Now Pro75, I am going to answer your question? but not really answer
your question…
I have been deep into this book by Prigogine called: Order out of chaos…
Man’s new dialogue with nature…
and one of the topics he deals with is Entropy…and of course this idea
of order and chaos…but the big question he deals with is energy……
let us do a quick review of philosophy and see what has been the deal
with philosophy…
with the “new” science of Kepler and Galileo and Newton,
we have come to learn of new vision of the universe…
a vision where motion, the movement of objects and stars
was the “Scientific” way and philosophy in some attempt to
become more “Scientific” adapted the scientific method…
Socrates would have been rolling around in his grave had he known
this because Socrates whole point was to bring philosophy down to earth…
not to make philosophy scientific, for that was the whole movement of
philosophy before Socrates…to engage in the world scientifically
and see what that meant philosophically…
but Socrates didn’t want to have anything to do with that, he wanted
to bring philosophy “out of the heavens”, not science, as was practiced
by the Pre-Socratic philosophers but about values and the soul and virtue…
Human values, not an understanding of the universe scientifically, but
philosophically…
so, when did Modern philosophy lose it way?
when it became scientific… following the lead of Descartes
and Newton, Hobbes and Locke and Hume……
let science do its thing and that thing is good, make no mistake,
I am not anti-science… However I am for science being about science
and philosophy being about matters of philosophy…
there are many question of philosophy for which science cannot answer for us…
for example, science cannot answer questions of ethics, nor can science answer
questions of Aesthetics and most interestingly Epistemology… the study of the
scope, nature and limits of human knowledge…what did you say Kropotkin?
that science cannot answer questions of Epistemology?
Yep, no matter how big a set of Epistemology answers we get,
we cannot catalog everything… something will get left out of
the question of Epistemology…… we cannot put into a set
everything that is Epistemology… no matter how hard we try,
something will get left out…try putting all the emotions we have
into some set or subset…no matter how many emotions you might get,
you will be missing some… that is the problem with any attempt to list
everything about a certain subject… you can never include everything…
thus all information we have is incomplete… we can never reach the
limits of human knowledge… something will be missed…
so to return to our problem… science cannot answer certain philosophical
questions, no matter how hard we try to do so…
so, science starting with Kepler, became about motion…
read your Galileo and it is all about motion, read Newton
and it is all about motion…a good deal of Einstein is about motion…
the theory of Relativity and the special theory is all about motion…
so, philosophy in its bid to become
scientific, became all about motion…
and questions about motions is great for science, but the understanding of
motions doesn’t answer philosophical questions……
how is the question of virtue, a motion question?
it isn’t…but there is something that might be better suited to
answer questions of virtue scientifically…
and that is energy……
re orientate philosophy to think of questions in terms of energy…….
ah, what the hell are you smoking Kropotkin?
see the next post…
Kropotkin