A problem with science

       Detail from Salvador Dali's      
 Enigma Without End

An up-and-coming German philosopher has some critical words about the way  many in his own field and in the scientific world think about what we can know as real. Markus Gabriel, a professor of philosophy and chair of epistemology at the University of Bonn, Germany, highlights what has been been described as "the cavernous gap separating sophisticated professionals from healthy common sense".  The English translation of his book, Why the World Does Not Exist, has just been published by Polity Press.

In a review, New York academic Richard Wolin points out that Gabriel identifies particular branches of study as "inherently flawed, because their scientism — the conviction that science alone represents the royal road to truth — leaves no room for phenomena like poetry, reverie, or human intimacy, experiences that prove refractory to laws of causal determination".

"More seriously, the epistemological dogmatism of such approaches risks codifying a new species of metaphysical intolerance, since they condescendingly stigmatize competing claims as "unscientific." As Gabriel pointedly remarked in a 2014 article in Die Zeit: "At an earlier point, God and fate were invoked in order to deprive us of our freedom; today, it is ‘nature,’ ‘the universe,’ ‘the brain,’ ‘the egoistic gene’ or ‘evolution.’"

While the ordinary person welcomes Gabriel's highlighting of the intolerance of scientism, his inclusion of imagined creatures like elves or the unicorn as having the same ranking as the concrete reality around us posits little obvious change from "the ludicrousness of the cul-de-sac in which much of academic philosophy finds itself today", as Wolin puts it.
[] See also: The scourge of lying and cheating in science