Autonomous Reason: A Defense of Rationality Against Naturalistic Materialism - Couverture souple

Ibberson, John

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0995852308 ISBN 13 : 9780995852303

Editeur : Studium Generale Press, 2017

Synopsis

“Reason undermines itself.” So allege those who announce the demise of the age of reason and the defeat of “the enlightenment project”: reason supports science, science supports naturalism, and naturalism undermines reason. Naturalism denies that we possess a faculty of reason, conceived as the ability to recognize good reasons. It asserts that we have only an information processing system that transforms cognitive inputs into outputs according to contingent psychological laws. This book argues that naturalism undermines itself: if naturalism were true then neither it nor anything else could be rationally believed. Beliefs could never be held because they were true, or even supported by evidence, but only because they provided the most efficient way to cope with the material and intellectual environment. Reason does not undermine itself. Reason may support scientific instrumentalism, but only scientific realism supports naturalism, which in turn undermines the realism. Rationalism requires that the mind be immaterial, though mind-body interaction is no more mysterious than particle-field interaction. The real mysteries concern the nature of causal interaction itself, the unobservability of forces, the presuppositions of inductive inference from the past to the future, and the lack of any plausible way to quantify matter.

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

John Ibberson B.A., M.A. (Calgary), D.Phil. (Oxford) is the author of The Language of Decision: An Essay in Prescriptivist Ethical Theory (Macmillan, 1986). He taught philosophy at the College of New Caledonia in Prince George, British Columbia from 1989 until 2013. He is now an independent scholar residing in Kelowna, BC.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Studium Generale Press
• Date d'édition: 2017
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0995852308
• ISBN 13: 9780995852303
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 354
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible