Note on Science and Philosophy

I despise the disposition which claims philosophy ought to progressively relinquish its problems, handing them over to science, because you simply can’t solve them via a priori introspection, and so on. Today it would be utterly vulgar to claim pure intuition can do better than rigorous investigation and theoretical legwork. Fortunately, philosophy is not, at its core, concerned with solving problems or explaning phenomena or anything like that.

Philosophy does not attempt to accumulate knowledge, but rather asks to what end is that knowledge accumulated and how is it subsequently used. It is less a matter of how the world works, than of what do we do once we know how the world works. What purpose is there to this activity?

A scientific claim can justify its validity, or the meta-claim that we should make, accept, or endorse said claim, by simply pointing to the body of evidence. Yet what requires securing here is not the scientific claim itself, but the very activity of making and testing such claims. All manner of frightening conservativisms have constricted scientific inquiry for centuries by falsely instrumentalizing science, placing it in the service of mythic ends, be they religious or humanistic.

Philosophy shouldn’t try to compete with science in making knowledge claims, because it has a task that science forecloses a priori: confronting the problem of the purpose or reason behind the pursuit and accumulation of knowledge. Philosophy should concern itself with what we are to do with knowledge, now that we have it. How do we live, once science has deprived us of mythic security? How can the corrosive power of (de)naturalization effect the praxical arrangements that make up the mass of society? What can we do, and what should we do?

Ontology, or the discourse of being, is thus very different from scientific knowledge of being. The former includes the latter, without reducing it, instead actively thematizing and using it – perpetuating or stifiling it, embracing or recoiling from it. Philosophy is a matter of the use of knowledge, not its accumulation.