Sunday, February 11, 2024

Natural Philosophy

Whatever of the cosmos really exists outside of my mind, it would by necessity be part of reality, and thus every idea about the universe is true or false, and in turn everything about nature--which material environments and bodies exist, their physical composition, their relationship to immaterial things like reason [1] and the uncaused cause [2], and the way that different material bodies interact with each other--is entirely philosophical.  Whether the sun is composed largely of hydrogen atoms is a matter of metaphysics, albeit a lower kind than the existence or nature of logic, consciousness, and morality.  Other scientific issues like whether or why lightning tends to strike higher points of contact, massages relax the myofascial tissue encompassing muscles, or bones survive natural fires intact are likewise connected with what the physical world is and is not like.

One could go on and on with examples from everyday life or from the reports of others: soap killing or dislodging bacteria, the power of electric fish to stun other organisms, the buoyancy of many woods, and so on are all a matter of truth or falsity (though just seeing something does not in any way require that it is really there or as it appears, so much testimony from the senses is utterly unprovable).  As far as epistemology goes, lock someone in a room or allow them to wander about the landscape without the aid of technology, and they, as long as they have functioning senses, can still perceive basic physical objects and natural correlations, such as how if they manually release a dish or a stick, it will fall to the ground if no support is placed under it.  They will not have access to any sensory hint of microscopic bacteria or of atomic structure, but they will still have some direct capacity for scientific observation and experimentation.  Still, they could realize logical truths about science either way and would have a limited ability to conduct observation.  All of this is philosophical.


The pre-Socratics, philosophers of ancient Greece like Pythagoras, Zeno, Thales, and Democritus, are reputed to have often focused on what was called natural philosophy, or metaphysical ideologies or epistemological inquiries about the nature of the physical world on the level of, say, causality or composition.  Thales, for instance, is said to have believed water to be the most fundamental or vital physical substance to the substance of nature.  Democritus proposed that atoms, what he thought of as indivisible, miniscule units of matter, are at the core of matter and that they exist in a void of matter, or empty space.  Natural philosophy is a subset of scientific matters and science-adjacent worldviews, but it is still philosophy because it would still have to do with ideas about reality, which are by logical necessity either true or false like any individual religious, moral, or other concept.

It is just nowhere near as abstract and foundational as logical necessities like axioms themselves--or verifiable, since scientific laws are not inherently necessary truths like logical facts and are perceived from a purely subjective standpoint we cannot escape (though we can know the objective logical possibilities and what does follow from certain scientific ideas thanks to reason).  Now, science is neither the foundation of truth (metaphysically) or the revealer of it (epistemologically), for that could only be reason, and because logical axioms and other necessary truths are true in themselves without depending on anything else, it could never have been otherwise.  The erroneous ideology holding that science has this place of reason is a self-contradictory one called scientism, since all truths must be consistent with reason to be true, and reason is distinct from scientific laws and the scientific method.  It could also only be true that science is a subcategory of philosophy rather than separate from it, for this notion is itself a philosophy, and a logically false one at that.

Furthermore, everything related to science is at absolute best secondary or even more removed than this from the core of reality (logic, the uncaused cause, etc.) and even uncertain things that would, if true, be of higher significance than mere matter, such as the obligations of morality.  Whether or not the expansion of the universe exceeds the speed of light is nothing compared to whether any activity at all is objectively good or evil; whether or not the strong force is what holds subatomic particles together in the nucleus of each atom is nothing compared to the inherent truth of logic, such as with how everything either does or does not necessitate something else: logic being false would mean it follows that everything in particular that would have been true because of logic is false, which itself requires that reason be metaphysically true in order to be correct.

Science, despite being less important than such issues by far, is of course philosophy because all things are philosophical: they are true or false and verifiable or unverifiable.  It is regardless one of the lowest categories of philosophy, having to do with mere perceptions (unlike reason, which is both intrinsically true and absolutely certain), practicality, happenstance natural objects and laws that could have differed, and/or subjective interest and curiosity.  Natural philosophy has captivated many moderners without them even realizing it is philosophical in the sense that a true rationalist would recognize.  For all of its pragmatic triumphs, science--the perceives (and seemingly real) patterns and behaviors of the natural world as well as the epistemological scientific method--is but one manifestation of something greater and deeper than itself.



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