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–including the BIBLIOGRAPHY–of THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE FUTURE HERE.
This forty-second installment contains section 4.0.
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
1.7 Sensible Science 1: Natural Science Without Natural Mechanism
1.8 Sensible Science 2: Natural Science Without Materialism/Physicalism
1.9 Sensible Science 3: Natural Science Without Scientism
1.10 Frankenscience, the Future of Humanity, and the Future of Science
2.1 Wrestling with Modernity: 1900-1940
2.1.1 Six Sociocultural or Sociopolitical Developments
2.1.2 Two Philosophical Developments: Classical Analytic Philosophy and First Wave Organicism
2.1.3 Architectural and Artistic Trends
2.2 The Historical Black Hole, The Mechanistic Mindset, and The Mechanistic Worldview: 1940-1980
2.2 The Emergence of Post-Classical Analytic Philosophy
2.2.3 The Two Images Problem and its Consequences
2.2.4 Modernism and Countercurrents in the Arts and Design
2.3.1 The Rise of Po-Mo Philosophy
2.3.2 Po-Mo Architecture: Unconstrained Hybridity
2.3.3 Other Apocalyptic Developments: Crises in Physics and Big Science, and The One-Two Punch
2.4 From The Mechanistic Worldview to Neo-Organicism
2.4.0 Against The Mechanistic Worldview
2.4.1 Seven Arguments Against The Mechanistic Worldview
2.4.1.1 Logical and Mathematical Arguments
2.4.1.2 Physical and Metaphysical Arguments
2.4.1.3 Mentalistic and Agential Arguments
2.4.2 Beyond The Mechanistic Worldview: The Neo-Organicist Worldview
2.4.2.1 The Neo-Organist Thesis 1: Solving The Mind-Body Problem
2.4.2.2 Dynamic Systems Theory and The Dynamic World Picture
2.4.2.3 The Neo-Organicist Thesis 2: Solving The Free Will Problem
2.4.2.4 Dynamic Emergence, Life, Consciousness, and Free Agency
2.4.2.5 How The Mechanical Comes To Be From The Organic
3.1 A Dual-Content Nonideal Cognitive Semantics for Thought-Shapers
3.2 The Cognitive Dynamics of Thought-Shapers
3.3 Constrictive Thought-Shapers vs. Generative Thought-Shapers
3.5 Thought-Shapers, Mechanism, and Neo-Organicism
3.6 Adverse Cognitive Effects of Mechanical, Constrictive Thought-Shapers
3.7 How Can We Acknowledge Organic Systems and Organic, Generative Thought-Shapers?
3.8 We Must Cultivate Our Global Garden
Chapter 4. How To Complete Physics
4.0 Introduction
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
4.0 Introduction
In the 1990s and again in the 2010s, Steven Weinberg, Stephen Hawking, and other leading physicists asserted that late 20th and early 21st century philosophy is “dead” (Weinberg, 1994: ch. VII; Hawking and Mlodinow, 2010: p. 5). And it’s certainly true that recent and contemporary mainstream professional academic philosophy, which is dominated by post-classical (i.e., since 1950) Analytic philosophy, is largely and pervasively (i) irrelevant to the larger sociocultural and sociopolitical world, (ii) ideologically enslaved to the military-industrial-university-digital complex, and hyper-Scholastic, and therefore (iii) capable of at most “playpen” creativity and scholarship, and bereft of any truly original, life-changing, world-shaping ideas (Hanna, 2021a: chs. XVII-XVIII). But by an ironic twist, this is principally because science itself killed post-classical Analytic philosophy in a substantive philosophical sense, by fatally chaining it to scientism (Haack, 2017; Hanna, 2021a: ch XVII).
Let’s assume that post-classical Analytic philosophy is indeed dead in a substantive philosophical sense, even if not in a social-institutional sense—indeed, in that sense, post-classical Analytic philosophy remains dominant and ideologically hegemonic in contemporary professional academic philosophy—and that science killed it. Nevertheless, as Carlo Rovelli has correctly pointed out, “physics needs philosophy [and] philosophy needs physics” (Rovelli, 2018). Rovelli’s insight, which is of-a-piece with Whitehead’s similar first-wave organicist insight a century ago, philosophically outruns Weinberg’s and Hawking’s blithe and uncritical neo-Vienna-Circle-style scientism by a country mile. Correspondingly, I’ll argue in this chapter that contemporary physics, according to the Standard Models of cosmology and particle physics, is itself inherently incomplete and needs to be completed by a robust new wave organicist, aka neo-organicist metaphysics of free agency in particular and a neo-organicist worldview more generally, together with The Theory of Thought-Shapers, aka TTS, and creative piety. And if that’s the case, then not only are Weinberg and Hawking scandalously wrong that philosophy is dead, but also it’s profoundly true that without neo-organicism, TTS, and creative piety, then contemporary physics is dead in the substantive philosophical sense. Moreover, if I’m right that contemporary physics as epitomized by the Standard Models is inherently incomplete, and also that without neo-organicism, TTS, and creative piety to complete it, contemporary physics is not only in crisis but doomed to reductive nihilism and its complicity-&-collaboration with The Four Horsemen of The New Apocalypse, then the circle of mutual needs between and among the several formal and natural sciences, the humanties, the fine and applied arts, the social sciences, religious experience and spirituality, and philosophy, runs essentially and infinitely deeper, more holistically, and more widely than Rovelli’s simple “physics <–NEEDS–> philosophy” dyad. In short, the correct dyad is
Humankind <–NEEDS–> The Uniscience.
Against Professional Philosophy is a sub-project of the online mega-project Philosophy Without Borders, which is home-based on Patreon here.
Please consider becoming a patron!
