The Survival of Metaphysics
The approach of modern science, like the approach of Aristotelianism, is apparently not universally accepted by all people who accept the concept of nature as a reality which we can pursue with reason.
Bacon and other opponents of Metaphysics claim that all attempts to go beyond nature are bound to fall into the same errors, but Metaphysicians themselves see differences between different approaches.
Immanuel Kant for example, expressed the need for a Metaphysics in quite similar terms to Aristotle.
...though we cannot know these objects as things in themselves, we must yet be in a position at least to think them as things in themselves; otherwise we should be landed in the absurd conclusion that there can be appearance without anything that appears.
— Critique of Pure Reason pp. Bxxvi-xxvii
As in Aristotelianism then, Kantianism claims that the human mind must itself have characteristics which are beyond nature, metaphysical, in some way. Specifically Kant argued that the human mind comes ready-made with a priori programming, so to speak, which allows it to make sense of nature.
Read more about this topic: Nature (philosophy)
Famous quotes containing the words survival and/or metaphysics:
“We hold on to hopes for next year every year in western Dakota: hoping that droughts will end; hoping that our crops won’t be hailed out in the few rainstorms that come; hoping that it won’t be too windy on the day we harvest, blowing away five bushels an acre; hoping ... that if we get a fair crop, we’ll be able to get a fair price for it. Sometimes survival is the only blessing that the terrifying angel of the Plains bestows.”
—Kathleen Norris (b. 1947)
“The form of act or thought mattered nothing. The hymns of David, the plays of Shakespeare, the metaphysics of Descartes, the crimes of Borgia, the virtues of Antonine, the atheism of yesterday and the materialism of to-day, were all emanation of divine thought, doing their appointed work. It was the duty of the church to deal with them all, not as though they existed through a power hostile to the deity, but as instruments of the deity to work out his unrevealed ends.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)