Philosophy Isn’t What It Used To Be

The meme here is funny, but, news flash: Very few Americans could even tell you who Heiddeger was; let alone what he meant. I had to add his name to my dictionary just now.

Having said that, this gives me an opportunity to make a point: in large measure, Western philosophy has largely been supplanted by Western science.

Like the other existentialists, Heidegger attempted to define the human condition.  His main ideas were that “Being-in-the-world” for the human animal is defined by “Dasein” (being there) and Sorge (care).

But what weight do these ideas carry, 90 years later?  Well, start with this:  Now, if you want to understand human consciousness, you don’t ask a philosopher; you ask a neurologist.

Similarly, until fairly recently, if you wanted to understand the basic building blocks of the universe, you asked a metaphysician.  But is it true that “To be is to be a substance,” as Aristotle told us?  Does the universe consist of “monads,” per Leibniz?  Are there “bare particulars,” each with “attributes,” as Whitehead suggested?  Is the world just the mind of God, like Spinoza wrote (right before he got excommunicated for making the claim)?

Now, we’ve realized that there all just ideas and that no one is really any better than any other one, because we don’t have “epistemic access” to the answers.  Even worse for philosophy, today, if we actually are hunting for answers as to what the universe is made of, we don’t ask philosophers; we ask particle physicists.

We may not get definitive answers, but we won’t get just another unprovable idea from some guy at a university.