[travel] Tell me more about the dead white people

[mattbell]

My college humanities courses tended to avoid the canon of dead white people at all costs, instead focusing on alternative voices, indigenous cultures, oppressed peoples and the like. Some of it was very interesting, some of it wasn't. However, after a visit to the stunning Athens Archaeological museum, which showed me firsthand the achievement's of Athens' Golden Age, I want to learn more about the intellectual culture that spawned the world's first democracy, a rich theatrical tradition, and numerous other achievements. To those of you who sought out the traditional classics, I ask what you would recommend, keeping in mind that I'm on the road so online material is preferred. I assume it's all well out of copyright, even the translations.

Comments

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

I had always thought that "metaphysics" refers to the stuff that's "beyond physics", in the sense of explaining what the physical world is made of, so that physics has a foundation. However, it turns out that it's just the stuff that happened to be in the book that Aristotle write just after he wrote the book called "Physics", so, "meta" just means "after" here.

A friend of mine mentioned this to me recently. Then we debated for a while what metaphysics really meant... he was saying it had more to do with philosophy of mind than philosophy of physics... and that many of the things I probably thought were metaphysics are actually philosophy of physics.

Occasionally, the word "metaphysics" comes up in physics papers (for instance, my advisor has a couple papers where a whole section is dedicated to "metaphysics"). And I can say that in those cases, that the meaning is clearly having to do with the foundations of physics... basically whatever questions arise because of our current understanding of physics but do not appear to be answerable through empirical study. So then the question is if the meaning is actually different in philosophy, as this friend of mine claimed.

Then I went and showed him a blog entry by Chalmers where he tries to do a taxonomy of philosophy, and under metaphysics he listed pretty much exactly what I would have expected to be listed. When my friend saw it he said "oh, well maybe I am wrong then... it does seem to include more philosophy of physics than I thought".

So would you say that the story about it being named after the chapter in Aristotle's book is just a story about how it got that name? or does it actually mean that metaphysics is not really about answering questions about the nature of reality that go beyond what physics can answer?

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

Oh, and also, probably a lot of things you think of as metaphysics are more often studied under philosophy of physics, but that's because they're not of interest to core metaphysicians. Just as a lot of metaphysics is done by philosophers in just about any other area of philosophy. Despite what the positivists said, you can't say much of anything meaningful without making metaphysical claims.

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

Despite what the positivists said, you can't say much of anything meaningful without making metaphysical claims.

Would you apply this statement to physics as well, or just philosophy? I think a lot of physicists would disagree with you. I find there is a general idea among physicists that we can make meaningful statements that only refer to the prediction of measurable observables, while remaining agnostic about metaphysics. This could be due to the influence of logical positivism on scientific culture, especially with any discussions relating to quantum mechanics. Anyway, I think I sort of agree and sort of disagree. I think that we do have the ability to teach quantum mechanics and study it and apply it to predict experiments, without giving it a metaphysical framework by interpreting it. Of course, in the back of everyone's mind, I think they do have some metaphysical framework in mind... it just varies a lot from person to person. And I also think what framework you have in the back of your mind ends up affecting the direction future research will take... so in that sense, it's probably *not* the best idea to just not talk about it.

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

I guess I worded all of this assuming your answer to my first question was "both physics and philosophy". If it wasn't, then I guess what I said is not terribly relevant or should be worded differently.

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

I would mainly apply this to philosophy, but I think it's also true to some extent for physics. I suppose in physics you can often write down a formula that will tell you what measurable values to predict in certain ranges of circumstances, and thus postpone the metaphysical questions, but once you start asking how different systems interact, or how they work outside a standard range of validity for your formulas, then you have to pay attention to what the numbers in the formulas are supposed to mean. Also, even if you say that you're just using the numbers for predictive value, if you're doing theoretical work, then the direction of your research will most likely be shaped by your "unofficial" interpretations of what the numbers mean. Empirically equivalent theories suggest different modifications, both in the light of recalcitrant evidence, and also when generalizing to new situations, or when noticing oddities in the behavior of the system at certain points. And I think how your theory will develop is a very important part of one's scientific theorizing. So you can't really just ignore the metaphysics, unless all you care about is predictions of a controlled type of system in a moderate range.