http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/09/05/how-to-be-good
Read this the other day, /lit/. Seems pretty relevant.
Has anyone else noticed metaphysics coming back in a big way over recent years? It's pretty funny (in a smug/spiteful way) to see just how many scientific roads are leading back to the metaphysics from which that field has long tried to divorce itself in the pursuit of empiricism.
Dust off your Kant, dig out your Schopenhauer and reread your Nietzsche.
>>8041798
This is sad, buts its the kind of drivel you'd expect to be shovelled into the trough of whoever the fuck still reads the New Yorker
>>8041798
Whenever I see the phrase "X person is considered to be Y by academics/many people" and there isn't a citation, I get upset.
>>8041821
Hey, it's hardly new; we've had meme scientists like Sam Harris (Ben Stiller) playing around with the same kind of question for ages now.
I'm just happy to see names like Kant even mentioned again, after years of everyone throwing themselves at the feet of 20th century meme philosophers; like 99% of all post-modernists, for a start.
>>8041838
I remember an old Youtube video where Richard Dawkins was asked by a Philosopher of Science if his subject was still relevant, and Dawkins practically laughed at him and said no.
Who's laughing now?
>>8041798
>and then he said, "I read it in the New Yorker!"
>haha, I bet he thinks he's just sooo sophisticated too
>>8041852
>Heh, look at all these plebs. Reading newspapers? Keeping up with current events? I'll bet it's the only thing he reads!
>Fuck that!
>Reads Gravity's Rainbow for the 12th time
>>8041798
Metaphysics never went away and science has not tried to eliminate it for almost a century.
>>8041863
Buddy, The New Yorker is far from a newspaper. It might be the most ideologically laden publication there is right now. It might as well be the DNC's equivalent of Pravda. It aims at middle-class folks who think they're super classy and sophisticated by reading something ostensibly written for New York bigshots.
>>8041864
Are you kidding??
They've been trying to replace it with shitty, one-dimensional materialism for decades now.
Modern science takes phenomenon to be noumenon at almost every turn; with the exception of Quantum Physics/etc, which no one really knows anything about, but who will always claim to have an interest in it so as to seem deep.
Johnson's little refutation of Berkeley whereby he kicks the rock to 'refute' him is essentially their mantra. If it can be sensed, it is a thing in itself; which pretty much ignores the entire metaphysical debate.
>>8041798
>Tfw metaphysics never went away for me
My body and my will are one, anon.
>>8041895
I think you've been listening to too many pop-memers. People like Harris and Dawkins are the exception today, not the rule. But when it comes to fundamental physics, there is a general understanding amongst those in the field that they're working with models, not necessarily reality.
I spent ages trying to wrap my head around what 'will' is, in philosophical terms, and I still don't really understand it.
I really hope metaphysics isn't making a comeback. Take this, for example:
>Spinoza says that if a stone which has been projected through the air, had consciousness, it would believe that it was moving of its own free will. I add this only, that the stone would be right. The impulse given it is for the stone what the motive is for me, and what in the case of the stone appears as cohesion, gravitation, rigidity, is in its inner nature the same as that which I recognise in myself as will, and what the stone also, if knowledge were given to it, would recognise as will.
What the fuck?
