Scientism is the view that all real knowledge is scientific knowledge – that there is no rational, objective form of inquiry that is not a branch of science. There is at least a whiff of scientism in the thinking of those who dismiss ethical objections to cloning or embryonic stem cell research as inherently "anti-science." There is considerably more than a whiff of it in the work of New Atheist writers like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who allege that because religion has no scientific foundation (or so they claim) it "therefore" has no rational foundation at all. It is evident even in secular conservative writers like John Derbyshire and Heather MacDonald, whose criticisms of their religious fellow right-wingers are only slightly less condescending than those of Dawkins and co. Indeed, the culture at large seems beholden to an inchoate scientism – "faith" is often pitted against "science" (even by those friendly to the former) as if "science" were synonymous with "reason."The second one is titled Recovering Sight after Scientism and it starts this way:
As I argued in part I, scientism – the view that all real knowledge is scientific knowledge – is either self-refuting or trivial. Moreover, consistently pursued, it leads to the "eliminative materialist" position that the human mind itself is a fiction – that there are no such things as thinking, perceiving, willing, desiring, and so forth. This position is not only incoherent, but undermines the very possibility of science itself – the very thing scientism claims to champion.If you care about understanding reality and reasoning correctly, you ought to read them.
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1 comments:
Ed Feser is outstanding. I highly recommend all his books.
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