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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Edward O. Wilson

Following science as a layperson

13 Sunday Dec 2009

Posted by Amod Lele in Certainty and Doubt, Epistemology, Faith, German Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Humility, Natural Science, Philosophy of Science, Politics, Social Science, South Asia

≈ 6 Comments

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Aristotle, Edward O. Wilson, Friedrich Schelling, G.W.F. Hegel, George Monbiot, John Doris, Ken Wilber, natural environment, Randall Collins, René Descartes, Stephen Jay Gould

Perhaps the trickiest thing about trying to be a philosopher today is the explosion of information in natural science: we are in the era of “rapid-discovery science,” as Randall Collins calls it in The Sociology of Philosophies. Aristotle could write not merely a Metaphysics but a Physics, and his wide range of general knowledge was enough to make him one of the experts on the subject. Even as recently as the 19th century, Schelling and Hegel could have a decent shot at writing “philosophies of nature,” in which they tried to think philosophically through the whole scope of the way the natural world works. But today, not even a professor of natural science can know all the science that’s out there, even in relatively general terms. To some extent, we need to rely on the authority of experts we trust to know their fields well – what Indian philosophers called the śabdapramāṇa, the source of knowledge beyond inference and personal experience. And even if we somehow could know all the science for a moment, we’d lose it almost instantly as the science changes. Continue reading →

E.O. Wilson and the limits of empiricism

29 Sunday Nov 2009

Posted by Amod Lele in Christianity, Epistemology, Foundations of Ethics, Free Will, German Tradition, Philosophy of Science

≈ 14 Comments

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David Hume, Edward O. Wilson, Immanuel Kant

Browsing in the library I recently stumbled across Edward O. Wilson‘s ambitious book Consilience, in which the famous biologist tries to propose a unified account of knowledge – one in which the natural sciences take a supreme role. I have a certain sympathy with Wilson’s project – his attempt to unite the different realms of human knowing is not so different from my own long-term goal of constructing a philosophy that draws from many (and preferably all) traditions of inquiry. It’s unfortunate, then, that Wilson’s attempt falls flat in a wide variety of ways – but they can, at least, be highly instructive ways. They do very well, especially, at illustrating the limits of an empiricist account of knowledge. Continue reading →

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