I haven’t yet gotten around to writing up a response to Scientia Salon’s Scientism week, but I’m not sure I need to after Massimo’s post. His response is fantastic – and it’s got sass: “One doesn’t get to arbitrarily redefine words to suit one’s own ideological position or personal inclinations.”
by Massimo Pigliucci
“All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.” So wrote Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason, one of the most influential philosophy books of all time. Kant is also the philosopher credited for finally overcoming the opposition between empiricism and rationalism in epistemology, as he realized that neither position, by itself, is sufficient to account for human knowledge.
Kant was notoriously awoken from what he termed his “dogmatic slumber” [1] by reading David Hume, who had written in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding:
“All the objects of human reason or enquiry may naturally be divided into two kinds, to wit, Relations of Ideas, and Matters of fact. Of the first kind are the sciences of Geometry, Algebra, and Arithmetic … [which are] discoverable by the mere operation of thought … Matters…
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One thought on “The return of radical empiricism”
whitefrozen
I didn’t read the article – I’m not terribly impressed by Pigliucci or SS, but I have to question the merit of devoting over 3000 words to what really should be a dead horse topic. It seems on par with writing a refutation of positivism.