Magni Formica Laboris

Putnam's slogan: "Scientific realism is the only philosophy of science that does not make the success of science a miracle." (xxii) "What should be noted is that agnostic empiricism comes in two varieties: naive and sophisticated. The naive variety stresses that the only rational option is suspension of judgment as to the truth of theoretical assertions. The sophisticated variety, associated with van Fraassen's approach, is that being agnostic is no less rational than being scientific realist." (Psillos xxi)

A quote from Nordmann's Cambridge introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus : 1) "The theory and practice of the Tractatus distinguishes not just three, but four uses of language, including the one in which it is written ... While Wittgenstein scholars have learned to accept that some sentences might be senseless but not nonsensical (ie. logical propositions), most will not find intelligible the inverse claim that other expressions are literally nonsensical and yet make sense, for example, in that they help us 'see the world right' (TLP 6.54)." (Nordman 9) and from Megill's Prophets of Extremity : 1) "...the loss of the transcendent dimension, prompted by the notion of Kritik as a pervasive power, leads to modern man's homelessness in the world. This is the crisis. It is the loss of authoritative standards of the good, the true, and the beautiful to which reason has access, coupled with loss of the Word of God in the Bible." (Megil xiii) 2) ...

From Ladyman: 1) Science is the only intellectually respectable form of inquiry. 2) All truths are either: (a) analytic, a priori and necessary (tautological) or (b) synthetic, a posteriori and contingent.* 3) So far as knowledge goes, it is either purely formal and analytic, such as math and logic, or it is a kind of empirical science.* 4) The purpose of philosophy is to explicate the structure or logic of science. Philosophy is really the epistemology of science and analyzing concepts.** 5) Logic is to be used to express precisely the relationships between concepts. 6) The verifiability criterion of meaning : a statement is literally meaningful if and only if it is either analytic or empirically verifiable. 7) The Verification Principle : the meaning of a non-tautological statement is its method of verification; that is, the way in which it can be shown to be true by experience. * - Godel's Incompleteness Proof seems to undo these two tenets, or at least to obfuscate t...

Excerpt about this scientific outlook in Ladyman , James, Understanding Philosophy of Science , Routledge 2002. "The constructive empiricism of van Fraassen has provoked renewed debate about scientific realism. Van Fraassen is happy to accept the semantic and metaphysical components of scientific realism...but he denies the epistemic component. He thinks that scientific theories about unobservables should be taken literally, and are true or false in the correspondence sense, depending on whether the entities they describe are part of the mind-independent world. However, he argues that acceptance of the best theories in modern science does not require belief in the entities postulated by them, and that the nature and success of modern science relative to its aims can be understood without invoking the existence of such entities. "Van Fraassen defines scientific realism as follows: 'Science aims to give us, in its theories, a literally true story of what the world ...

"One must be daring and approach the truth: for even if we may not grasp it completely, yet we will get closer to it than we are now" - Galen [In light of this it appears that the prototype modern scientist enjoys tenets of Epicurean, Utilitarian, Thomist, reductive materialist, and Galenic thought. Contrast with what the modern scientist is not: Kantian, Platonic (most, at least), Aristotelian, Humean, ...]

from The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics, article by Michael J. White: "Another illustration of Stoic accommodation of ontological monism to more conventional ways of thinking and speaking about reality is found in one feature of the Stoic doctrine of cosmic cycles. For a monist such as Spinoza, the identity of god and nature is axiomatic. For orthodox Stoics, the doctrine of cosmic cycles allows them to 'qualify' this identity to a degree. During the phase of conflagration or ekpurosis within a cosmic cycle, god may be regarded as completely existing 'in himself', so to speak. As a passage from Origen, quoted previously, puts it, 'the god of the Stoics has the whole of substance ( ten holen ousian ) as its controlling principle, whenever there is the conflagration'...This 'god-phase' of the cosmic cycle imparts a quasi-transcendence to god and allows the Stoics more naturally to speak of a deity as the creator of the world order - as the ...

--various funnies brought to you by The Hellenistic Philosophers 21S Lucretius 4.622-32 "When the bodies of the diffusing flavour are smooth, they give pleasure by touching and stimulating all the moist and oozing regions in the tongue's vicinity. But by contrast, the more each of the bodies is furnished with roughness, they prick the sense and tear it in their encounter. Next comes pleasure from the flavour at the boundary of the palate. But when it has plunged right down through the throat, there is no pleasure while it is all spreading into the limbs. And it makes no difference at all what diet nourishes the body, provided that you can digest what you take and spread it out in the limbs and keep a moist tenor in the stomach" (p.118-119). 48E Plutarch, On common conceptions 1078B-D "If blending occurs in the way they [the Stoics] insist, the constituents must come to be in one another, and the same thing must both be enveloped by being in the other and by accomodat...