Topics Philosophers

Question I'm particularly concerned with this question and response: http://www.askphilosophers.org/question/4636 I'm not necessarily interested in the theological ramifications, but in terms of Richard Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene and Lawrence Krauss's cosmology in The Universe from Nothing, it feels like these are very real issues that have not been addressed by philosophers. Is there serious philosophy that has kept up to date on science? Or are these thinkers simply interested in claiming that Lawrence Krauss' "nothing" is different than the philosophical conception of nothing? Are there philosophers at all that deal with science post-Newton?

Accepted:
July 12, 2012

Comments

Speaking for my own response

Speaking for my own response to Question 4636: I offered two quotations of Krauss from his online interview with Sam Harris (in which Harris gave Krauss ample space to clarify his positions) in order to show how advanced training in science doesn't guarantee even minimal competence in philosophy.

All three clauses in the first quotation are stunningly false: First, modern science hasn't "changed completely our conception of the very words 'something' and 'nothing'"; arguably, science couldn't completely change our conception of those ordinary-language words. Krauss seems to think that science has somehow made the word 'something' synonymous with 'something material' and 'nothing' synonymous with 'nothing material', but if that were so then those two-word phrases would be pleonastic (i.e., redundant), which clearly they're not. The set {2} contains nothing material, but it contains something; it's not the empty set. Second, the statement "Empirical discoveries continue to tell us that the Universe is the way it is, whether we like it or not" is so silly, so confused, that it would take me too long to spell out its defects. Third, "'something' and 'nothing' are physical concepts and therefore are properly the domain of science, not theology or philosophy" repeats Krauss's first error.

The second quotation is no better: "our universe arising from precisely nothing, embedded in a perhaps infinite space, or infinite collection of spaces, or spaces-to-be." Here again, Krauss uses 'nothing' idiosyncratically to mean 'nothing material'. Various critics have faulted him for a bait-and-switch in which he promises to explain how something arose from nothing but delivers, at most, a theory of how something material arose from something nonmaterial. It's not the difference between a "philosophical conception" of nothing (there isn't one) and some other conception of it; it's the difference between using the word 'nothing' in the standard, ordinary way and using it in an idiosyncratic, Pickwickian way.

I doubt that philosophers would bother to point out Krauss's obvious blunders if it weren't for the fact that Krauss is highly visible and (was for a time anyway) eager to tell folks that science has made philosophy obsolete.