This book, THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE FUTURE: Uniscience and the Modern World, by Robert Hanna, presents and defends a critical philosophy of science and digital technology, and a new and prescient philosophy of nature and human thinking.
It is being made available here in serial format, but you can also download and read or share a .pdf of the complete text of THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE FUTURE HERE.
This eleventh installment contains section 1.6.
We know the truth not only through our reason but also through our heart. It is through the latter that we know first principles, and reason, which has nothing to do with it, tries in vain to refute them. (Pascal, 1995: #110, p. 28)
If there is any science humankind really needs, it is the one I teach, of how to occupy properly that place in [the world] that is assigned to humankind, and how to learn from it what one must be in order to be human. (Rem 20: 45)
Natural science will one day incorporate the science of humankind, just as the science of humankind will incorporate natural science; there will be a single science. (Marx, 1964: p. 70, translation modified slightly)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
A NOTE ON REFERENCES TO KANT’S WORKS
0. Introduction: Science, The Four Horsemen of The New Apocalypse, and The Uniscience
0.0 How Uncritical and Unreformed Science Is Literally Killing The Modern World
0.2 The Uniscience and Pascal’s Dictum
Chapter 1. Natural Piety: A Kantian Critique of Science
1.0 Kantian Heavy-Duty Enlightenment and The Uniscience
1.1 Kant’s Neo-Aristotelian Natural Power Grid
1.2 Kant, Natural Piety, and The Limits of Science
1.3 From Kant’s Anti-Mechanism to Kantian Anti-Mechanism
1.4 In Defense of Natural Piety
1.5 Scientific Pietism and Scientific Naturalism
1.6 How to Ground Natural Science on Sensibility
Chapter 2. This is the Way the World Ends: A Philosophy of Civilization Since 1900, The Rise of Mechanism, and The Emergence of Neo-Organicism
Chapter 3. Thought-Shapers
Chapter 4. How To Complete Physics
Chapter 5. Digital Technology Only Within The Limits of Human Dignity
00. Conclusion: The Point Is To Shape The World
APPENDICES
Appendix 1. A Neo-Organicist Turn in Formal Science: The Case of Mathematical Logic
Appendix 2. A Neo-Organicist Note on The Löwenheim-Skolem Theorem and “Skolem’s Paradox”
Appendix 3. A Neo-Organicist Approach to The Nature of Motion
Appendix 4. Sensible Set Theory
Appendix 5. Neo-Organicism and The Rubber Sheet Cosmos
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1.6 How to Ground Natural Science on Sensibility
The thesis of Strong Kantian Non-Conceptualism says (i) that not all of the intentional or representational contents of our cognition are either necessarily or sufficiently determined by our conceptual capacities, housed in the faculty of understanding or Verstand, and (ii) that on the contrary, at least some of the intentional/representational contents of our cognition are both (iia) concept-autonomous = they are not necessarily determined by our conceptual capacities = their existence and specific character are determined by our non-conceptual capacities housed in sensibility without any concepts whatsover, for example, the cognitions of pre-linguistic human children and other non-rational human cognizers, and non-human animals, and also (iib) concept-independent = they not sufficiently determined by our conceptual capacities = their existence and specific character are necessarily underdetermined by any and all concepts—for example, our cognition of “incongruent counterparts” (DS 2: 378-383), and our cognition of the temporal ordering of the spontaneously-chosen, “entirely arbitrary” (ganz beliebig) subjective sequence of perceptions in inner sense (CPR A193-197/B238-243).
Indeed, as regards the point about the concept-independence of inner sense, in the Introduction to Metaphysical Foundations Kant explicitly denies that there could ever be a naturally mechanistic science of psychology (MFNS 4:471), because orderings in inner sense cannot be arithmetized, which is to say that they cannot be reduced to primitive recursive functions like addition, subtraction, and so-on—that is, they cannot be denumerably quantified or counted. If orderings in inner sense cannot be arithmetized, then they cannot be fully or objectively conceptualized either, since as the Axioms of Intuition and Anticipations of Perception show, arithmetization in terms of either extensive quantity or intensive quantity, namely, in terms of natural or rational numbers, is a necessary condition of the application of objective science to nature (CPR A162-176/B202-218).
Now, Strong Kantian Non-Conceptualism closely corresponds to the thesis of transcendental idealism for sensibility (Hanna, 2016b):
necessarily, the manifestly real world that we veridically cognize in an essentially non-conceptual way through sensory intuition or Anschauung, structurally conforms to the specific formal character of our faculty of sensibility.
More precisely, then, the thesis of transcendental idealism for sensibility says that the veridically apparent, manifestly real world fundamentally conforms to the essentially non-conceptual a priori forms of human sensibility, our representations of space and time. Kant worked out explicit proofs for transcendental idealism for sensibility in the Inaugural Dissertation (ID 2: 385-419) and again in the Transcendental Aesthetic in the first Critique. The simplest version of the proof, provided in the Transcendental Aesthetic, goes like this:
1. Space and time are either (1.i) things in themselves, (1.ii) properties of/relations between things in themselves, or (1.iii) transcendentally ideal.
2. If space and time were either things in themselves or properties of/relation between things in themselves, then a priori mathematical knowledge would be impossible.
3. But mathematical knowledge is actual, via our pure intuitions of space and time, and therefore really possible.
4. Therefore, space and time are transcendentally ideal. (CPR A 23/B37-38, A38-41/B55-58)
There is, of course, much more that can and should be said about this highly controversial argument. What is most crucial for my purposes here, however, is that this version of transcendental idealism relies only on essentially non-conceptual content and the nature of human sensibility, and neither relies on concepts and the nature of human understanding, nor does it entail that the authentically apparent or manifestly real world necessarily conforms to our concepts and the nature of human understanding.
Now what about natural science, and in particular, physics? It’s arguable that for Kant, given the nomological framework of Kant’s Neo-Aristotelian Natural Power Grid, natural science knows the manifestly real essences of veridical appearances, given in direct perception, via natural science’s synthetic a priori knowledge of the general and specific causal laws of nature, which in turn track strongly modal intrinsic spatiotemporal and dynamic structures of objects of actual or really possible human experience (see also Hanna, 2006a: part 1, and ch. 8). I’ll call this scientific manifest realism, or scientific empirical realism, as opposed to scientific noumenal realism—for example, scientific essentialism. It’s also arguable that Kant defends the primacy of practical reason over the theoretical reason, and in particular, defends categorical epistemology, that is, non-instrumentally normative and perfectionist epistemology (Hanna, 2006a: part 2, 2015: esp. chs. 3 and 6-8).[i] According to Kant’s categorical epistemology, as he spells it out in the Introduction to the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, authentic science, including both a priori knowledge of the truths of mathematics and a priori knowledge of the most general causal laws of nature, is synthetic a priori knowledge with objective certainty, grounded on rational insight or Einsicht, and all such knowledge is in turn a categorically normative achievement, and a “perfection” of our normally more or less imperfect cognitive activity, by means of the transcendental imagination. If Strong Kantian Non-Conceptualism, Kantian transcendental idealism for sensibility, Kant’s Neo-Aristotelian Natural Power Grid, Kantian scientific manifest realism, and Kantian categorical epistemology are all true, then natural science, and in particular physics, is cognitive-semantically, epistemically, and metaphysically grounded on sensibility in the Kantian sense.
NOTE
[i] Interestingly, and only 237 years after Kant originally presented categorical epistemology in the Critique of Pure Reason, some post-classical Analytic philosophers re-discovered it at the end of the second decade of the 21st century. See, e.g., (Littlejohn, 2018).
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