A Weblog Dedicated to the Discussion of the Christian Faith and 21st Century Life

A Weblog Dedicated to the Discussion of the Christian Faith and 21st Century Life
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I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this also I believe, –that unless I believed, I should not understand.-- St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109)

Monday, December 16, 2013

Contemplating the Cosmos

clocksEstablishing the Philosophy of Cosmology by Rachel Thomas:
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"We live in a golden age of cosmology," says Jeremy Butterfield, a philosopher of physics from the University of Cambridge. Since the mid 20th century, we've seen dramatic advances in our understanding of the Universe. It started with Einstein's development of the general theory of relativity in the beginning of the century, which provided a deeper understanding of the structure of stars and galaxies and their formation. In the 1960s the unprecedented precision of observations provided an enormous stimulus. This, according to Butterfield, therefore also heralds a golden age for philosophy.

Scientific advances have always stimulated philosophical reflection, whether it's Plato, Aristotle, Galileo or Newton. But over the last century, Butterfield says, analytic philosophy, growing up mostly in Vienna and Cambridge between 1890 and 1930, was overly obsessed by logic. This perhaps isn't surprising, as logic at that time was developing rapidly with revolutions in the foundations of mathematics, such as Gödel's incompleteness theorem. "This mesmerised philosophers into thinking that logic and language, and how language represented reality, were the centre of philosophy," says Butterfield. "Unfortunately they therefore downplayed the philosophy of nature, as it used to be called, or natural philosophy."

But fortunately, in the 1970s, philosophers began to once more engage with the details of science, and natural philosophy came back into its own. Philosophers began to really sink their teeth into the two scientific revolutions of the early 20th century: quantum mechanics and relativity. Philosophers have found rich pickings in the strange world of quantum mechanics (you can read more about this in Plus) and Butterfield hopes that a new project will allow them to investigate areas of cosmology just as fruitfully.
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The entire article can be read here.

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