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Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament

Analytic philosophy as a historical movement has not done much to provide an alternative to the consolations of religion. This is sometimes made a cause for reproach, and it has led to unfavorable comparisons with the continental tradition of the twentieth century, which did not shirk that task. I believ
e this is one of the reasons why continental philosophy has been better received by the general public: it is at least trying to provide nourishment for the soul, the job by which philosophy is supposed to earn its keep.

Analytic philosophers usually rebuff the complaint by pointing out that their concerns are continuous with the central occupations of Western philosophy from Parmenides onward: metaphysics, epistemology,
logic, and ethical theory. Those topics have been pursued in a great tradition of works that are often technical and difficult, and that are not intended for a broad audience. The aim of that tradition is understanding, not edification.

This reply is formally correct, but it fails to acknowledge the significant element of yearning for cosmic reconciliation that has been part of the philosophical impulse from the beginning. Its greatest example is Plato, who had what I would call a profoundly religious temperament -- displayed not in what he said about religion, but in his philosophy.

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"...The Negress sings. Can you justify your existence then? Just a little? I feel extraordinarily intimated...Couldn't I try...Naturally, it wouldn't be a question of a tune...but couldn't I, in another medium?...It would have to be a book: I don't know how to do anything else...

They would think about my life as I think about the Negress: As something precious and almost legendary."
-Sartre, Nausea

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A good review of Nagel's Mind & Cosmos - Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False by physicist Adam Frank:

Is There A Place For The Mind In Physics? Part I

Now, as 13.7 readers know, I am no fan of reductionism. In its grandest claims, reductionism tends to be more an affirmation of a faith then a tenable position about ontology (what exists in the world). However, as a physicist I am more prone to the Emergentist position because it requires a less radical alteration of what we believe does exist out there. Nagel's view asks for such a dramatic reworking of ontology that the evidence better be just as dramatic and, so far, it isn't.

Still, once I got past Nagel's missteps on Darwin, I found his arguments to be quite brave, even if I am not ready to follow him to the ends of his ontology. There is a stiff, cold wind in his perspective. Those who dismiss him out of hand are holding fast to a knowledge that does not exist. The truth of the matter is we are just at the beginning of our understanding of consciousness and of the Mind.

Think about the difference between Galileo's vision of "the real" and Einstein's. At this point in our study of the Mind, are we really so sure of what can, and what cannot, be simply dismissed? Nagel may ultimately be wrong, but he is correct in articulating one limit in the range of what might possibly be right.

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Mind and Cosmos Roundup

Feser goes through reviews of Nagel's polemic. He echoes my point that Nagel should have stated this short tract did not, in fact, carry the brunt of his arguments against the materialist paradigm.

Very interesting stuff from the "other side of the fence", so to speak. 

...it is for the same reason a mistake to assume that the dispute between Nagel and his critics is essentially a scientific dispute and that Nagel’s status as a layman dependent on popularizations of science casts doubt on his claims.  For in fact the dispute concerns the philosophy of science and the philosophy of nature that contemporary scientists tend to take for granted.  Does the essentially mathematical conception of nature we have inherited from Galileo, Descartes, and Co. capture all aspects of nature?  Is the methodology associated with that conception an appropriate means of discovering and studying all aspects of nature?  These are essentially metaphysical and epistemological questions rather than empirical scientific questions, and Nagel’s position is that they must be answered in the negative.  Of course, Leiter and Weisberg might insist (after the fashion of “naturalized” epistemology, metaphysics, etc.) that all such philosophical questions must ultimately be answered through scientific means, but merely to insist on that is simply to beg the question against Nagel rather than to refute him.