My colleague Mark Kingwell reviews Curtis White's The Science Delusion in today's Globe and Mail. (The review can be viewed here.)
Like Zabala and Davis, White quotes Stephen Hawking "Philosophy is dead. [It] has not has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics." The best response to this canard is that good philosophers have indeed kept up with "modern developments in science" to exactly the degree that is required by the content of their philosophical reflections. Thus, Derek Parfit not at all, but Bas van Fraassen quite a bit.
Zabala and Davis accept the critique, but push it off on to "analytic philosophy;" Curtis White dissociates himself from "scientism." Kingwell, regrettably, endorses this: "The best parts of the book . . . show just how easily good science can shade into the self-aggrandizing ideology of scientism". That ideology apparently includes the atheism of Dawkins and Hitchens.
Kingwell's bottom line: "The tough neo-Darwinians of our moment are like the economists in an old New Yorker cartoon: Their theoretical models would work much better if the people were left out." "For [deeper substance] you can read Thomas Nagel's compelling, and bestselling, recent atack on neo-Darwinism." (Speaking of philosophers who haven't kept up . . . Sigh!)
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