Stop Calculating: It Is About Time to Start Thinking!

EasyChair Preprint 13935

Abstract

The paper is a partly provocative essay edited as a humanitarian study in philosophy of science and social philosophy, reflecting on the practical, “anti-metaphysical” turn taken place since the 20th century and continuing until now. The article advocates that it is about time it to be overcome because it is the main obstacle for the further development of exact and natural sciences including mathematics therefore restoring the unity of philosophy and sciences in the dawn of modern science when the great scientists were philosophers as a necessary condition for their revolutionary achievements, and the physicists were simultaneously mathematicians not less than philosophers and even theologians as Descartes, Newton, Leibnitz were just as their predecessors, Copernicus or Galileo Galilei. The revolution in science accomplished by them needed philosophy since any scientific revolution, then necessarily growing into social, needs philosophy; and if ones wish to prevent social revolutions originating from fundamental scientific discoveries, in turn relying on the close link of sciences and philosophy, they are to cut the link at issue, and just that happened in the 20th centuries therefore implicitly heralding a “brave new world” of eternal normal science without revolutions whether scientific or social. Fukuyama’s “end of history” requires an “end of scientific history” as it is an obligatory premise, and separating sciences from philosophy is sufficient for that, though proclaimed quite otherwise: as overcoming metaphysics preventing sciences and substituting them by quasi-sciences. Particularly, that “anti-metaphysical turn” has established for science to obey society absolutely and thoroughly, obviously a condition contradicting the scientific and social revolutions in Modernity featured by the domination of science over society by the mediation of philosophy able to translate all epochal scientific discoveries as social corollaries.

Keyphrases: Heidegger, Wittgenstein, anti-metaphysical turn in philosophy, demarcation of science to metaphysics, modernity versus postmodernity, normal science versus scientific revolutions reasonability versus sociability, science versus society, thinking versus calculation

@booklet{EasyChair:13935,
  author    = {Vasil Penchev},
  title     = {Stop Calculating: It Is About Time to Start Thinking!},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 13935},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2024}}