In the Beginning: The Science and Philosophy of Origin Events
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2020
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Abstract
“In the Beginning” is a manuscript that focuses on how philosophy (as well as the humanities and arts in general) and an expanded conception of reason can help inform scientific work that is being done in physics, biology, and chemistry—especially as those disciplines ask origin questions concerning the birth of the cosmos and the initial rise of life on Earth. When prebiotic chemistry goes searching for the very first living thing, the first living individual “subject” to arise on our planet, it does so with typically unacknowledged conceptions of individuality, subjectivity, and personhood that are tied to European modernity and Liberal political theory. When we unpack and question those assumptions, we discover that there are far-reaching implications for how we then ask the questions that drive the science as it searches for the first individual form of life. Similarly, when cosmologists investigate the origin of the universe, they run directly into the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” This is the traditional territory of philosophy and theology; and as a result, physicists often get caught in the double-bind of both inadvertently adopting the underlying historical, philosophical, and theological assumptions built in to that question, as well as overreacting against the perceived influence of those supposed “nonscientific” disciplines. However, when we put philosophy and cosmology in constructive dialogue, we discover, for example, that it is possible to see the ways in which teleological thinking can be constructive for the science and a careful philosophical analysis of what is meant by “nothing”—as well as what it means to imagine a natural law at work before there is even a universe—can point to new ways of investigating the question from the vantage point of thermodynamics. Ultimately, this project attempts to make it clear how Continental philosophy, especially, but the arts and humanities in general, are truly essential for the work of physics, biology, and chemistry as they look into these origin questions, not only in terms of pointing to the conceptual assumptions that routinely sneak into theoretical and experimental work, and not only in terms of suggesting correctives to those assumptions when they prove limiting and even misguided, but also in terms of pointing to the values that are necessarily embedded in science, the conceptions of the human person at work, the need for widening the notions of truth and objectivity employed by these sciences, and the senses in which asking “why” is just as important as asking “how” as we expand what it means to engage in such forms of rational inquiry.
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Filosofía de la ciencia, física y fenomenología, Artes y Humanidades