‘Effectively, Catholicism lost its moral authority the minute it mixed epistemic and pisteic belief — breaking the link between holy and the profane.’ —writes Nassim Nicholas Taleb, on Medium in his article On Christianity. I think that there is enough space here for some nuances. Modern science did not appear from anywhere but was itself …
What is matter, and how can we think of matter? ‘Matter’ is not something real in the sense that it can be given in our experience. It is not something that we can feel, touch or see as we see this apple tree or this cat. Matter is an ‘abstraction,’ as they say, or an …
Concrete observations come necessarily before any theoretical scientific modeling. One needs a large pool of empirically observed data on which a scientist builds his theory, that is to say, an imagined view of the world in which things are thought to be related mathematically. Science and rational imagination are a necessary conceptual pair. The principles …
We must acknowledge that the distinction between a priori and a posteriori raises many difficulties for an understanding of Hegel’s philosophy of nature. Some interpreters have contended that the a priori character of this philosophy makes it completely senseless in that it claims the legitimacy to replace empirical research of science with the pure logical …
There is an interesting misunderstanding concerning Hegel: the idea that he wanted to explain everything through his philosophical system, that he tried to raise himself to the absolute knowledge of God. Of course, this is also based on his own words, concepts, or expressions like ‘absolute knowledge’ that accompany his explanations concerning his philosophy. But …
Hegel describes very intuitively the essential conceptual features of each of the three dimensions of time (Hegel, 1970, p. 235): how do we think of the future, how do we think of the present, and how do we think of the past? Or rather, what the most elementary logical content is that we meet in …
What does natural science do when interpreting human consciousness? It attempts to interpret it as a consequence or effect of the complex system that the brain is. In other words, it tries to obtain the mental state from the state of the brain and of the human body in general, similarly to how Laplace’s demon …
Whitehead considers that philosophy has a close relationship with religion and science. We could add in this respect that philosophy, like religion, aims at an integration of the individual into the universal. It aims at finding a general scheme of thought that can answer not only to the rational needs of the individual but also …
Science cannot even start its investigation without presuming the existence of free will, in the same way in which the principles of mechanics cannot ignore all the meanings present in the term ‘force’ related to the human force exerted in our daily experiences. Thus what science does in the case of free will is only …
In Hegel, self-externality of space is only a logical condition for everything that exists. As logical, it concerns pure possibility and not reality. Space is everywhere opening itself into other self-external spatial contents. The difficulty of understanding Hegel in his explanations concerning nature is that we tend to understand the concepts about which he speaks …