (1921, p. 87).
What we call natural laws are pure abstractions that will not in themselves explain anything without us referring to deeper metaphysical principles. They can give a purely description of certain natural functions post hoc, but we still need a normative principle that can explain why an apple is falling to the ground, or why two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom combine in order to constitute a water molecule. Saying that its because of a “law of gravity”, or a “law of chemistry”, is attempting to explain one unknown with another unknown.
Philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright thinks we now have three alternatives about laws, that (1) they are Humean constant conjunctions, (2) Platonically existing, or (3) are expressions of underlying Aristotelian laws of natures. The first will hardly provide a solid foundation for any science, the second is hard to square with how platonic entities are supposed to have normative effects, while the third option will require us to abandon the notion of laws of nature as independently existing, and instead returning to a view of causal powers being located in the actual natures of existing things.
The best in the game?
Many will admit that there are challenges to treat science independently from philosophy. Although, it’s merits alone should give us pause, they say. Science has flown us to the moon, manufactured vaccines that exterminate diseases, and brought revolutions to our way of living that would be completely unthinkable only a few centuries ago. This is the view of philosopher Alex Rosenberg:
The technological success of physics is by itself enough to convince anyone with anxiety about scientism that if physics isn’t ‘finished,’ it certainly has the broad outlines of reality well understood (2011, p. 23).
But no matter how successful a range of methods is within its own domain of specialty, doesn’t justify why we should use it outside of that domain, or why we should discredit other approaches. No matter how successful someone may be in international law, it is no given that will also succeed as a musician, gardener, chess player or bank manager. That needs to be evaluated on its own merits (Kleiven, 2017).
Few will protest that the natural sciences have been highly successful, but to extrapolate from this into making these methods our sole or primary spearhead into the search for knowledge does not follow. That is no better than saying that the metal detector’s excellent metal finding abilities qualifies it to be our primary tool in search for reality, even if that would turn out to consist only of metal (Feser, 2014). And even when we explore what counts as success in the first place, for what is the telos of the human investigation, that will unfold in philosophical terms.
Proponents that want to make the natural sciences our only or primary way of investigating reality, while disregarding other approaches, are guilty of crippling the full range of methods available to human beings, based on flawed reasoning that does not include the need for deeper reflections on foundations.
The sciences need philosophy. Now, just as much as ever.
References
Feser, E. 2014. Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction. Neunkirchen-Seelscheid: Editiones Scholasticae.
Hawking, S. & Mlodinow, L. 2010. The Grand Design. New York: Bantam Books.
Kleiven, D.J. 2017. Hvordan naturvitenskap og religion kan virke i harmoni. Religion og Livssyn 1/2017.
Payne, K. 2013. A clash of science and philosophy: our chat with Lawrence Krauss and William Lane Craig. Eternity News. Accessible from: https://www.eternitynews.com.au/archive/professor-lawrence-krauss-and-dr-william-lane-craig-interview/ (retrieved 29.10.19)
Rosenberg, A. 2011. The Atheist’s Guide to Reality. New York: W. W. Norton.
Schrödinger, E. 1956. What is Life? and Other Scientific Essays. New York: Doubleday.