|
PHGA 6458 Modern philosophy began with the Scientific Revolution. The scientific ideas of Aristotle had dominated Western thought for over a thousand years when the sixteenth-century astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus proposed a new model of the universe. Contrary to Aristotle, Copernicus claimed that the earth orbited the Sun not vice versa. In order to prove the Copernican model of the universe true, Galileo Galilei and other leaders of the Scientific Revolution developed new tools and techniques for studying the natural world – tools and techniques that ultimately showed not just that Aristotle’s cosmology was wrong, but almost every aspect of Aristotelian science. The Scientific Revolution involved more than a rejection of Aristotelian science, however; it involved a rejection of Aristotelian philosophy as well. In its place people erected a new philosophy based on dichotomies: freedom versus determinism, fact versus value, mind versus body. These dichotomies are responsible for the problems of modern philosophy. The task of philosophy since the Scientific Revolution has been to resolve the tensions they generate – to explain how we can be free, mental, moral beings if we inhabit a universe that at a fundamental physical level has none of these features. Philosophy of mind tries to resolve the problems generated by the mind-body or mental-physical dichotomy. These are called mind-body problems. Mind-body problems are based on a distinction between mental phenomena and physical phenomena. The seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes was chiefly responsible for introducing this sharp mental-physical dichotomy. After more than 300 years, philosophers continue to struggle with the problems this dichotomy generates. An adequate philosophical account of relationship between thought, feeling, and action, on the one hand, and events in the human nervous system, on the other, remains elusive.
|
|