By NATHAN SCHNEIDER [Chronicle of Higher Education] – Descartes, in his monumental Discourse, presented a philosophy meant to be “the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences.” It would be hard to get more foundational than that. But closer to the prevailing view today is that of Bertrand Russell: Even while attempting to ground all of mathematics in philosophical logic, he observed that philosophy was only the “residue” left over after “those questions which are already capable of definite answers are placed in the sciences.”
That latter opinion has been taken up with a vengeance lately by famous scientists, most notably Stephen Hawking, who proclaimed “philosophy is dead” on the first page of his recent The Grand Design, even if the subsequent pages contained no small amount of what can only be considered philosophizing. Another physicist, Lawrence M. Krauss, staked his latest book, A Universe From Nothing, on much the same claim: “I think philosophy is already unnecessary,” he said when I asked about the issue in an online discussion held by his publisher.
This would be news to Alfred R. Mele, a philosopher at Florida State University. When I first contacted him, in early 2010, his phone was ringing so much that he was anxious about picking it up. “I’ve been taking steps to avoid crank calls since the grant was announced,” he told me then.
The grant he was referring to, as is well known among philosophers by now, is for a $4.4-million study of free will financed by the John Templeton Foundation. Mele isn’t planning to use it just to sit around and think. He’s charged with leading a multidisciplinary project that provides for six-figure subgrants to scientists for conducting empirical research.
He hopes the philosophical contributions will give this research a leg up on previous scientific studies, which he says have been conceptually jumbled. “There are interesting studies,” he says, “but they could be done in a more interesting way, in a way that would bear more directly on free will than some of these free-will studies actually do.” It’s a project of a size and scope unheard of in academic philosophy—that is, except for the ever-growing number of similar grants in the Templeton docket. Just this summer, $5-million went to John Martin Fischer, a philosopher at the University of California at Riverside, to study the concept of immortality.
“Philosophers don’t have that many sources of money to turn to,” says Brian Leiter, a philosopher at the University of Chicago’s law school and editor of the discipline’s leading gossip blog, Leiter Reports. For them, “Templeton has been a windfall.” No longer are philosophers stuck playing catch-up with the latest science; now, some of them have the resources to help shape it from the outset.
Continued at The Chronicle of Higher Education | More Chronicle & Notices.
