Essay: What (If Anything) to Expect from Today's Philosophers

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In the Middle Ages, the questions that philosophy asked were determined largely by theology; today major philosophical issues are posed by science. Says Chicago's McKeon: "The new priests come from the lab and hand us the tablet—how do we handle it?" Philosopher Hubert Dreyfus of M.I.T. is wondering about the possibility of creating a computer that would be completely determined by programming but would behave as if it were a free, intelligent agent. "If something that we knew was just a machine could behave intelligently," he muses, "it would tend to suggest that maybe we are just machines." Would such computers have to be considered conscious beings? Would they raise a civil liberties problem? To some, such questions suggest that science is creating more problems than philosophy can readily cope with; and concepts like antimatter and the expanding universe make some philosophers quite nervous.

Chances are, however, that philosophy will learn to coexist with science and (in Mortimer Adler's phrase) reach its delayed maturity, provided it resolutely insists on being a separate discipline dealing publicly and intelligibly in first-order questions. Caution is bound to remain. Instead of one-man systems, philosophy in the future will probably consist of a dialogue of many thinkers, each seeking to explore to the fullest one aspect of a common problem. Says Oxford's James Urmson, a visiting professor at the University of Michigan: "It is just like Galileo experimenting with little balls on inclined planes before he addressed the heavens."

The question remains: Will philosophy ever again address the heavens? Will it contribute anything to man's vision, rather than merely clarifying it? Caution and confusion are not necessarily signs of disaster, and even Hegel remarked that "the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk." But the shadows are deep and the time for an awakening is at hand.