You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: The Survival Instinct - Does it Exist?
Woo, that's a long post! Good one, though.
I've often had trouble with philosophy's attempts to interact with science- for every Thomas Kuhn or Karl Popper or Paul Feyerabend, you have a dozen philosophers claiming philosophy's dominion over science, or misinterpreting science for their own ends (philosophers are as bad as hippies when it comes to quantum mechanics), or pretending that all science operates the same as physics (Heidegger). You've actually managed to walk the line between science and philosophy pretty well, though. Color me convinced of your thesis- I'll be removing survival instinct from my vocabulary!
I don't even pretend to understand what Heidegger is saying most of the time! :P
Yeah, long post, worried very few are gonna read it because of that!
I appreciate that you did! And furthermore you were convinced! Yippee! I'm sure my brain just made a couple dopamine molecules!
The situation in philosophy isn't that different from other disciplines, I'd say. How many experiments in medicine yield promising results, and how many fail? So 1 in 12 I can very well live with! :P To have so many philosophers who actually contribute something to science (Karl Popper being another big figure) is a pretty good track record to me.
Using the vocabulary of survival and self-preservation, or capitalizing the word Nature and giving her a gender and saying she selects, etc., isn't bad as long as you know what you're doing. Problem is when people take these terms literally, usually people not versed in biology.
Taking any metaphorics literally is asking for trouble, and yet people do it constantly. (Economists especially.)
I'm wading through Heidegger's Question Concerning Technology, but it's slow going.
Yeah the problem with metaphors, is you think they're harmless, but then you realize it's the reason people couldn't get around an issue, or were switching back and forth between using the metaphor literally and using it metaphorically, and sowing confusion when they thought they were being clear. Many examples both in science and philosophy of people doing that.
I think in sciences that have a big theoretical component, like biology, just-so stories and what not, there should be classes on what's a literal and what's not!
Only books of Heidegger's I read if I recall are Introduction to Metaphysics and Being and Time. He gets all the ancient Greek translations wrong! Like he's not even translating the same text, that's how wrong I mean. They're highly idiosyncratic translations to say the least. The editors should provide a conventional translation in footnotes, because all that's lost on foreign readers.
Wish you luck with the book!
Thanks, I'll need it!
And yeah, I've known plenty of people who just get trapped by metaphors in exactly that way, so I've heavily cut back on their use when describing scientific concepts.