Philosophy, Not Science

knowledge and competence are only ever local. There are meaningful categories of universals in mathematics and physics, but not in any remotely social affairs. Humans create universals across disciplines so as to comprehend and communicate, but, as the linguistic philosopher Alfred Korzybski is well known for saying, the map is not the territory. M

Immanuel Kant, the extraordinary Enlightenment philosopher, had laid down the thought that we could never come to know the real world which exists beyond our perceptions. Rational enquiry, he said, could never provide the path to understanding ‘objective’ reality, because the most our minds can do is set about organising and considering the world t

strange misapplication of the rigorous but quite limited methods of the modern empirical sciences to questions properly belonging to the realms of logic and of spiritual experience.

The triumph of science has been mainly due to its practical utility, and there has been an attempt to divorce this aspect from that of theory, thus making science more and more a technique, and less and less a doctrine as to the nature of the world. The penetration of this point of view to the philosophers is very recent.