- #1
oldman
- 633
- 5
I ask this question as a non-philosopher whose ignorance of this subject and its history is profound.
In my ignorance I nevertheless suspect that change in philosophy has over the last few hundred years lagged behind the explosive increase in our knowledge of the natural world, its history and our place in it. Some instances of quite recently acquired knowledge that I suppose may have a bearing on philosophical questions are:
1. Our species and our large-scale environment were not always as we now find them. Both have been and are subject to punctuated/continuous evolutionary change.
2. Our origins, and those of the natural world, lie much further back in history than we had supposed. Very much further --- Myrs and Gyrs, respectively.
3. Until quite recently (50 to 100Kyrs ago) modern man existed in relatively small numbers only on the African continent as one of several (possibly many) species of large African apes.
4. The intellectual potential of our species has not evolved significantly since some of us left Africa. Partners in Goldman Sachs may be richer than tribal folk, but they ain't necessarily smarter. Memes have evolved more rapidly than genes since those times.
5. We are evolutionarily advantaged by a set of attributes we happened to acquire (how, we don't know). The set may include an upright posture, speech and the propensity to use tools, chatter and reason abstractly. This has led to the present infestation of this planet with humanity. But essentially we remain just a very successful kind of African ape (if success is measured by numbers, that is).
6. Most folk find the worlds of the unfamiliarly tiny, unfamiliarly vast, unfamiliarly slow and unfamiliarly quick difficult to describe simply and comprehend fully (as in the quantum, cosmic, geological and relativistic domains of the physical world). Some of these domains can only be described with various dialects of a language evolved over the last five or so Kiloyears, namely mathematics.
7. There are many aspects of the complex natural world that our languages and understanding do not equip us to model predictively. We euphemistically label these "emergent" phenomena.
We now seem to know roughly where we are, what we are and how we and the universe came to be as they are (although origins remain mysterious).
Can the philosophy folk on this forum provide reassurance that this modern perspective is fully taken into account in considering philosophical matters?
In my ignorance I nevertheless suspect that change in philosophy has over the last few hundred years lagged behind the explosive increase in our knowledge of the natural world, its history and our place in it. Some instances of quite recently acquired knowledge that I suppose may have a bearing on philosophical questions are:
1. Our species and our large-scale environment were not always as we now find them. Both have been and are subject to punctuated/continuous evolutionary change.
2. Our origins, and those of the natural world, lie much further back in history than we had supposed. Very much further --- Myrs and Gyrs, respectively.
3. Until quite recently (50 to 100Kyrs ago) modern man existed in relatively small numbers only on the African continent as one of several (possibly many) species of large African apes.
4. The intellectual potential of our species has not evolved significantly since some of us left Africa. Partners in Goldman Sachs may be richer than tribal folk, but they ain't necessarily smarter. Memes have evolved more rapidly than genes since those times.
5. We are evolutionarily advantaged by a set of attributes we happened to acquire (how, we don't know). The set may include an upright posture, speech and the propensity to use tools, chatter and reason abstractly. This has led to the present infestation of this planet with humanity. But essentially we remain just a very successful kind of African ape (if success is measured by numbers, that is).
6. Most folk find the worlds of the unfamiliarly tiny, unfamiliarly vast, unfamiliarly slow and unfamiliarly quick difficult to describe simply and comprehend fully (as in the quantum, cosmic, geological and relativistic domains of the physical world). Some of these domains can only be described with various dialects of a language evolved over the last five or so Kiloyears, namely mathematics.
7. There are many aspects of the complex natural world that our languages and understanding do not equip us to model predictively. We euphemistically label these "emergent" phenomena.
We now seem to know roughly where we are, what we are and how we and the universe came to be as they are (although origins remain mysterious).
Can the philosophy folk on this forum provide reassurance that this modern perspective is fully taken into account in considering philosophical matters?