[b]Thomas Nagel
I believe that the methods needed to understand ourselves do not yet exist. So this book contains a great deal of speculation about the world and how we fit into it. Some of it will seem wild, but the world is a strange place, and nothing but radical speculation gives us a hope of coming up with any candidates for the truth. That, of course, is not the same as coming up with the truth: if truth is our aim, we must be resigned to achieving it to a very limited extent, and without certainty. To redefine the aim so that its achievement is largely guaranteed, through various forms of reductionism, relativism, or historicisim, is a form of cognitive wish-fulfillment. Philosophy cannot take refuge in reduced ambitions. It is after eternal and nonlocal truth, even though we know that it is not what we are going to get.[/b]
What a damn fool, right, Mr. Objectivist?
The place at which the contrast between forms of intelligibility is most vividly presented is in the understanding of ourselves.
Wow, who would have thunk it?
It is not enough to be able to think that if there are logical truths, natural selection might very well have given me the capacity to recognize them. That cannot be my ground for trusting my reason, because even that thought implicitly relies on reason in a prior way.
And then it’s that all the way down.
If we tried to rely entirely on reason and pressed it hard, our lives and beliefs would collapse – a form of madness that may actually occur if the inertial force of taking the world and life for granted is somehow lost. If we lose our grip on that, reason will not give it back to us.
I’m sort of saying that. I think.
I realize that such doubts will strike many people as outrageous, but that is because almost everyone in our secular culture has been browbeaten into regarding the reductive research program as sacrosanct, on the ground that anything else would not be science.
James S. Saint is sort of saying that. I think.
Even if we acknowledge the existence of distinct and irreducible perspectives, the wish for a unified conception of the world doesn’t go away. If we can’t achieve it in a form that eliminates individual perspectives, we may inquire to what extent it can be achieved if we admit them.
I know: Let’s take this mystery to the grave.