> >John, I, 1, 3
> >Augustine
> >Aristotle
> >Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
> >Ockam (with Pier Damiani)
> >Aquinas and also Wyclif
> Why should we care *what* they thought about issues that
> can only be resolved by understanding the universe *based on the best and
> deepest available information and theory* (and even that probably falls
> well short of requirements)?
> Damien Broderick
Modern science is different. But when you deal with fundamental
questions the physical "reality" is "veiled", now and then [1, 2].
Sometimes philosophers (of science) make some big mistake.
In example ....
"Empedocles (and with him all others who used the same
forms of expression) was wrong in speaking of light as
`travelling' or being at a given moment between the earth
and its envelope [universe], its movement being unobservable to us;
that view is contrary both to the clear evidence of argument
and to the observed facts; if the distance traversed were
short, the movement might have been unobservable, but where
the distance is from extreme East to extreme West, the strain
upon our powers of belief is too great."
- Aristotle, "On the Soul", Book II, 418-b.
But sometimes they (philosophers and foretellers) are inspired.
In example ..... Leibniz was a convinced advocate of a Eurasian
policy and published a collection of documents on China ("Novissima
Sinica",1679). Father Joachim Bouvet, who had been in China,
wrote Leibniz [3, 4] a letter in which he described the "I Ching" and
sent him a reproduction of the system (in the Fu-hsi ordering).
Leibniz recognized in the enigmatic hexagrams representations of
the progression of natural numbers in binary digits: his binary digits.
To demonstrate this he wrote "Explication de l'Arithmétique Binaire" (1705).
The "I Ching" was important for its divinatory contents, but for Leibniz it
becomes further evidence in proving the universal value of his formal
calculus. He was also convinced that his calculus has a divine
foundation, as it reflects the dialectic between God (1) and
Nothingness (0) . In a letter to Father Bouvet he suggests that its
inventor was Hermes Trismegistus. As a matter of fact, Fu-hsi, the
legendary inventor of the hexagrams, like Hermes, was considered
the father of all inventions.
[1] Bernard d'Espagnat
http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9802046
"Quantum Theory: A Pointer To An Independent Reality"
While philosophy of science is the study of problems of knowledge concerning
science in general, there also exists - or should exist - a '' philosophy in science''
directed at finding out in what ways our actual scientific knowledge may validly
contribute to the basic philosophical quest. Contrary to philosophy of science,
which is a subject for philosophers, philosophy in science calls on the services
of physicists. When, in its spirit, quantum theory and Bell's theorem are used
as touchstones, the two main traditional philosophical approaches, realism and
idealism, are found wanting. A more suitable conception seems to be an
intermediate one, in which the mere postulated existence of a holistic and
hardly knowable Mind-Independent Reality is found to have an explaining power.
[2] Bernard d'Espagnat
"Veiled Reality - An Anslysis of Present-Day Quantum Mechanical
Concepts", Addison-Wesley, 1995, pages XX + 474
[3] Swiderski, Richard M. (1980). "Bouvet and Leibniz:
A scholarly correspondence." Eighteenth-Century Studies,
14, pp. 135-150.
[4] Umberto Eco, "Serendipities - Language and Lunacy", Phoenix
paperback, 1999, and 2000, pag. 92
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