Hi Steve, not sure about the Plato / appearances bit, but from "I
suspect that he thinks that ..." onwards I totally agree.
Ian
Sent from my iPhone
On 15 Sep 2010, at 19:51, Steven Peterson <peterson.st...@gmail.com>
wrote:
Hi John, Horse, Marsha,
I hesitate to conclude that Hawking is a moron since there is so much
evidence to the contrary.
What I hope he means by "philosophy is dead" is that philosophy as
Plato's project of getting beyond appearances to get us in touch with
reality as it really is has run its course and outlived its
usefulness. If so, I think Pirsig and any pragmatist would agree. On
the other hand, what I suspect he does mean is that science has proven
itself to be the one true way of getting us in touch with reality as
it really is. I suspect that he thinks scientific descriptions have
some privileged status over other sorts of descriptions. The sentence
"water is composed of one part oxygen to two parts hydrogen" is
thought to get us closer to the essence of what water really is than
the sentences "water is healthy" or "water is wet" or "water is life."
Someone who spends all his time thinking about theoretical physics may
start to think that a grand unifying theory in physics will be a
theory of everything. The fact that everything perhaps _can_ be given
a physical description will never mean that everything only ever
_should_ be thought of in physical terms.
Best,
Steve
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