The caricature doesn't really fit Leibnitz either (nor, for that matter, does it really fit with science generally, where in there is no such thing as simply taking in empirical evidence and spitting out conclusions). What would that even mean? You look at the world without taking what you're seeing in any particular given way and without any framework for sorting out what's relivant and what isn't. and then you just conclude things? What would such an enterprise even look like? Would it start without even an implicit ontology?

Last edited by iwpoe (7/04/2015 4:24 am)

iwpoe wrote:

To give a fair reading of the basic idea of empericism here: ontology just is the structure of reality and that structure is at least partly given in experience. So I think Arch-empiricists like Husserl and his early followers were right to say if we want to actually pay attention to reality we can’t get away from a certain ontology including universals, material A priori truths et cetera.

No, I understand that aspect of phenomenology, but this is  patently not what the wikisters mean by "applying empirical evidence", since *that* kind of empiricism would be compatible with a certain construal of their rendering of scholasticism provided that by "first principles or prior definitions" you mean just those essences universals mathematicals & etc one gets through experience. No schoolman thought he was taking simply *made up* "principals" or "definitions" of things in his reasoning. What they're dumbly trying to say is that Leibnitz thought that from your armchair you could know everything you need to know about the myriad of things in the world while a proper philosophy would simply set all the things of the world you wanted to know about out in-front of your armchair and, by seeing them, you would simply know everything you need to know (i.e. that there is a seeing which is in no respect a thinking by way of which we good moderns settle problems of thought). Sometimes people say stupid things like 'if you just *looked* at living things* you would understand that Darwin was correct." There is a sense in which that's correct, but it's not simple in the way they suggest.

Last edited by iwpoe (7/04/2015 1:26 pm)

iwpoe wrote:

iwpoe wrote:

To give a fair reading of the basic idea of empericism here: ontology just is the structure of reality and that structure is at least partly given in experience. So I think Arch-empiricists like Husserl and his early followers were right to say if we want to actually pay attention to reality we can’t get away from a certain ontology including universals, material A priori truths et cetera.

No, I understand that aspect of phenomenology, but this is  patently not what the wikisters mean by "applying empirical evidence", since *that* kind of empiricism would be compatible with a certain construal of their rendering of scholasticism provided that by "first principles or prior definitions" you mean just those essences universals mathematicals & etc one gets through experience. No schoolman thought he was taking simply *made up* "principals" or "definitions" of things in his reasoning. What they're dumbly trying to say is that Leibnitz thought that from your armchair you could know everything you need to know about the myriad of things in the world while a proper philosophy would simply set all the things of the world you wanted to know about out in-front of your armchair and, by seeing them, you would simply know everything you need to know (i.e. that there is a seeing which is in no respect a thinking by way of which we good moderns settle problems of thought). Sometimes people say stupid things like 'if you just *looked* at living things* you would understand that Darwin was correct." There is a sense in which that's correct, but it's not simple in the way they suggest.

I agree (but how many of these individuals have actually read, much less understood, Husserl, just about any prominent Schoolman or Leibniz himself for that matter?). I was more attacking the straw-man dichotomy between 'Rationalism' and 'Empiricism'. The 'Empiricism' they reference is pretty much synonymous with Positivism and doesn’t fit with any historical ‘Classical’ Empiricist even Hume himself.

EDIT: Put it another way, we should do everything we can to prevent the wiki-troll and his species getting away with these stock linguistic caricatures of 'Rationalism' and 'Empiricism'. If they are allowed to go on deforming language as they do proper debate becomes more difficult. For instances terms like 'scientific sceptic' are strictly synonymous with 'square-circle' and should be treated as such.
 

Last edited by DanielCC (7/04/2015 3:07 pm)

Heh, thanks to John West for providing a working link. My own URL was converted automatically and I didn't check it after I posted (although I seem to recall that it worked in the preview).

EDIT: And I see why it's not working: the automatic link conversion included the period at the end.

Last edited by Scott (7/04/2015 3:40 pm)

John West wrote:

Oh, I see. The period got included in the link. I wish I had noticed that.

I wish I had noticed it. Something to watch out for in the future, anyway.