In the late 1970s, when I entered university at 30 yrs old, I read Plato’s famous dialogue, The Republic, where Socrates explores the nature of psychology, politics and human nature. Fascinated by the ideas I met there, I enrolled in a philosophy course where they would spend an entire fall, winter and spring examining that book from start to finished.
But once the course started, I was dismayed to find that the professor, teaching assistants, and students (most of whom were aspiring to get into law school), weren’t interested in ideas at all – all they wanted was to argue, sometimes heatedly, over the methods of argument Socrates uses.
That was enough of modern philosophy for me. I stopped reading it. I’m not alone in this either. Historian Will Durant started his career in philosophy (his 1926 book The Story of Philosophy – The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers was a bestseller), then he grew disgusted with 20th century philosophers. The philosophers of the past, right up to the 19th century, wrote about everything – science, politics, psychology, etc. But in the 20th century, Durant said:
Its practicioners…..lost themselves in the labyrinths of [rhetoric] and metaphysics; they wrote for one another in a kind of ….. secret society, in an aloof and awesome dialect……… and the world passed them by.
Yes, during all civilization’s crises, turmoil and struggle during in the twentieth century, a roller-coaster of history if there ever was one, contemporary philosophy stayed out of it.
But something different is happening now, in the 21st century. A new generation of philosophers have turned their attention back to the real world.
I first noticed the turn around when, a few years ago, philosopher David Chalmers, tired of hearing contemporary physicists talk and talk about their search for a “theory of everything”. He pointed out that they will never have a theory of everything unless they can also explain the phenomenon of the mind, a great elephant in the room of reality that few physicists have dared to even think about. They’ve carefully avoided it for a long time.
But my favorite is this new Norwegian philosopher, Bjørn Ekeberg, new to public attention that is, who has gone after astrophysicists on what they consider to be their home territory – the Big Bang.
I’ve previously written about this (see my post Edwin Hubble’s forgotten battle against the Big Bang), so I’ll just give you the the summary of Ekeberg’s ideas provided on the Institute of Arts and Ideas (IAI) website, prior to their interview with him titled, The Delusions of Cosmology:
The idea that the universe started with a Big Bang is a key tenet of the standard model of cosmology. But that model is a lot less scientific than it’s taken to be. To begin with, we can never have direct evidence of the Big Bang itself, and so if we are to accept it, it must be as a metaphysical, not a scientific hypothesis. Furthermore, the standard model of cosmology has had to adapt to a number of observational discrepancies, postulating entities like dark matter and dark energy for which there is no direct evidence. To add to the above, another central assumption, the cosmological principle, stating that the laws of the universe are the same everywhere, is also under scrutiny. The universe might turn out to be a lot stranger than we think, or could possibly imagine.
The key to the controversy that has since arisen around Ekeberg is his assertion that these astrophysicists aren’t practising science – they are dealing in metaphysics.
Metaphysics is a term I sometimes wish was never invented. The Merriam-Webster dictionary, after offering a couple of troublesome definitions, makes this clarifying comment:
Just as physics deals with the laws that govern the physical world, metaphysics describes what is beyond physics – the nature and origin of reality itself.
In other words, once you get beyond physics, we can discuss ‘the nature and origin of reality itself’, which includes the existence of gods, spirits, etc too, but we are no longer doing science.
The astrophysicists throw a lot of complicated math at you, never admitting that all that calculation starts from a set of assumptions that aren’t based on anything known at all. That’s what Bjørn Ekeberg is challenging them on.
This seems to have really got under their skin in a way the few physicists combating them for years haven’t been able to do. Here is what astrophysicist Ethan Siegel wrote recently in his Forbes column in response to Ekeberg:
To point to “a steady crop of discrepancies” is a disingenuous — and I daresay deliberate — misreading of the evidence, used by Ekeberg to push forth a solipsistic, philosophically empty, anti-science agenda….. [and he warns against] ideologically-driven diatribes without the requisite scientific merit to back them up.
Pretty heated stuff right? But keep in mind that there isn’t a scrap of science in those words. Unlike most other scientists, astrophysicists are notorious for thinking that everything they say is scientific. On his blog, Ekeberg responded:
Beyond this rather predictable condemnation, Siegel does not really engage with my argument. Instead, he tries to reassure readers that this science is as solid as it comes…… who am I to question what “practically every working scientist,” according to Siegel, agrees on? ……. To be clear, I do not claim to prove that standard cosmology is false, nor do I advocate any alternative theory. My concern is to ask questions that some scientists may find inconvenient and therefore want to dismiss wholesale as ‘anti-science’. But since when did self-questioning stop being part of science?
There is much more to that increasingly entertaining debate, but I’m going to leave it now. If you’re interested, here is a link to the IAI interview with Ekeberg:
These new philosophers are not stopping with cosmology. They appear to be examining everything in the world around them.
Recently I discovered philosopher Deborah Barnbaum’s book, The Ethics of Autism: Among them, but not of them – a survey of philosophers confronting the enigma that autism is to non-autistic people. I’ve been reading this interesting book for a while now. Some remarkable ideas are put forward, not all of them welcome to anyone who considers themself to be on the Spectrum.
As soon as I’m finished the book I’ll do a post on it.
Alan Conrad 