Recherche – Detailansicht
Ausgabe: | Mai/2021 |
Spalte: | 450–452 |
Kategorie: | Philosophie, Religionsphilosophie |
Autor/Hrsg.: | MacEwen, Philip [Ed.] |
Titel/Untertitel: | Idealist Alternatives to Materialist Philosophies of Science. |
Verlag: | Leiden u. a.: Brill 2019. 326 S. Geb. EUR 138,00. ISBN 9789004415263. |
Rezensent: | Atle O. Søvik |
We can make a coarse distinction between materialists, claiming that fundamentally everything is physical, and idealists, claiming that fundamentally everything is non-physical. The anthology Idealist Alternatives to Materialist Philosophies of Science offers different perspectives on philosophy of science, of which idealist perspectives are central.
The book starts with an introduction where Philip MacEwen offers a concise presentation of each chapter. There are three sys-tematic chapters and five historical chapters. A reviewer can always say that there should be more of this or that, but a book for a broad-er audience cannot cover everything. When this reviewer makes comments about things gone amiss, they should not be taken as important objections to the book, but rather as indications for the readers toward further interesting ideas to consider as parts of this fascinating topic. This review cannot comment on all chapters, but those not commented offer good presentations of their topics.
The first systematic chapter is written by Leslie Armour. He argues that physical things can be reduced to physical particles, which in turn can be reduced to mathematical entities. These mathematical entities are understood platonically, as possibilities having real existence, and these are the bedrock of reality. All things we perceive are configurations of these. In addition, there are selves who perceive all these things, and these selves participate in a universal mind.
This view has the advantage that it avoids the problem of how to understand the relation between physical and non-physical things. An objection could be that mind and mathematics do not cause motion, so we need forces to create physical motion. But such mo-tion can be understood as an illusion, and Armour leans on the so-called C-series of McTaggart, which claims that it is an illusion. Other problems with such an understanding of time are not discussed.
When it comes to a Platonic understanding of mathematical entities, it would have been interesting to see the position defended against the alternative that mathematical entities can be understood as possible patterns a mind can think of and thus grounded in an existing mind instead of having some independent platonic existence.
Armour argues against such an alternative view by saying »you may not like the number two, but there is nothing you can do about it«. But an alternative view would be that you can change the number two by changing the mathematical framework that 2 is part of. For example, the series of natural numbers could be 1,2,3,11, 12,13,21,22,23 … Then 2 + 2 = 11, and 2 is half of 11. Or you can put 2 in the framework of tropical geometry, and then 2 + 2 = 2. All ma-thematical entities get their content from the framework they are in, and how can you say that one of them is the correct meaning of »2« or »+«? You can say that one is the most coherent meaning, but Gödel has shown that no framework will be complete. This would have been interesting to discuss in Armour’s chapter.
In the next systematic chapter, Hugo Meynell argues that ideal-ism is an important half-truth. For on the one hand the mind influences our perception of the world, but on the other hand something is true independent of the mind. A materialist could agree, but Meynell argues that rationality is incompatible with pure mate-r-ialism, since we have no reason to believe in judgments that are merely the result of physical and chemical laws.
Here Meynell should have discussed the standard objection from a materialist saying that it has been evolutionarily useful to produce a mind that can discover truth in general – including as a byproduct truths that are not important for survival. Daniel Kahneman has given us many reasons to believe that our thinking abil-ity is a product of evolution that often works well, but also often fails. I’m not saying there are no good answers to this, but I missed a discussion of it. It could also have been a small discussion with those who want to say that the world is not independent of mind. Some will say that it does not make sense to say that there were dinosaurs before humans, even though there was something that could later be understood as dinosaurs, but also understood as something else. In any case, Meynell’s points give a nice supplement to the picture Armour presented.
The rest of the chapters to be considered are historical. Since my own approach to these matters is systematic and not historical, I am less competent to judge the quality of these chapters. Chapter two is written by Philip MacEwen. It is possible to have a »two cultures« or »one culture« view on science and humanities, and MacEwen analyzes Hume’s discussion of the design argument (in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion) from both of these perspectives. MacEwen argues that when Philo concludes in chapter 8 that a suspense of judgment in matters of natural religion is the only reason-able alternative, it is an expression of the two cultures view. But when Philo concludes in chapter 12, it is an expression of the one culture view. Philo there says that the contemplative religious man should hold that the arguments favoring design exceeds the objections.
MacEwen defends his analysis well, but I was wondering about a possible alternative interpretation of Hume. Could it be that the conclusion in chapter eight expresses what is most reasonable in general, while the conclusion in chapter twelve expresses what is most reasonable given that you are religious? The conclusion in chapter twelve is a bit ambiguous since it asks: what more can a contemplative religious man do than hold the arguments for design to be best? That is a bit different than saying that any reason-able person should hold them to be the best.
In chapter four, John Norton, argues that Einstein was not just a hardline verificationist in his philosophy of science, but instead a thinker who used different kinds of philosophy pragmatically as it served his purposes. Einstein himself wrote in 1949 that a scientist is a scrupulous opportunist – idealist in seeing theories as free inventions of the mind, positivist in seeing theories justified only by sensory experiences, and appearing Platonist in seeing simplicity as an effective tool of research.
Norton’s presentation of Einstein is very thorough, demonstrating knowledge of all kinds of sources. My only question to the analysis is how much we should make of the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification. In the context of discovering new ideas and hypotheses, Einstein seems willing to employ any philosophy, but in the context of justification, he seems to stick to verification only. If so, one could argue that it is the context of justification that matters when classifying his position, so that Einstein should still count as a verificationist more than anything else.
In Chapter seven, Fred Wilson gives an extremely long (93 pages!) presentation of some debates on idealism and naturalism through-out the history from Anaxagoras to Russell. Wilson has chosen well in focusing on discussions about whether there are necessary re-lationships between things and whether you can have a natural science of what it is to be a human. He shows how discussions and distinctions that are still important in the debate today have evolv-ed through history.
It is not always clear in this chapter when the author speaks, and when the sources speak. But generally, the reader is introduced to many interesting arguments to consider, and the author gives his explicit judgment on the matters discussed towards the end.
Personally, this reviewer thinks that some of the most exciting arguments against materialists today are those that argue that there are laws of nature and that we have a unified consciousness is capable of subjectivity and intentionality, all of which clearly seem to exist and to have non-physical properties. It would have been exciting with a systematic chapter that addressed the discussion today on laws of nature and consciousness.
Overall, the book contains a good selection of topics and arguments in the current debate on the prospects of idealism as a metaphysical position in philosophy of science, and as such offers a good introduction to readers with no in-depth knowledge of the field.