507 lines
36 KiB
HTML
507 lines
36 KiB
HTML
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
|
||
<html>
|
||
<head>
|
||
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
|
||
<title>The evolution of ontological philosophy</title>
|
||
<meta name="generator" content="LibreOffice 4.2.8.2 (Linux)">
|
||
<meta name="author" content="Amr Gharbeia">
|
||
<meta name="created" content="20010831;23700000000000">
|
||
<meta name="changed" content="20150722;1728222503783">
|
||
<style type="text/css">
|
||
<!--
|
||
@page { margin-right: 1.2cm; margin-top: 1.2cm; margin-bottom: 1.25cm }
|
||
p { text-indent: 1.27cm; margin-bottom: 0.25cm; direction: ltr; color: #99ccff; line-height: 120%; text-align: left; widows: 2; orphans: 2 }
|
||
p.western { font-family: "Arial", sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; so-language: en-US }
|
||
p.cjk { font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt }
|
||
p.ctl { font-family: "Simplified Arabic"; font-size: 10pt; so-language: ar-EG }
|
||
-->
|
||
</style>
|
||
</head>
|
||
<body lang="en-GB" text="#99ccff" dir="ltr">
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><font color="#993366"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><b>T<img src="data:image/png;base64,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" name="TtsOtkCRS10_13" align="right" hspace="5" width="250" height="40" border="0">he
|
||
evolution of ontological philosophy.</b></font></font> There is,
|
||
however, an alternative. That is shown by the argument presented
|
||
here. Thus, instead of giving up philosophy and keeping epistemology
|
||
by doing naturalized epistemology, it is possible to give up
|
||
epistemology and keep philosophy by doing ontological philosophy.
|
||
That is, instead of abandoning philosophy, this alternative does
|
||
philosophy in a new way. And since it is both possible and
|
||
functional, the evolution of ontological philosophy is inevitable.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Philosophy
|
||
is a second level argument, that is, an attempt to explain the
|
||
validity of first level arguments, or rational culture, from the
|
||
foundation of a deeper cause of their validity. But there are
|
||
basically two ways of doing this. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">The reason
|
||
there are two ways of doing philosophy is that rational beings have
|
||
two different ways of understanding causes in the world: naturalistic
|
||
understanding and reflective understanding. Naturalistic
|
||
understanding enables them to explain what happens in nature by
|
||
efficient causes, and reflective understanding enables them to
|
||
explain how subjects behave by rational causes. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Epistemological
|
||
philosophy uses reflective understanding to introduce a theory about
|
||
the nature of reason by which they would explain the validity of
|
||
arguments of rational level culture. And ontological philosophy uses
|
||
naturalistic understanding to introduce a theory about the nature of
|
||
substance by which they would explain the validity of arguments of
|
||
rational level culture — first, the validity of the efficient-cause
|
||
explanations of natural science and, then, by way of its implications
|
||
about the inevitable course of evolution, the validity of the
|
||
rational-cause explanations of the science of subjects. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">One way of
|
||
putting the difference between then is to say that, whereas
|
||
epistemological philosophy argues for necessary truths from the
|
||
wholeness of reason, ontological philosophy argues for necessary
|
||
truths from the wholeness of the world. That is, epistemological
|
||
philosophy constructs an argument on a higher level of forensic
|
||
organization by offering an explanation of the nature of reason that
|
||
shows how all the kinds of first level arguments are valid. That is
|
||
to assume that reason has a wholeness that underwrites the validity
|
||
of all parts of rational level culture. But ontological philosophy
|
||
constructs such a higher level argument by first explaining how two
|
||
opposite kinds of basic substances make the world whole. Then, from
|
||
that foundation, it explains the nature of reason, and its nature and
|
||
place in the natural world explains the validity of all (valid) first
|
||
level arguments. But far from explaining the wholeness of reason,
|
||
ontological philosophy shows that reason, as it is understood by
|
||
reflective understanding, is not whole, because the arguments of
|
||
rational culture are divided by at least three basic dichotomies.
|
||
Thus, instead of trying to explain the wholeness of reason,
|
||
ontological philosophy <i>makes </i>reason whole.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Though
|
||
there is another way of doing philosophy, no one is doing it, to
|
||
judge from what is being published. One would expect naturalists to
|
||
be trying it out, at least. And if they did, it would be selected,
|
||
unless these is something seriously wrong with the foregoing, because
|
||
that would begin the career of ontological philosophy. That
|
||
ontological philosophy would be inevitable because it is both
|
||
functional and possible. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Ontological
|
||
philosophy is functional, because it would not only enable
|
||
naturalists to defend natural science against the skepticism of
|
||
analytic philosophy, but as we have seen, it would also do what
|
||
philosophy as aspired to do all along — to overcome the dichotomies
|
||
of rational culture and explain how all its (valid) first level
|
||
arguments are valid. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Moreover,
|
||
ontological philosophy is obviously possible, because, as can be seen
|
||
from this argument, it is actual. But that does not quite show that
|
||
it is possible in the relevant sense, because it does not explain how
|
||
it can be tried out as a random variation on the arguments that are
|
||
already evolving at the philosophical spiritual stage. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Unless
|
||
the defenders of natural science are so committed to naturalized
|
||
epistemology that they prefer abandoning philosophy to doing
|
||
philosophy in a new way, the reason that ontological philosophy has
|
||
not evolved must be that something is has been keeping it from being
|
||
tried out. Natural science has now evolved far enough with
|
||
mathematics as its tool and capitalism as its sponsor to overcome the
|
||
limitations encountered by the Pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient
|
||
Greece, but there are two causes that may be conspiring to keep it
|
||
from being taken seriously, one having to do with contemporary
|
||
naturalism, and the other having to do with contemporary natural
|
||
science. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">As
|
||
defenders of natural science, naturalists assume that whatever can be
|
||
known about the substances constituting the world must be discovered
|
||
using the empirical method of natural science. They are scientific
|
||
realists in the sense that they believe in the existence of the
|
||
entities (observable and unobservable) mentioned by natural science.
|
||
By the same token, however, they are skeptics about the existence of
|
||
anything whose existence does not have to be posited in order to
|
||
accept the conclusions of natural science as true. Thus, they let the
|
||
conclusions of science determine their ontology. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Parsimony
|
||
is a basic tenet of the empirical method of natural science. In
|
||
making inferences to the best efficient-cause explanations of the
|
||
natural world, science assumes that the best explanation is the
|
||
simplest and most complete, and thus, if two theories have the same
|
||
scope, it must prefer the one that that postulates the fewest and
|
||
simplest causes. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Contemporary
|
||
naturalists are skeptical to the point of being contemptuous of any
|
||
claims about the existence of something not recognized by natural
|
||
science. Natural scientists have long allied themselves with
|
||
empiricism, because empiricism seemed to be the vaccine that would
|
||
protect science from the embarrassingly implausible metaphysical
|
||
systems of traditional philosophy.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">That does
|
||
not mean that naturalists reject ontology. They recognize that it is
|
||
necessary to postulate substances as self-subsistent entities in
|
||
order to explain the natural world as something whose existence does
|
||
not depend on the individual rational subjects who know about it. But
|
||
as defenders of natural science, they believe that the only
|
||
substances they have to postulate are those that are entailed by the
|
||
truth of the theories of natural science. Naturalists believe,
|
||
therefore, that they are already doing everything that can be done
|
||
with ontology as a way of explaining the truth of scientific
|
||
theories. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Or to put
|
||
it negatively, naturalists do not believe that ontology can <i>explain
|
||
</i>the validity of the arguments of natural science, because
|
||
ontology depends on those very arguments for its beliefs about which
|
||
substances exist. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Natural
|
||
science is, however, overlooking one of the two, opposite substances
|
||
that constitute the world — or else it affirms the existence of a
|
||
kind of substance along with matter that makes ontology a problem,
|
||
rather than an explanation. It denies the existence of space as a
|
||
substance enduring through time, because that would mean that space
|
||
is absolute, and that is what contemporary physics rejected in
|
||
accepting the Einsteinian revolution. Instead, contemporary physics
|
||
affirms the existence of spacetime, if it affirms the existence of
|
||
any substances at all in addition to matter (that is, in addition to
|
||
particles and fields). Though Einstein admitted that his discovery of
|
||
his special theory of relativity was inspired by empiricism
|
||
(especially Mach), empiricist skepticism was not necessary for its
|
||
acceptance. Spatiomaterialism would be excluded anyway by the
|
||
empirical method of science, especially the form it takes in physics
|
||
because of the importance of mathematics, and there are two steps to
|
||
the banishment of substantival space from contemporary physics, one
|
||
having to do with Einstein’s special theory of relativity, and the
|
||
other having to do with his general theory of relativity. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">When
|
||
Einstein’s special theory of relativity was first accepted, there
|
||
were, as we have seen, two theories that could explain all the
|
||
phenomena covered by it: a theory of the kind proposed by Lorentz as
|
||
well as Einstein’s theory. But the empirical method of science is
|
||
to infer to the best efficient-cause explanation of what is
|
||
observable in nature, and in the case of physics, where mathematics
|
||
had long since become an indispensable tool, that meant making
|
||
quantitatively precise predictions of measurements. Thus, when
|
||
confronted with two highly mathematical theories covering the same
|
||
phenomena, physicists had to prefer the simpler theory, and that was
|
||
clearly Einstein’s theory. Einstein needed only two assumptions
|
||
about the empirical equivalence of all inertial frames in order to
|
||
derive mathematically descriptions of all the reluctant phenomena
|
||
(namely, the principle of relativity and the constant value of the
|
||
velocity of light in all inertial frames). </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Minkowski
|
||
recognized that all the measurements made by all inertial observers
|
||
could be explained by postulating spacetime, instead of space as a
|
||
substance enduing through time (that is, absolute space), and thus,
|
||
when Einstein used the notion of spacetime to explain the nature of
|
||
gravity, its status as a self-subsistent entity mentioned by the
|
||
basic laws of physics could hardly be denied. Spacetime had to be a
|
||
substance for its curvature to be the cause of gravitational
|
||
acceleration.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">This
|
||
seems to leave naturalists who would consider ontological
|
||
explanations of the world with a choice between a form of materialism
|
||
that reduces space to the spatial relations of bits of matter (or to
|
||
particles and fields, denying the vacuum like a contemporary plenum
|
||
theory), and a form of spacetime substantivalism (or
|
||
“spatiotemporalism,” as I called it in <font face="Arial, sans-serif">Spatiomaterialism</font>)
|
||
that reduces bits of matter to timelines in spacetime and implicitly
|
||
denies that there is any unique moment in their careers that is
|
||
present. In either case, ontology is not able to <i>explain </i>the
|
||
validity of the efficient-cause explanations of natural science. The
|
||
former, spatial relationism, affirms only the existence of what
|
||
natural science already mentions, and thus, as scientific realism
|
||
already postulates the substances needed to explain its theories. And
|
||
the ontological explanations built into science would cease to be
|
||
explanatory, if spatiotemporalism were taken seriously as the
|
||
ontology of physics, because it denies that any substance endures
|
||
through time. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Indeed, it
|
||
is hard to see how spacetime would be used as an ontological cause to
|
||
<i>explain </i>anything that exists in the natural world, since one
|
||
of the deepest puzzles confronting contemporary physics is
|
||
understanding how quantum mechanics, its theory of matter, is even
|
||
related to Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Current
|
||
attempts to find a single law of nature that would entail both
|
||
theories lead to the belief that there are eleven or more dimensions
|
||
to space! </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Naturalists
|
||
understandably make little use of spacetime in their attempts to
|
||
understand why the arguments of natural science are valid. And it is
|
||
easy for contemporary naturalists to settle for the believe in a
|
||
materialism that affirms nothing but particles and fields, because
|
||
the view that nature is constituted by a single kind of substance
|
||
goes back to the beginning of modern science, before Newton. It was
|
||
defended not only by Hobbes, the most famous materialist of the
|
||
modern era, but also by Cartesians, for they believed in “extension,”
|
||
or a plenum of substances whose only essential nature was geometrical
|
||
structure. Though mind-body dualism was an untenable ontology, the
|
||
belief that body itself consisted of two opposite kinds of substances
|
||
would make it even more inelegant. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">It
|
||
is, therefore, possible to explain why naturalists do not take
|
||
ontological philosophy seriously. Indeed, it is an inevitable result
|
||
of the empirical method used in physics and the deference that
|
||
philosophers of science pay to physicists. Though mathematics was an
|
||
offspring of epistemological philosophy (along with its main sponsor,
|
||
capitalism), the patent failure of traditional philosophy to provide
|
||
the deeper justification of natural science (and other arguments of
|
||
rational level culture) makes the decision of defenders of science to
|
||
abandon philosophy understandable. But in choosing to naturalize
|
||
epistemology, they are divorcing themselves from traditional
|
||
philosophy. And they getting a worse settlement than is possible,
|
||
because philosophy has a secret treasure stored in its early history,
|
||
before it started down the road of epistemology. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">The
|
||
Pre-Socratic philosophers had another idea about how to do
|
||
philosophy. They saw the possibility of an explanation of the
|
||
wholeness of the world, before philosophy came to be seen as seeking
|
||
just an explanation of the wholeness of reason. The Pre-Socratics saw
|
||
how the basic nature of what exists in the world, including its
|
||
categorical features, could be explained by identifying the basic
|
||
substances that constitute it. Not only did they discover the concept
|
||
of substance needed for ontology to be explanatory, but they
|
||
discovered the best ontological explanation of the natural world as
|
||
well. However, their ontological explanation of the world could not
|
||
be convincing, as we have seen, without an adequate theory of the
|
||
detailed nature of the “atoms” contained by the void, for that is
|
||
needed to trace the course of evolution, distinguish the various
|
||
levels of biological and neurological organization, and thereby
|
||
explain the nature of reason. When philosophers turned to
|
||
epistemology, the discoveries of pre-Socratic philosophy were
|
||
forgotten. Though the tool and sponsor needed to discover that
|
||
detailed explanation were provided by the easier road to philosophy
|
||
taken by epistemologists, the desperate flight from its failure now
|
||
threatens to deprive naturalists of what they need to defend natural
|
||
science. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">If,
|
||
however, the decision of naturalists to take their stand with natural
|
||
science and stop with scientific realism is caused by the factors
|
||
mentioned above, then it is possible for ontological philosophy based
|
||
on spatiomaterialism to be tried out at this point in the evolution
|
||
of philosophical culture by a random variation on existing arguments.
|
||
All that is needed is a rediscovery of pre-Socratic philosophy. That
|
||
would be to take the opposite course from naturalized epistemology.
|
||
Though it would abandon epistemology, it would be to do philosophy in
|
||
a new way. But that would give naturalists an ontology that would
|
||
explain the validity of the arguments of natural science in a way
|
||
that makes it possible not only to justify the empirical method of
|
||
science, but also to criticize it. That is, they would have reason to
|
||
doubt that it is sufficient to infer to the best efficient-cause
|
||
explanation of what is observed to happen in nature, for they would
|
||
see that it is possible to infer to the best ontological-cause
|
||
explanation of what exists in nature as well. This would lead them to
|
||
consider in a fresh way the possibility of spatiomaterialism, for it
|
||
is obviously the best ontological explanation of the categorical
|
||
features of the natural world, including the fact that material
|
||
objects have spatial relations, that they can change, and that they
|
||
can change only by motion, not to mention mathematics and the
|
||
principles of local motion and local action. And that could lead them
|
||
to acknowledge that spatiomaterialism can explain the truth of both
|
||
of Einstein’s theory.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Such
|
||
philosophers of science would then recognize that physicists made a
|
||
mistake when they rejected Lorentz’s Newtonian explanation in favor
|
||
of Einstein’s relativistic explanation. They would see that, even
|
||
though physicists were merely following their empirical method, what
|
||
physicists gave up for mathematical simplicity was not just the
|
||
intuitive intelligibility of theories in physics, as if that were a
|
||
mere subjective bias. What they gave up was a better ontological
|
||
explanation of the natural phenomena, that is, as we have seen, one
|
||
that explains more of what is observed in nature with less in the way
|
||
of substances. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Furthermore,
|
||
they would recognize that it is possible for spatiomaterialism to
|
||
explain the truth of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, even
|
||
though it entails the existence of absolute space. And in the
|
||
process, they would finally understand how the quantum theory of the
|
||
other three basic forces of nature are related to gravitation. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">If
|
||
naturalists did that, they would quickly recognize the other
|
||
consequences that follow from spatiomaterialism, all the necessary
|
||
truths of ontological philosophy, including the global regularities,
|
||
the course of evolution, and how it leads up to the discovery of what
|
||
is represented in the diagram of the wholeness of the world. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Ontological
|
||
philosophy is, therefore, inevitable. It is possible for such a
|
||
random variation to be tried out at this point in the evolution of
|
||
philosophical spiritual animals, and thus, since it is functional, it
|
||
follows that ontological philosophy based on spatiomaterialism will
|
||
evolve. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Ontological
|
||
philosophy will be rationally selected, once it is understood,
|
||
because as an explanation of the wholeness of the world, it has all
|
||
possible objections completely surrounded. All the issues currently
|
||
being disputed in intellectual culture can be located within the
|
||
structure of its argument, that is, within the diagram of the whole,
|
||
and ontological philosophy shows how they can all be resolved. When
|
||
that is recognized, the only issue will be whether ontological
|
||
philosophy is true, for all those objections to it will stand or fall
|
||
together. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">The
|
||
evolution of ontological philosophy does not, of course, depend on
|
||
tWoW.net. It would eventually evolve even if there were no such
|
||
website, because it is a possible random variation on the arguments
|
||
that have been accumulated as Western culture and, in spiritual
|
||
animals that are as populous, healthy and powerful as those that
|
||
exist today, there are enough rational subjects with the love of
|
||
argument and the respect for rational judgment to try it out. That
|
||
much is ontologically necessary — and it will happen in the near
|
||
future, barring some unforeseen catastrophe that derails evolution at
|
||
this point, like the impact of another giant asteroid like the one
|
||
that doomed the dinosaurs. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">On the
|
||
other hand, tWoW.net will not fail to convince rational subjects,
|
||
even if there are mistakes in the details of some of its arguments,
|
||
because if it is on the right track, that will be obvious and
|
||
mistakes can be corrected without upsetting the project as a whole.
|
||
Thus, it is reasonable to expect tWoW.net to be the random variation
|
||
whose rational selection will be responsible for the evolution of
|
||
ontological philosophy — though such a contingent detail cannot be
|
||
ontologically necessary. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">The
|
||
diagram of the wholeness of the world is, therefore, included in the
|
||
diagram of the wholeness of the world. Ontological philosophy based
|
||
on spatiomaterialism is itself something that inevitably evolves in
|
||
the kind of world that it describes, because the sort of evolutionary
|
||
change that it entails, given the specific nature of space and matter
|
||
in our spatiomaterial world, includes the evolution of reason and
|
||
reason evolves toward the natural perfection of understanding how the
|
||
world is whole. Thus, reason comes to understand itself as an
|
||
inevitable product of evolution by reproductive causation.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">The
|
||
rational selection of ontological philosophy is, however, just the
|
||
beginning of its career. The discovery of an argument that explains
|
||
the validity of all the arguments of rational level culture will make
|
||
it possible to sort out which arguments are valid and which are not
|
||
in every area of inquiry, and that will make it possible to discover
|
||
what is true much more quickly and reliably than currently seems
|
||
possible. Many of those discoveries are predictable, including those
|
||
that have been mentioned in this argument to show the possibility of
|
||
an ontological approach to philosophy. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">The
|
||
discovery of the true is, however, only part of the significance of
|
||
ontological philosophy. Reason is not just a cognitive machine. It is
|
||
an animal behavior guidance system, which uses its knowledge of the
|
||
true to guide behavior. And reason is the most powerful cause in the
|
||
world, because it guides the behavior of spiritual animals as well as
|
||
individual rational subjects. What it does will determine the future
|
||
course of evolution. Not only will reason take control of biological
|
||
evolution, with rational selection constraining where natural
|
||
selection works, but reason will create the other forms of natural
|
||
perfection that comes to exist during the career of ontological
|
||
philosophy. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">The
|
||
wholeness of the world is not, therefore, just the wholeness of space
|
||
or how all the aspects of the world are constituted by two basic
|
||
substances. Nor is its wholeness that those aspects entail an
|
||
evolutionary change in which the wholeness of the world comes to be
|
||
understood by rational subjects. Reason is a part of the world, and
|
||
thus, it has a role to play in the world. As rational subjects
|
||
recognize reason as the inevitable product of biological evolution,
|
||
they will recognize that they are responsible for the future of
|
||
evolution in their planetary system. What reason will do is not
|
||
something that reason knows by predicting what it will do. It is
|
||
something that is known by discovering what reason <i>ought </i>to
|
||
do. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Some of
|
||
what reason will do is, of course, predictable. Rational beings will
|
||
continue to pursue most of the same goals they currently pursue,
|
||
because those goals are good. And they will use their new
|
||
understanding of what is true to figure out how to solve all the
|
||
social, economic and political problems that now seem intractable.
|
||
These goals are predictable, because they are goals that reason
|
||
already has.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">However,
|
||
not all of the goals pursued by rational beings are predictable even
|
||
in this way, because some goals of reason are optional. Some goals
|
||
are good for reason to pursue because they are chosen by reason. And
|
||
since not only individual rational subjects, but also spiritual
|
||
animals can have optional goals, there are aspects of the future of
|
||
evolution that cannot be predicted even in principle. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Finally, as
|
||
we shall see, there is one kind of goal that reason can have only
|
||
because practical reason recognizes, as ontological philosophy
|
||
evolves in philosophical level culture, something that is so
|
||
absolutely perfect that it is worthy of worship. Though that is
|
||
necessarily true, if it is true at all, it is a necessary truth that
|
||
can be discovered only by practical reasoning. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">At
|
||
this point, therefore, the argument of ontological philosophy must
|
||
switch from theoretical reason to practical reasons, that is, from
|
||
arguments about what is to arguments about what ought to be. Knowing
|
||
the true is only half the way that reason makes the world whole. The
|
||
other half is how it does what is good. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Ontological
|
||
philosophy reveals, therefore, that reason is far more important to
|
||
the world than it supposed, when it assumed that a theory about the
|
||
nature of reason based on reflection would explain the validity of
|
||
the arguments of rational level culture. Instead of assuming that
|
||
reason is whole, ontological philosophy explained how the world
|
||
itself is whole. That revealed that reason is not whole, but divided
|
||
by inherent dichotomies. But understanding why rational culture is
|
||
limited makes reason whole, and as reason recognizes its place in the
|
||
world, it accepts responsibility for continuing evolutionary progress
|
||
and making the world itself whole. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
</body>
|
||
</html>
|