Dr. Stephen Hicks
speaker
174 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Dr. Stephen Hicks’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
So if you are, say, an empiricist and you want to say, well, we start in, say, the physical world and I have a physical body with physical senses and there's a causal story about how those interact with each other, but somehow I have to get that across this metaphysical gulf from the physical to the spiritual so that my mind,
which I think of as being on the spirit side of things or on the soul side of things, can confront it and then do various things that we think we're going to do with our minds, our reason and our emotions and so forth. And that metaphysical gulf, if you can't bridge that gulf metaphysically, is going to cause you problems epistemologically. And so one reason why...
we end up in postmodernism a few centuries later, I think is not only going to be because the early empiricist theories had problems, the early rationalist theories had problems, various attempts to overcome them like Kant led to problems and so forth. It wasn't only that there were epistemological problems that worked themselves out and led to dead ends.
But at the same time, we were struggling with the metaphysical problem, as I'm thinking of it, the mind-body problem. And once we said, or once we were starting from the perspective that ideas are non-physical realities, or stories are non-physical realities, and they're in a mind, and we're conceiving of that as something separate from the physical world,
as a non-physical world, it's very difficult to try to find how that then relates back to that physical world. So I would say in your field, for example, where you come out of professional psychology, it's interesting that professional psychology only came on board in the late 1800s. And so we say, you know, this is my potted history of your discipline.
We have the early Freudians and the early behaviorists both coming on board in 1900.
and one of the things that said they're both trying to do is to say well finally we can start to study the mind scientifically we can have a science of the mind but what they were reacting against was still in the 1800s was the idea that the mind somehow didn't fit into nature it was an extra natural thing it was a ghost in the machine and the the fitting of the ghost in the machine we don't have a theory that that works this out
And both of them were, of course, reflecting on Darwin and Darwin's more robustly naturalistic understanding of the human being, that we're going to see the mind not as a ghost that's in the wet wear or in the biological wear, but as a some sort of emergent phenomenon or a byproduct.
But it's only when we stop thinking about the human being as a ghost plus a machine, to use that metaphor, or a spirit plus a body as two different things, as much more of a naturalist integrative, then we start to think that we can do psychology scientifically. Now, the Freudians and the behaviorists, I think they were both disasters in various ways. And useful.
They were genius, but this is, again, the early steps of science. But what they are starting to do, though, is say, we're not going to study the human being. We are going to study the human being as part of the natural world. But notice that this is now into the 1900s, and psychology is a very new science.
And this is already 300 years after modern philosophy had been taken over, in a sense, by the epistemologists and had worked their way into a very skeptical form. So my hope is, if we're talking about where the future has to go, psychology has been online for a century now, a little more than a century now. extraordinarily complex stuff, as we all know, but we're making progress there.
But I think it's still early days, and what the psychologists work out has to be integrated with newer and better epistemology. It has to be an epistemology that integrates the best from the empiricist tradition, the best from the rationalist tradition, and so on. So, that's my summary story of how we ended up where we are, and why I'm not a thoroughgoing skeptic on any of these issues.
I see it as an ongoing scientific project.
Let me just interrupt. Are you talking about my experience of that or your experience of it? Because I came in with a pre-intention in that case. And yours was a different passive surprise response. Let's get to that. Exactly.
But they still respond.
Humans too.
Let me say, all of that is great, all of it is beautiful, all of that is directly relevant. So, to tie that back into what our philosophical intellectual predicament is now, if we want to say postmodernism,
As a skeptical project that's given up on everything versus those who see it as an active, ongoing project that we're learning more and more, that's going to give us a better and better epistemology. All of that is great. So I'm a kind of empiricist, but what I would say is that... Everything that you have said was, in the early days of empiricism, not known to any of the empiricists.
So, in many cases, they had very crude understandings of what memory would be, what reflex would be, what emotions would be, perception, right, and so forth.
And so, naturally, then it makes sense that they're trying to insist that we actually are in contact with reality at a basic level, but then very quickly they are speculating about what's going on in all of these other areas, and their theories are faulty, and it's the weaknesses of those theories that then lead people to start to say, well, empiricism is a failed project, instead of seeing it as an ongoing project.
Showing 61–80 of 174 · page 4 of 9
← Previous
Next →