Note: There was no Sunday Thoughts this week, as it was Easter, but you can get two hours of my soothing tones here in this interview. Around the two hour mark is when I enter the show. There is some written content behind the Green Door. You can sign up for an account at SubscribeStar or Substack.
I will be on the Paul Ramsey show this Wednesday. Because I am such a terrifying figure, I am not permitted on YouTube, but Paul does his show on Rumble for the second hour, which is when I will join.
The word philosophy comes to us from Greek, meaning “love of wisdom” but as a practical matter it is the study of knowledge. The great philosopher Emil Faber said that knowledge is good, so it may be tempting to look upon the death of philosophy as another sign that the West is in decline. Ours is no longer a culture that can produce great philosophers or even properly understand those of the past. Philosophy is just another victim of cultural decline.
On the other hand, the West got along for a long time without philosophy. In fact, the West was able to rediscover philosophy due to advances in material life prior to the rebirth of philosophy. We used to call the period after the fall of Rome the “dark ages”, but we now know it was not particularly dark. A new order was rising and eventually it would provide the human capital and resources to rediscover the Greeks and then build on what they had left to the world.
In other words, there is something else going on here. Alchemy is no longer practiced because it was replaced with something better. Astrology is still around, but it is for the stupid and superstitious. Perhaps like those things, philosophy has simply served its purpose and is no longer useful. It is often assumed that philosophy is a good in itself, knowledge for knowledge’s sake, but humans are still tool makers, so maybe philosophy is not an especially useful tool anymore.
Modern philosophers claim that they seek to understand fundamental truths about the human condition, the natural world, man’s relation to other men, and his relationship to the natural world. They break it down into metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, logic, and the history of philosophy. In order, these are the big questions of philosophy. Is there a god? What is knowledge? What is good? What is good reasoning? What is the history of these questions and who said what about them?
A more compact way of describing philosophy, however, is that it is composed of three main branches of inquiry. There is natural philosophy, which is the study of the natural world, including the nature of man. Then there is moral philosophy, which is the study of how men ought to act. Then there is metaphysics, which is mostly jargon-filled pedantry and gainsaying that leads to nothing. The last branch has come to dominate the philosophy departments of Western universities.
There are two reasons for the death of philosophy. One is that natural philosophy was overtaken by science. This is a point that Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow make in the book, The Grand Design. Hawking observed that philosophy had failed to keep up with science, so it had nothing useful to offer about nature. More important, the development of ideas like M-Theory meant that science offered the promise of explaining the why questions, as well as the how questions.
The truth is, philosophy has nothing useful to say about the workings of the natural world, including the workings of the human animal. For a while, they tried to draft on science with things like the philosophy of science, but it was nothing more than academic appropriation. One can argue that early philosophy laid the groundwork for science, but science has no need for that groundwork today. It is an entirely separate field with its own internal dynamics.
More importantly, modern science requires mathematical aptitude that is not present in moral philosophy. In order to understand the diversity of the human animal, you must understand genetics and evolution. While a philosophy student can dabble in those areas, his primary field of study operates outside of the domains of math and science, which is why philosophy is no longer relevant to the human sciences. This gap becomes much larger when you move to physics.
Moral philosophy, in contrast, is still with us. It has been an unequivocal disaster for Western civilization. Primarily concerned with conjuring an authority not named God, moral philosophy has been responsible for the terrifying and monstrous ideologies that made the 20th century a bloodbath. Given the direction of liberal democracy, it looks as if the quest to replace God as the ultimate authority could very well end in a series of mushroom clouds, erasing humanity from the planet.
Would the world have been better off if Hegel had never lived? Without Hegel, we do not get the young Hegelians, which is where Marx got his crackpot ideas about historical materialism. Tens of millions have been butchered in an effort to get on the right side of history. Imagine if we had the good sense to shutter the philosophy departments after Locke. Maybe the world would have been spared the terrors of man’s new god, the right side of history.
The aphorism, “If God is dead, then everything is permitted” is attributed to Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. It is a pithy truth, but Dostoyevsky had much more to say on the subject. If there is God, then he is the ultimate authority for both how and why of the world. If not, then what is the authority? Philosophy has no answers for how the world works. That has been taken up by science. As to why why the world works as it seems, philosophy has no answers.
The point here is that philosophy has nothing to say about how the world works and its efforts to explain why it works have been a disaster. Further, as Hawking explained and as Donald Hoffman has discussed, science may very well be on the cusp of explaining the why of it all. Even if moral philosophy had not murdered itself in the search for a new God, science appears to be heading for an empirical replacement for the why we needed God in the first place.
What is left for philosophy is metaphysics, but even here, science is slowly stripping it of its intellectual legitimacy. Questions like do people have minds? and do people have free wills? are now in the domain of science. This is why philosophy is now left with jargon and onanism. It has nothing to contribute to the stock of human knowledge, other than the ongoing process of cataloging the history of philosophy, which increasing reads like a suicide note written by Western civilization.
Training young people in philosophy is no different than teaching them alchemy or offering them astrology as a science option. Tarot card reading is less destructive, as the person claiming to see the future remains within the possible. It is the philosophy departments that have perpetuated the lunacy of perfecting the human animal and creating an earthly utopia. No one ever decided to immanentize the eschaton because their fortune teller had a vision of the future.
That last bit is why philosophy is dead. As a replacement for religion, particularly Christianity, it offered up a vision of a post human condition that turned out to be worse than the human condition. It amplified the worst aspects of the human animal in pursuit of fantastical visions of the future. Christianity staggers on, because it still can offer hope, regardless of conditions. Philosophy has run out of hope to offer and is largely to blame for the present crisis.
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For the first time I disagree with The Zman. Even if “science” discovers — or thinks it discovers — the Why of the Universe, the knowledge will be so esoteric and divorced from human experience that it will be meaningless to everyone but a handful of astrophysicists. As Zman has pointed out many times, we desperately need a new morality, and if we ever create one, it will not be built solely on “science.” We absolutely need a system of moral philosophy which is in accord with what we know through the sciences but also takes into account the elusive,… Read more »
I actually agree with you. Only a tiny number of people can think about the cutting idea stuff in physics, much less internalize it. Then again, how many people have any idea what Heidegger was trying to say?
The entire corpus of modern philosophy was to find a substitute for the God of The Bible and replace Him with a different god, viz., man himself. That this has been going on since the first couple resided in Eden seems to indicate that it is a systemic (I hate that word now that it has been coopted by the Gramscian left) problem; something that is endemic to all humankind since The Fall. This effort to replace God with Man has never yet been successful, and to the contrary, has resulted in the immiseration of generations of humanity, not to… Read more »
This was very disappointing. The only charitable interpretation of this post is that Zman simply doesn’t know what philosophy is.
Or do you not understand what philosophy isn’t?
Meanwhile, closer to home, Mr Z,s home that is.
Charm City might be dropping the “C”
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/baltimore-mayor-calls-citywide-curfew-after-all-hell-breaks-out
Those urban Amish youths at it again…
Uh oh, despite claiming to wash his hands of Z, Mr. natural rights, Mike Anton, may not be able to resist…
Here is an example of philosophical thinking. Science is concerned with the static, fixation. The human body is full of movement. Science will reduce it to parts and wholes which are further reduced to mathematical equations. Furthermore, science will view time as reduced phases of past, present and future each a whole when viewed separately but together they form a whole of time. The problem is time is continuous i.e. it is indivisible as life, but it is also discontinuous as phases which are a reflection of time or motion. So the human organism as being alive is not truly… Read more »
Wow!!! Tremendously weighty !!! As one with BA in philosophy, and 30+ yrs svc in the empire’s legions on top of that, I echo the sentiment: Put modern philosophy to the sword …. All of it” But for God’s sake, spare literature, at least. We must pull that gasping survivor from the the rotting mass of the collapsed western academic edifice, and fully resuscitate it. But, please no giving over of humanity / western civilization to a “New Elite” charged up on pure science. As fallible as we’ve proved to be, it could only become the new human tragedy. If… Read more »
Agree about literature. There is much worth restoring especially the classic novels and short stories. Lots of good sense and subtle wisdom conserved so it was no wonder that the ‘white male literary canon’ was the absolute first target of the rads, fembots, and other malevolent elements in the late Sixties (and thereafter) academy.
They called their joyful little annihilation of the works of their betters ‘deconstruction’. Because ‘Spiteful Resentment by Inferiors’ was neither p.c. nor fancy.
Yes, they were (are) an ugly bunch, those angry, hate-filled monsters. I got to see them up close every day during undergrad yrs. As one who took some “Great Books” coursework along with major and minor, I was exposed to the few WWII / Korean War vets still hanging on then. That band of relics was thoroughly despised and openly disrespected by the new, young pirates (as they saw themselves) then swinging over the railings ready to burn the old academy to the waterline.
In our increasingly complex society, all the best minds are tied up in very narrow fields of inquiry. Consider the cell phone. There is not one person who could design and build it from scratch. The cell phone is the result of several highly expert disciplines, each necessarily focused on very minute details in order to complete the whole. This extreme specialization is repeated across all disciplines necessary to keep the modern world functioning. With most of the brightest people working on making stuff and ensuring the smooth functioning of an increasingly complex society, there is very little high functioning… Read more »
You need an IQ up around 150 to have any hope of gr0kking the mathematics necessary for attempting to describe the behaviors which appear to occur in Relativity Theory & Quantum Mechanics [and there’s effectively no one who has ever been a true master of both disciplines]. Furthermore, a growing number of physicists are starting to suspect that the Future might influence the Past, and if that’s true, then it turns much of classical Philosophy upside down & inside out, with stratospheric IQs being necessary for creating the frameworks within which one might begin to philosophize about a tug of… Read more »
I’m not sure the sort of intelligence that makes sail foams work and philosophical intelligence are fungible. In other words, were Plato alive today I don’t think he’d be building his own digital server in Silicon Valley.
“There is nothing more dangerous than a philosopher who wants to change the world.”
-Piero Scaruffi
Zman is giving the moral philosophers way too much credit for shaping the arc of history. Ideology is post hoc rationalization of power, to quote Academic Agent “bs bs bs, therefore I rule”. If you erased Hegel and Marx from history, in all likelihood you’d step out of your time machine back into the present only to find that Russia had still been overthrown by a group of scheming Jewish intellectuals in the early 20th century, just calling themselves something else.
There’s a lot to this in that any ideology is primarily about *who* questions, even though it purports to be about *what* or *how*. In other words you always start with a group of people, not an idea. They contrive the ideas to justify their access to money, power, and pussy. That’s from the male perspective. Women’s ideologies are always about gaining access to a “better” class of men than they’ve been able to get to so far. Basically, there are just times in history when certain societies get something like AIDS. Tsarist Russia at the turn of the 20th… Read more »
It also explains the phenomenon of Jewish elites being behind both radical libertarianism and radical communism. Despite those ideologies being literal antonyms of each other, what they do have in common is under both systems rich Jews get the power and the shiksas.
Radical libertarianism suggests a different and perhaps opposite utility value of modern philosophy than the above. Instead of a route to power it seems, for some, to be a route to what you might call anti-power, a route to total irrelevance and ineffectualality. In the case of the libertarians it’s often quite obvious that many clearly embrace what’s been called “implicit Whiteness”. What path might they have walked if they hadn’t received the Gospel According to St. Rand? I doubt this is any kind of deliberate conspiracy but for the ruling class it’s quite a happy accident that so many… Read more »
Nah, it’s just power. Communism argues that the State has the right to do whatever it wants to you, libertarianism says corporations can do whatever they want to you once they coerce you into signing a 100 page license agreement to get your cheeseburger. The government and corporations are run by the same colluding elites, so in practice communism and libertarianism are the same. The anti-power element is always there as well, as part of the ideology is always to tell the proles that the rulers are legitimate and that under no circumstance should a prole try to exercise any… Read more »
Biology trumps psychology, until you have a zookeeper government creating artificial habitats. Psychology influences the politicians to do perform this role.
A society run by white men will inevitably progress toward prosperity, give or take. Affirmative action puts women and POCs in charge, creating an artificial habitat where white men are at a disadvantage in an environment they thrived in. Perhaps we adapt.
I was talking to a friend a year or two ago and we agreed that with the advance of science we actually know less about “life, the universe, everything” than in the good old days.
And we agreed that in due course another physics revolution will regard relativity / quantum mechanics as we regard astrology today.
But of course gubmint-financed philosophy departments are worse than useless.
Modern science has a problem with honesty and integrity. Faking results and outcomes is not good science.
Neither is suppressing contrary findings. The very people who condemn the persecution of Galileo, practice the very same. But now it’s scientists rather than prelates who are doing the persecuting.
I have to strongly disagree that philosophy is dead. To the contrary, it is needed now more than ever. The great contribution of Leo Strauss — once you get past all the nonsense about Jaffa and Lincoln and esoteric writing and all of that — was that he encouraged us to re-commit to the study of ancient and classical philosophy, originating with the Greeks, to help us understand our future. Ancient or classical philosophy regarded Man’s essential characteristics as fixed by Nature itself. The chief quality of man separating him from other animals was his ability to use reason to… Read more »
Aristotle, and his thoughts about philosophy, were a product of his environment in ancient Greece, particularly Athens. The dominant and persistent wisdom of that time and place were the product of the experiences of their local ancestors, and therefore “appeared to be” an ideal formulation because it “worked” so well for them. But would it have “worked” equally as well for the natives of subSaharan Africa who resided in a much different environment than that of Mediterranean Greece? Europe has now been invaded by many African and Middle Eastern migrants, and it does not appear that they are assimilating very… Read more »
Aristotle also said some men are born to be slaves. Socrates said virtue cant be learned, its a gift from the gods. Sounds like two hereditarians to me.
Or is that your point?
As smart a guy as Strauss was purported to be, you’d think he would have noticed that modernity didn’t invent war, it just industrialized it.
Well, yes. Certainly the ancients engaged in war.
But none of them had the hubris of Woodrow Wilson, who claimed that we we going to fight “a war to end all wars.”
Modernity claims that it can use technology and social structures to fundamentally alter human nature, ostensibly to correct its defects — e.g. Marx’s “species being” (or, as Nietzsche argued to the contrary, “maggot man, swarming over Europe.”)
None of us would agree that the Jews were right to crucify Christ because they were in power.
Christ had a particular mission to fulfill, so His is a special case and not really the best example for arguing against “might makes right.”
Excellent post today. I have been contemplating a similar piece of writing about the death of economics, which has seemingly been subsumed or eliminated entirely by politics. I am in the same age cohort as the Zman. Throughout most of my life there was vigorous debate between economists about the economic impact of government policies, e.g., tax rates, regulations, etc. Who of our age doesn’t remember the Laffer curve? Over the course of the past ten years this debate has all but disappeared. I can’t remember the last time I saw an editorial or article about tax policy, or heard… Read more »
Speaking out against climate change, and/or the policies that arise from the belief in it, leads to the cancellation of one’s career. Everybody knows this. The economists are all leashed now. Kind of like the doctors.
Its probably both. Im watching women ruin formerly successful businesses with absurd ideas and POC staff picks. Women and POCs cant stand economics nor philosophy. Affirmative action was like demon possession of every institution. Debate means nothing when the men have 85 IQ and the women have such high levels of empathy that they cry on the job weekly.
You do not understand metaphysics. It does question many of your issues addressed in the post. Examples: there is no mention of life and its meaning.Science cannot answer that problem because it is concerned with limits, the finite.Value is not purpose. No one has a satisfactory grasp of this problem. Modern ethics is relative and that is causing major problems for the world and not just America. Everything I have read on the Comments about how to move forward is being blocked by not recognizing the importance of philosophy and metaphysics. One must understand that the goal of Modernism was… Read more »
“Science” reminds me of the saying “he knows the cost of everything but the value of nothing.”
There was always going to be a Hegel in the post Napoleonic world. Some of the worst ideas in humanity are taken up directly after great wars, when society is off its bearings and searching for answers as to what happened, ending with the wrong answers. We’re all just sort of carried along by fate and events, even the greatest men in history. After 200 years of domestication, would today’s Napoleon be a LcCrosse coach somewhere in France? The most hopeful thing I can cling to, after all the science of philosophy has reached its logical conclusions and dead end,… Read more »
His “Four Quartets” are an incitement to spiritual reflection, and great poetry as well. Thanks for dropping these conclusory lines into this thread.
RTWT. Repeatedly, both in the little eddies of discrete sections, or carried along by the sweep.
I have loved “The Four Quartets” for more than half of my life. I remember telling my ex-wife how much I loved it and she asked what it was about. I was embarrassed to discover that I couldn’t answer her question. I took some solace in Eliot’s quote that “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” After that, I spent years trying to summarize the piece. My best attempt is that it is about the exasperation with God of a devout Christian, his feelings of frustration with his failures to practice the faith and his abandonment by God, but… Read more »
I picked up the copy of the Four Quartets that lies on the table next to my bed, and opened it to Section IV of East Coker. I think that this was not merely fortuitous, given that Good Friday was just past. I am of a mystical turn of mind; to me the ancient saying from the book of Hermes Trismagistos, “As above, so below’, intuitively makes good sense. So too that the stillness and the dance are one. Richard Wagner characterized Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony as “The Apotheosis of the Dance”, and having had the privilege of performing this work… Read more »
It could be eye opening if somebody did a study on the prevalence of astrology belief in white women, especially single cat owning shitlib white women who claim to value “science.” My anecdotal is it’s the majority of them.
Women’s brains operate differently from men’s, using a kind of inductive reasoning that allows them to make “short cuts” based on synthesizing empirical observations. This is probably selected for, as it helps them intuit or anticipate the needs of children who often cannot articulate their needs rationally.
On the downside, it causes women to make unjustified logical “leaps”, or even mental paralysis when sufficient empirical cues are not present. In such cases women often look for confirmation from non-germane external phenomena, like tarot and astrology.
“ Training young people in philosophy is no different than teaching them alchemy or offering them astrology as a science option. ” Not sure I completely agree. You argue persuasively on the failure of the “how” and “why” wrt to the world. But what about the mind, or rather the “strengthening of thought”? I remember fondly my intro philosophy classes as a freshman. One of the first was “Introduction to Logic”. You know—“All men are mortal. Socrates was a man. Socrates was mortal” stuff. Seems we are surrounded with folk these days—including *scientists* that could use a refresher course is… Read more »
“war is the father and king of us all”
End of philosophy lesson.
OT, or maybe not.
James Kunstler’s site looks as if it may be under a DDOS attack. Shows he has been consistently over the target. Shut up, shut up, shut up!
Site is now back up. Was this merely a technical snafu with his server, or the spastic flailing of the wounded beast, Leviathan? Difficult to know.
The only sites I ever see that happen to are dissident sites.
“Moral philosophy, in contrast, is still with us. It has been an unequivocal disaster for Western civilization. Primarily concerned with conjuring an authority not named God, moral philosophy has been responsible for the terrifying and monstrous ideologies that made the 20th century a bloodbath. Given the direction of liberal democracy, it looks as if the quest to replace God as the ultimate authority could very well end in a series of mushroom clouds, erasing humanity from the planet.”
It is a religion, though. And, yes, a death cult.
If I’m reading this correctly, it gets down to Hegel (idealism), and science (materialism). If you look at the quality of things today, it’s apparent to me something is missing. Woke is obviously out of touch with reality, but on the other hand, you’ve also got phone-gazers. My opinion, like I said the other day: men are between God and animals. Or ideal and material, if you like. I think there are different kinds of knowledge, valid on their own terms, but incomplete. Reality is a comprehensive thing, but I’m not sure it’s reducible. Smarter people than me have tried… Read more »
From Wikipedia (I know, but it’s cited and the article doesn’t seem like garbage. FWIW):
“According to Witten, M should stand for ‘magic’, ‘mystery’ or ‘membrane’ according to taste, and the true meaning of the title should be decided when a more fundamental formulation of the theory is known.”
Even science starts as conjecture, is substantiated or not. That’s significant.
For that matter, how is the idea of scientific progress different from the idea of historical progress, other than the fact that the present descent into dystopia makes it easy to doubt historical progress? I imagine if the technocrats keep having their way, doubting science will soon be easy, too.
Honestly I’m not trying to be a dick, it’s that I we need reset before we get one imposed on us. Too many dead ends and too much certainty driving us into them.
science may very well be on the cusp of explaining the why of it all. Science has also been on the cusp of immortality, AI, and any number of things for a long time now. Color me skeptical. I can upload your “consciousness” to a computer for immortality – for a (comparatively) small fee of course. I know you poopoo metaphysics, but it is really nothing more than the examination of underlying assumptions that must be made in order for anything to “work”, including science. Such as the law of non-contradiction. The problem is most metaphysics has probably been settled… Read more »
I think, in Z’s essay and also in the comments there some confusion as to philosophy and philosophers and the teaching and/or study thereof.
A bunch of horses of many different colors.
[…] The Death Of Philosophy […]
The failing of science and engineering is our failing infrastructure. The signs of the failure are all around us and happening with increasing frequency.
The failing philosophy is why we worship trannies and African Americans. The collapse of society.
“Then there is metaphysics, which is mostly jargon-filled pedantry and gainsaying that leads to nothing.”
My worst experience in college was being forced to read “Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals” by Immanuel Kant. Almost 100 pages of esoteric jargon that boiled down to following the golden rule.
Ninety-eight percent of philosophy is men who, to quote my dad, love to hear the sound of their own voice. Castle-building. Lots of bloviation and vanity that leads to nothing except more philosophers.
Go do something in the world. You can cogitate endlessly when you’re dead.
Moral philosophy and metaphysics? That’s what Scripture and relationship with Christ are for.
“Equity is Good” – Emil Faber they/them/theirs
This is simply ignorant twaddle. I wonder what set off this rant.
We found the philosopher.
Faith is difficult for people who are above average in intelligence (like our host).
Philosophy is the bridge between science and faith. Like physics and biochemistry, however, you must be REALLY intelligent to understand the links. Personally, I just fake it: the religion, the science and the philosophy.
Boethius sat in the same seat as our host while the Roman Empire disintegrated. Hopefully an angel swings by and gives him similar consolation (absent the execution).
>Further, as Hawking explained and as Donald Hoffman has discussed, science may very well be on the cusp of explaining the why of it all. Even if moral philosophy had not murdered itself in the search for a new God, science appears to be heading for an empirical replacement for the why we needed God in the first place.
LOL I’ll believe that when I see it.
My thought as well. An atheist (Hawking) is telling us science will prove God doesn’t exist. Yeah, okay. The more likely explanation for “why we needed God in the first place” is because God is real, and he has placed himself beyond our ability prove it.
Agreed. Z’s uncritical worship of science strikes me as naive. If there is a single characteristic at the core of dissidence, it is skepticism. And if the crackpot use of science with relation to the Covid farce–not to mention science’s reluctance to accept genetic reality regarding sex and race–doesn’t engender skepticism about contemporary science, I don’t know what will.
It may go without saying but you could certainly have also added Climate “science”
Time for Back to Aquinas.
What is wisdom? Simply put, it is a description of beliefs (and associated practices) that have proven beneficial over a long period of time for a particular people in a particular place. It is the descendant concepts of successful local evolutionary adaption. Why is wisdom important? Because it advances the survive and thrive imperatives of all the various cohorts of Homo sapiens living in different environments on the planet. And most of this wisdom is location specific, but there can be some aspects which are more universal (i.e. they work in most places most of the time). Patriarchy is an… Read more »
You would think we could look back at the Chinese and see what happens when you think everything “old” is bad. One of the “Four Olds” was old thinking. IOW, wisdom. “Old thinking” is old for a reason. It’s evolution for reasoning. Bad ideas produce bad results and hopefull die. Good ideas become embedded and take on the role of “tradition”
This is a disappointing post. You already had this conclusion in mind, and work backwards with a series of tendentious assertions that — quite frankly — also sound somewhat ignorant of the history of the philosophy. Just to take one example, the flippant dismissal of metaphysics leads me to believe you have no appreciation or understanding of Aristotle. You sound a bit like a man who’s wandered into a modern art exhibition and is using the occasion to denounce art altogether.
I once called Aristotle history’s greatest monster. https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=29113
And yes, I know the Greeks wore a himation, but few would understand what I meant, so I went with toga.
But yet you wrote “decided to immanentize the eschaton”. Ingish plz
A few weeks back you posted a interview with a University professor, Stanford I think, concerning the subject of reality that was very intriguing.
I thought when I listened to the interview even though much of it was over my head that this potentially opens up an entire new realm for mankind.
I would be interested if any significant part of what we call modern science is accepting this concept and exploring it?
Perhaps studying the subject of reality brings us closer to the subject of God?
Just a thought that hit my mind around this essay.
This is something Hawking touched on in his book I mentioned. Once you accept that maybe we are not evolved to perceive reality accurately, it opens the door for a lot of things, including the existence of a creator or a set of creators. maybe what we think of the universe is just a terrarium on a child’s dresser he made for science class.
I think of just perhaps a half century ago, or less, the concept of creating a virtual reality was not known by the general public.
Now jr. high kids play around in this world using electronic devices throwing around atoms.
If what Donald Hoffman and others say about reality is true we could actually be living in a creation of something far different than man has conceived of in the past using his tools of science.
A terrarium on a child’s dresser…. Hm. So, this is where almighty science leads us, huh? Pass. I’ll take Plotinus over Hawking.
Well if it is God playing The Sims, at least he’s moved past that phase of walling people in until they pee their pants.
Isn’t logic a branch of philosophy? Isn’t everything, including science, based on some sort of metaphysical assumption?
I will be on the Paul Ramsey show this Wednesday. Because I am such a terrifying figure, I am not permitted on YouTube
This is unpossible. I am reliably informed that the people who run YouTube are passionate about including diverse viewpoints!
They are. Trannies are gods, or trannies are angels. It doesn’t get much more diverse than that.
Ironically, Philosophy Departments at universities are in crisis for wont of students. When my eldest graduated a few years back (Ivy League school, where you’d expect to find some egghead Phil. majors), there were maybe 9 Philosophy majors in a class of over 1500. My old classmate, a Philosophy professor at a huge State flagship university, told me she doesn’t have enough students in her classes. So the main impact of philosophy now on campus is seen in the adjacent Gender/Race-Grievance/Sociology/PoliSci programs. In these areas, the Frankfurt School line has taken over. The funny part is that the these DIE-type… Read more »
What you see is the rise of the NPC degree. Critical theories don’t include reasoning, so devolve into nonsense. Not before casualties, and wasted time.
The Philosophy is settled–as a discipline it is racist. Eventually philosophers of color will come along and the grievance studies will be rebranded as “philosophy.” Tell your friend she just came too late or too early, depending on her Whiteness.
Michel Foucault is the most often cited academic philosopher—still, after all these years. Among people who don’t know his work, half take his referential dominance to prove that he invented or at least endorsed present-day “white power structures” type garbage. (He didn’t.) The other half cite him. Foucault had already become unread by the time I went to college circa 1990, but millennials are the generation that rejected philosophy in full. What that means is rejecting reading anything but Harry Potter. The only notable philosophical work they’ve produced is [drumroll] “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality,” a from-the-ground-up reinvention… Read more »
Philosophy doesn’t pay. And in AINO’s transactional higher ed environment, that means obsolescence. Philosophy is hardly the only field suffering this malaise, either. English and art, among other soc sci/humanities fields, are on the rocks. On the surface, this might appear a hopeful development, but deep down inside I can’t help but think it’s actually bad news. There is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in the STEM fields.
What is the endgame of The Science explaining it all? Wouldn’t that be something like the transhumanist techno-utopia promised by WEF?
How would the science-answers be relayed to the double-digit IQ masses?
TikTok videos, naturally.
AA lot of the problem is not that philosophy is useless so much as they aren’t allowed to ask the interesting questions. How do you create good governance for distinct peoples? What sorts of eugenics are allowable given the differences in human abilities? What are the moral limitations in the use of propaganda? Is there a moral obligation to sustain human genetic diversity? How far does it go? For Universities, these questions make assumptions about the natural world that are true but anathema to speak, which is why they are so useless. If you can’t even ask the right questions,… Read more »
Karl Popper had a lot to say about Hume and induction. I’m not sure I understood it all. But I think his critique of Hume was that science isn’t about induction, it’s about falsifying hypotheses.
One encouraging sign is the rediscovery of the neo-Machiavellians: Mosca, Pareto, Roberts, and above all Carl Schmitt. Burnham was never lost, probably because tribal privilege. Throw in Heidegger if you need a metaphysics. Taken together, they are particularly good at describing the function of elites, and represent the only real philosophical advance since Locke’s Second Treatise.
As for philosophy, does anybody here understand why Slavoj Žižek is so popular in the West? He is an utterly disgusting human being. A fat drooling slob and a rambling idiot. Just looking at him tells me that he shouldn’t be an authority on anything at all. If you are fat and disgusting swine like him, anything you say is worthless.
Zizek is a “pop philosopher”, a “rock star philosopher.” He has a background in academic philosophy. Some of his earlier books were good. His 700-page book on Hegel — one of his later ones — is worth a glance though difficult reading. But “peak Zizek” was probably around 20 years ago. Few people mention his name today and it’s considered passe to do so. Al least he wasn’t a complete fraud like Derrida.
What is The Science is corrupt, politicized and full of midwits, all flowing in the same direction that gives them predictable career path?
It is my most humble opinion that “The Science” has fallen for these reasons: First, the big push to get everyone into STEM. There’s a couple problems with this. Most people just aren’t smart enough to be a scientist or engineer, yet we push them (especially non-whites and women) into STEM anyway. Then, like any AA program, it has to be dumbed down so that they can pass, and the various science and engineering programs have to start tolerating the AA and other dumb folks who bring in their SJW ideas. Second, even smart people find difficulty getting decent-paying jobs… Read more »
“Even though physics is an extremely tough college major (ask me how I know), good luck getting a good paying job with just a BS. An advanced degree is necessary to work in the field at a living wage.” I hear you, but not everyone—perhaps even few—get jobs directly in their field of study. Which is why I don’t belittle a field of study in a sparsely employed, but rigorous discipline. Physics majors take a lot of math. Heck, even in Computer Science our majors could take *more* classes in the Math dept than ours and graduate with a degree… Read more »
Compsci, yes those are good points. Anyone who can complete a physics degree can probably do many other things. But if all they have is a BS, they probably won’t be working in physics. I consider that to be part of the STEM scam. Don’t get me wrong, I respect people who take a STEM major rather than something easier, but you’re still about as likely to work in your field of study as that philosophy major is.
But that’s exactly my point—STEM is not a scam. Now college itself may be a scam, that I freely admit. But to go to college and successfully take a rigorous set of classes in a STEM field, leading to a degree completion, is to prove yourself a cut above all the others—at least 80% of attendees. There is certainly room in the job market for such people even if not directly in your field of study.
If a person’s goal is to do interesting, meaningful and decently compensated work perhaps they should reevaluate whether spending 4 years of their life and $100K + at a university is their best option. Where I work a kid can come out of high school take a 1 year certificate program at the local community college and start at $65k as technician with no experience. In one year they can advance to $85k after passing an oral board. With three years experience senior technicians currently make $95 + . There is usually a lot of overtime available which allows earnings… Read more »
Reading this article is like walking into a tornado. She’s probably right. Mushroom clouds indeed
https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/04/07/human-destiny-in-ukraine/
The lunatics running the GAE have no reverse gear.
Anyone that does not now understand that is in total denial.
I would settle for neutral.
It apparently has not brake, either.
Thanks, that’s a clear-eyed assessment and one I generally have made: as the United States grows economically weaker, it will become more aggressive abroad (and despotic at home, to paraphrase a great man). Those of us in the GAE face two great dangers. The first is obvious nuclear annihilation because of the sociopathy laid out in that piece, the second is even more horrific domestic oppression if the GAE does not resort to nukes and loses the proxy war. Heads they win, tails we lose. I once had thought that the oligarchy’s fear of destruction would foreclose at least the… Read more »
Too much to disagree with in today’s essay. A couple of points in passing (it’s too much to point out all the places I think you’re mistaken). Alchemy remains alive and kicking. I know at least one quantum field theorist who considers himself an alchemist first and foremost. Secondly, natural philosophy wasn’t “replaced” by science; it was *renamed* science. What distinguishes today’s physics — perhaps the ur-science — from earlier attempts is its reliance on advanced mathematics simply not known earlier — differential equations, differential geometry, group representations, linear and multilinear algebra, fiber bundles and Lie groups, algebraic topology, and… Read more »
“What is also interesting is how little theoretical physics is now advancing: the low-lying fruit has all been picked and the field is now in its baroque stage.”
When they cannot conduct experiments on the theories, it runs out of gas. I was listening to a podcast with a bunch of physicists a few months ago – including Donald Hoffman – and they didn’t agree on much, but they agreed with you that there was little advancing in physics. I’m not sure I understood it all though…
I remember going to a lecture of String Theory by Brian Greene. Smart guy and phenomenal speaker, but couldn’t help but think he was stuck in the theory being beautiful, and therefore true, regardless of the mathematical contortions involved.
Aesthetics plays a key role in formulating theories. It played a role for Copernicus, for Maxwell, for Einstein, and for today’s physicists. The conviction is that if something is aesthetically satisfying, then by golly, it must be true. Of course this can’t be defended rationally but often it seems to work. The “eightfold way” in particle physics comes to mind
I think there is some confusion here. When I say I have written an elegant solution to some problem, I do not mean that it is beautiful as in a work of art. I mean that it is beautiful in its simplicity. It is following the law of parsimony. One could argue that simplicity lies at the heart of artistic beauty, but that is debatable.
” They break it down into metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, logic, and the history of philosophy.”
The missing branch of philosophy in this list is aesthetics, which answers the question, “What is beauty?” And, yes, this has played a key role in the development of natural philosophy. The neglect of aesthetics resulted in the ugliness of modernity. Or maybe it’s the other way around.
I think Jordan Peterson started talking the same way about around the same age. You looking to start a cult, Z?
“I think Jordan Peterson started talking the same way about around the same age.”
If Z writes an earnest article about the Chinese Communist Penis Milking Facilities I swear I’ll start donating.
Feng shui and the art of washing your penis.
You’re quite right. It;s the interplay of theory and experiment that’s crucial. A lot of the elaborate mathematical structures that have been created by modern theoretical physicists simply don’t allow experimental corroboration of even the most tenuous kind. Modern theoretical physics is not so much the union of mathematics and experiment as the union of mathematics and mysticism. A representative of such work is Ed Witten. We require experiments to not only allow some corroboration but to remain “grounded”, to not engage in the wild flights of fancy that mathematics makes possible.
It’s funny this topic comes up this morning for me as I happen be reading Imperium again. The work addresses this topic in some depth and my understanding of the thrust of the author’s assertions on the subject argue that European culture-man has simply lived through that stage of life where civilizational energy is invested in philosophical inquiry. Science as well appears to have reached certain boundaries that leave its most advanced frontiersmen back where man started , struggling with the Prime Mover question and conceding the question is unknowable according to their own scientific / mathematical framework. More broadly,… Read more »
The square root of -1 is a cope.
A useful one though. If it didn’t exist European culture-man would have been compelled to invent it haha. reminds me of another bad math joke … Aleph-Null bottles of beer on the wall , Aleph-Null bottles of beer, take one down, pass it around, ….
The square root of -1 is more than a cope. It’s the foundation of one of the most beautiful areas of mathematics: complex variable theory. And it is a key part of our worldview and helps explain phenomena both in mathematics and the outside physical world. The intriguing thing about mathematics is that concepts designed as copes, as ad hoc conveniences, often turn out to be helpful in understanding the outside world.
The mistake was referring to complex numbers as “imaginary”, implying that they only exist for the sake of mathematical masturbation. Quantum computing does indeed require complex numbers as a quantum bit is a complex probability.
Also, medieval alchemy never was about pure chemistry, although there was a strong chemical component to retorts and experiments, from which modern chemistry is partly derived. Alchemy provided the literary and graphic super-structure for understanding and manipulating mass human psyche and behavior. It was a proto-manual for mass control of human organization and systems. Jung’s ‘Psychology and Alchemy’ and ‘Mysterium Conuinctionis’ are good guides to this subject. Particularly effective in medieval alchemy was the manipulation of the planetary base duality, that of collective male and collective female, and developing methods for effecting mass alterations of humanity and the human condition.… Read more »
Yes, Jung explained “psychological alchemy” very well, though of course this does not exhaust what alchemy is about. Partly because there are different kinds of alchemy and it’s not a simple monolithic structure. If today mathematics has become the bridge between inner and outer, between intuition and imagination on the one hand and the experimental world on the other, then various esoteric fields such as alchemy, astrology, and various flavors of hermeticism did so previously. And not ineffectively. Nor are these fields divorced from mathematics. As Frances Amelia Yates argues, mathematics was one of the master keys to the cosmos… Read more »
There were many schools and cultural sources of alchemy, as for example there were many sects of gnosticism. And yes alchemy was and is one of the hermetic disciplines. Not that I’m for it.
…”Philosophy has run out of hope to offer and is largely to blame for the present crisis”…
My immediate thought went to Yuval Harari and his enabler Soros as personifications.
Without ‘Science!’ there wouldn’t be a new pharma ad on TV every five minutes, with some name, duly focus-grouped to sound original, yet nonsensical.
Philosophy can’t keep up with that.
Excellent piece. As a historical note, the abolitionists and the other progressive meddlers that began to rise in the early 19th century, were more informed by Hegel and the notion of the world-spirit operating in history (“the arc of the universe bends toward justice”) than the Puritanism of their forefathers, which certainly recognized limits to human aspirations.
wait a minute, aren’t you tarring all philosophies due to the bad ones? the argument can be made that there is a fair amount of overlap between religion and philosophy (at least the moral branch). hasn’t religion lost “territory” to science, as well? and finally, religion – including christianity – has been the motive force behind plenty of slaughter and mayhem. maybe philosophy should be re-titled meta-religion? [and be concerned with teaching people how to evaluate a religion]
“religion – including christianity – has been the motive force behind plenty of slaughter and mayhem”
Can you be more specific? I hear this a lot, but have a hard time matching the 100 million or so deaths that atheism claimed over just a few decades of the last century. The Crusades claimed about 1-3 million over a century. But what else? And I don’t think it’s fair to count when kings would claim God is on their side as they go to war for power and land.
One needs to “normalize” the numbers for the population of the time and perhaps the technology available for implementation.
For example. Genghis Khan had a habit of wiping out whole city states that piss’d him off. Others he took their surrender and garrisoned them and moved on. He never approached a city the size of New York, nor had he the men and means to implement such a slaughter if he had. But nevertheless, he certainly had the will to do so.
Modern slaughters are confounded by technological advancement, but I’m not sure are morally distinguished from older slaughters.
Fair enough, but I don’t think we can put Genghis Khan under the religious war category, though I know he is just one example to make your point about scale. But a death is a death, regardless of the size of the population at the time. If we adjust Cain killing Abel for population, it would be a large massacre by today’s standards, but it is still just one death. But even if we multiply the Crusades by 20 to account for population, it is still is less deaths over two centuries than Mao accomplished in two decades. And he… Read more »
Thirty Years’ War: 4-12 million deaths. Justification for the conflict was whether Protestantism or Catholicism had the biggest pee pee.
this is exactly what i was thinking of. plus the Huguenot troubles in France. not sure if that is part of Thirty Years war or not.
No idea, a lot of European history blurs together to me. I was just reading about Jan Zizek thinking he was part of the Thirty Years War but he was leader of the Hussite rebellion like 200 years earlier.
^ I meant Zizka. Ugh, someone mentioned that slob earlier and now my wires are crossed.