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Originally Posted by peter12
What does it mean to be natural? As moderns, we interpret natural man through the eyes of the liberal theorists, Hobbes, Descartes etc... We reduce ourselves to mean creatures who operate in a mechanical fashion almost entirely around the basis of avoiding pain and propagating our genes.
Who says this is correct? Science? When Dawkins wrote "The Selfish Gene" think about the theoretical and political assumptions he made as he interpreted the science.
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By natural I just mean that our brains are physical organs constructed by our genes and our environment, and that "we" arise from the processes in the brain.
That doesn't necessarily mean that that reduces us to mechanical creatures, it just means that there are natural reasons for what we as humans do and think. Understanding those reasons doesn't make those the thoughts and actions invalid.
Understanding why we have the mores we have and how they developed doesn't invalidate them, any more than understanding that a magic trick is really just a trick makes it less magical; I don't have to believe in magic to feel the effect of the trick.
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Originally Posted by peter12
Humanity is not subject to the natural sciences, but to the human sciences, ie. philosophy, a subject which as almost been entirely lost to us in this age post-Darwin, Freud, Weber etc...
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Unless you are suggesting some kind of mind/body dualism how can you say humanity is not subject to the natural sciences?
From Wikipedia: "
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, truth, beauty, law, justice, validity, mind, and language."
I think science can contribute to the philosophical discussion about any of those things.
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Originally Posted by peter12
I don't know where I am going without erupting into a full-scale post about philosophy and the background of the humanities endeavour, but suffice to say that there are more rich and complete views of humanity buried into our past.
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Studying humanity through science is not in itself a view of humanity; science doesn't make value judgments. Science is a process.
Science could tell us how altruism developed, and could tell us how the drive for infidelity developed, but doesn't make a statement about the value of each of those and if they should be sought after or avoided. Just like science can tell you how to build a bomb, but not if you should use it.
And philosophy does have a close relation to science in that it is reasoned and explicit (as opposed to mysticism or something).
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Originally Posted by peter12
Of course they can examined in a rational sense, just not in a laboratory.
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The world is a laboratory.
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Originally Posted by peter12
Aristotle said that man, by nature, is a political animal. The capacity to understand the world around us is aided by the capacity to understand ourselves. The ancients believed that all men were NOT capable of this understanding, us moderns believe differently. Unfortunately, the current reductionism of science is proving the ancients correct. The current interpretation of scientific data, unaided by philosophical understanding of humanity, is completely useless to the way in which we live our lives. Darwin, by himself, gives us no context to life beyond a vague and unconvincing natural history.
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You'll have to elaborate on how reductionism of science is proving that men were not capable of understanding themselves.
If people ignore philosophy in the pursuit of understanding that's hardly the fault of the scientific process. It's not a one or the other proposition.
To complain that Darwin gives "no context to life beyond a vague and unconvincing natural history" seems like a big straw man to me. Darwin never set out to nor claimed to have a complete view of humanity. He simply described the processes (descent with modification and natural selection) that leads to the diversity of life on our planet. By itself it's not a value judgment about any facet of humanity.
HOWEVER you can take Darwin and use his conclusions in philosophy. At one point people thought black people were not fully human; while Darwin removes those distinctions. In a philosophical discussion of ethics knowing that black and white people are the same might have some impact on the discussion no?
As an aside I'd like to know how Darwin is unconvincing about what he said.