We can all imagine a day when physics will pretty much end. It is the goal of many scientists to create a grand-unified theory of everything, and that such a theory is possible is tied in with our basic assumptions that existence is a rational knowable thing. However, this does not seem to be the case with philosophy. I was speaking with an old professor of mine and I was shocked that he did not see such a parallel between physics and philosophy. I have always assumed that there would eventually be one philosophy that won out (on its own merits, of course) and was widely accepted just as there is with relativity and quantum mechanics.
That’s kind of strange because the last philosophy professor I had made it a point to compare philosophy, particularly some of that old pythagorean stuff, with modern physics.
One could reasonably make the comparison and obtain the opposite conclusion: that physics and philosophy are now both purely theoretical, with conjectures in each field being judged only by how many people agree with them rather than by any relationship to physical reality. If so, they’ll both likely continue churning out new propositions for as long as humanity exists in something close to its present state.
On the other hand, one could argue that philosophy has already ended. The past hundred years haven’t produced any philosopher of stature equal to the great philosophers of ancient times, the middle ages, Renaissance, or the 19th century. The modern world has less use for philosophy; necessity pushes great thinkers into technical and financial fields, while pure thought is confined to the academic world. As time goes on, their numbers will dwindle until philosophy becomes a historical curiosity.
I’ve thought about this before. I think science will eventually render philosophy moot. It will explain all of the mysteries. For example, I’m reading this book, “Moral Minds” by Marc Hauser, which is a kind of scientific analysis of how people make moral decisions. The essential argument of the book is that, like language, everybody has an innate capacity (an actual structure in the brain) to form a morality. That is, from childbirth, the brain analyzes the moral messages being sent in much the same way it analyzes linguistic patterns–and it shuts off “moral options” one-by-one in the same way that the linguistic structure shuts off linguistic options. Eventually, your moral self is fully developed and unique–an ethical language.
The argument of the book is that moral decisions happen this way:
event happens
innate brain morality decides whether it’s right or wrong.
you feel a strong emotion and believe you are making a judgment (when really you made the judgment before you felt the emotion)
you justify your opinion with a rational response, thus misleading yourself into believing your ethical opinions are based on rationality. Notice the actual thinking part comes after the judgment is made.
All of this happens in the blink of an eye–and there you were thinking your decisions were based on reason. According to this author, your ethical opinions are no more within your control than the language you natively speak (which is not to say you can’t, knowing that, then make a different decision based on rationality, i.e. it’s always possible to learn a new language.) This is why so many of us cannot comprehend many others’ moral perspectives – it is literally because they are speaking a different ethical language.
I don’t know that Marc Hauser is absolutely correct – though he does use a lot of research to back up his claims.
…But supposing that he is? Where does that leave philosophy? What happens when every last inch of our brain is mapped out, and we understand exactly why we are who we are and why we behave the way we do? I can’t answer that question, but I suspect that if we ever do reach that point, philosophy would be pointless.
I say this as someone how loves philosophy – I don’t want to sound like a hater here. That just seems like the most reasonable response to the question…
I mean, I can’t think of a single major issue that’s settled in philosophy. We’re still arguing over the stuff that the Greeks were, and often their very same points of view and positions are still around in some form or another. The only measure of progress in philosophy, aside from occasionally being able to declare that this or that minor, extreme, often straw man position is illogical (which even in an of itself isn’t a truly final blow!) is how many new neat positions and ideas we can think up rather than how many questions we can answer.
Don’t get me wrong, I love philosophical discussion. But honestly, I can’t even forsee any way for much of anything to come to any resolution, even in theory.
Of course, there truly isn’t any “essence” to philosophy unless you arbitrarily define a certain sort of reasoning to be “True Philosophy”. Do philosophers aim at answering questions? Sure, some of them do, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but others seek to do away with the questions in the first place. Why should we call the first kind of philosopher, a “philosohper”, but not the second? And vice versa.
Really? You don’t consider the accomplishments of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Wilfrid Sellars, Donald Davidson, to be as innovative and fascinating as those of Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Descartes, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Nietzsche, etc?
I went to some lectures on quantum physics. The guy taught chronologically. He said that in the 19th century many physicists thought physics would end because there were only a very few unsolved problems.
At the end of the 19th century before quantum mechanics, philosophers had thought that people’s actions were predetermined- the dynamics of everything was predictable using Newton’s classical laws.
Apparently many physicists went into different fields because physics was about to end.
Why do you suspect that? Suppose you had in hand a map of your brain, and an understanding of exactly what you would do in any given situation, and what would cause you to do so.
Now, even if that were to happen, wouldn’t you still be capable of having the following conversation with yoursel? “Okay, if I were in circumstance C, it appears from this map that what I would do is this. I believe doing so is the right/wrong thing to do, and the reason I believe this is found on the map here. Okay, well, that’s what the map tells me I would do, and that’s what the map tells me about why I would do it. And indeed, that seems accurate: that seems to be just about what I imagine I would do, and why I imagine I would do it. Yet… how certain am I really that its the right thing to do? What considerations come to bear on the question ‘what is the right thing to do?’ Do these considerations really tell in favor of the action I would take in that situation, or not?”
Is there anything about having the map in hand that does (or should) forestall the asking of questions like those toward the end of that monologue?
If not, then having such a map does not cause philosophizing to cease.
I think you are right, and you and Nava have shown me that my initial assumption wasn’t very well thought out.
Perhaps as long as humans are thinking beings, philosophy will always continue to exist. Though I really am curious – how are we defining philosophy? Does religion count as philosophy? Are certain religions philosophies and others not? Is law a philosophy? Do we consider science to be its own philosophy? Is anything that has anything to do with thinking and trying to make reasoned judgments considered philosophy? If that were the case, it would be hard for the human brain to exist without philosophy–I think by nature we are creatures who think about these things.
Again, you have a very narrow conception of philosophy if you think its relationship to science is such that the scientific project of “completely mapping the brain” would have a significant impact on most philosophy departments. The assumption that the brain causes behavior, or that through repeated experimentation, science comes closer and closer to the “truth”, are ways of thought constructed by philosophers, and as such, so too can they be destroyed by philosophers. Empirical evidence will never be the bane of philosophical thinking.
These assumptions wouldn’t even have to be “destroyed” in order for philosophy to continue apace. Plenty of philosophers already share these two assumptions, in fact–and yet continue to ask questions, for example, about the norms that ought to govern us in our ethical and epistemological pursuits. Put simply, facts about our physical makeup, and about what exists in the world, do not determine answers to normative questions. “Should I enslave my fellow human being” is not a question that can be answered on physical or physiological grounds. Similarly, neither is the question “Can I, and how can I, revise my foundational assumptions about the world in a principled way?”
