| Summary: | "The volume is made up of papers selected from a larger number scattered during fifteen years in various journals. The philosophical presupposition of a view which joins the words "Philosophy" and "Science" is, to my thinking, at once an Idealism and also a Naturalism. No philosophy can today deny Naturalism; by Naturalism meaning the recognition of the right of Dame Nature--physical, vital, mental--to be and to do what she really is and does with no let nor hindrance whatever, from us or from all the tribe of thought. If we allow science at all--knowledge of Nature, at all--then the ideal of science and of scientific explanation is once for all erected. Naturalism, which, in my usage of the term, is a name for science not for philosophy, must sweep the boards of every fact that "is, was, or ever shall be," of every fact of every kind, before its task is done, leaving not a pawn on any square of the board we call the cosmos. Philosophy is a new reading of Science, a saying of this or that about knowledge--not a special species of knowledge, nor a discovery of what is new. Philosophy evaluates, estimates, criticises, unifies, enjoys. Philosophy says "How?"--To Science's "What?" How can this and that both be true? How can the universe hold both man and nature? Both fact and ideal? Both "is" and "ought"? How can action be immoral and thinking false? In short: How can and how must we men think Nature and act naturally? Nature being what and only what science makes her out to be. Such be one's presuppositions, then it follows that one's philosophy is simply one's thought--one's best thought--about Nature. My best thought of nature, my type of philosophy, is an Idealism which finds that the universe of science, is, when all is said, a cosmos which is not only true but also beautiful, and in some sense good. Science tells us what is true; that is science's prerogative: and whatever maybe science's final word about Nature, that word is in so far the truth of the matter. Philosophy then enters her questions: How can such truth be also good, beautiful, livable--or none of these? While others say other things, and many others many other things, I say it is true and good because it is beautiful. Nothing, I think, can be true without being beautiful, and nothing can be, in any high sense, good without being beautiful. The ascription of beauty, a reasoned, criticised, thought-out ascription of aesthetic quality, is the final form of our thought about nature, man, the world, the All"--Book. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)
|
|---|